My refrigerator was on the fritz this past week. Normally when this happens, I take the back off, clean the coils, move some food around, take a hair dryer to any accumulated ice, adjust the temp settings, and hope that does the trick. This time, the freezer was working, but the fridge was not. When my normal tricks didn’t work, I began moving food to the backup fridge and freezer. (We have solar generation to power these because, well, Texas. They also come in handy for non-grid-related events and small emergencies, like this one. But I find myself increasingly thinking of only using refrigeration that I could power completely with solar power. More on that in another post.) While doing this bit of extra work and thinking about what might be going on with the fridge, I remembered back to something I read about people who think refrigeration isn’t necessary or guaranteed. There’s a subculture of so-called “fermentos” who believe in the power of fermentation not just to create deliciousness (and alcohol), but also to aid in self-reliance in the event that power and/or refrigeration becomes dicey in terms of access.

In my early to mid ’30s, I taught introductory argumentation in college, and I studied what was being called, for a moment, rhetorics of food. My ambition was to study the ways in which food and communication traveled together through networks. I wasn’t alone. After writers like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser and filmmakers like Richard Linklater and Morgan Spurlock released some powerful arguments, there was a fair amount of interest in argumentation related to global food systems. Popular media and journalism, as well as community activism, amplified many trends that would change the way we eat. In higher education, teachers of writing had used food writers like Calvin Trillin for years. However, in the early aughts, there was a shift in thinking. Instead of the using the work of food writers to model good writing, many scholars began arguing that food is an expressive media that moves along and intersects with writing. For example, in the book Food Is Culture (2004), Massimo Montanari argues for a connection between rhetoric and food. Montanari writes that “food acquires full expressive capacity thanks to the rhetoric that in every language is its necessary complement” (102). He continues, articulating food as one of the available means of persuasion. “Rhetoric is the adaptation of speech to the argument, to the effects one wants to arouse or create. If the discourse is food, that means the way in which it is prepared, served, and eaten” (102). Without the rhetorical trappings involved in preparation, service, and consumption, food would be slop. But so interconnected are the rhetorical aspects of food with the food itself, that even the act of unceremoniously serving gruel is laden with rhetorical significance.

In a couple earlier posts, I wrote briefly and inexpertly about Plato. I did so mainly so I could pivot toward Epicurus, who provides another way of thinking about food and philosophy. I’m not a classicist, nor a philosopher by trade, but I do like to trace things backwards and try to understand how we got to where we are. ¹ In pivoting toward Epicurus, I think we might be able to highlight different starting points that aren’t possible if we begin with Plato.

According to peer-reviewed academic sources like the IEP, “Epicurus rejected the existence of Platonic forms and an immaterial soul, and he said that the gods have no influence on our lives.” Epicurus was coming on the scene (figuratively speaking) in Athens as Plato was exiting it. His school was called The Garden. There, he taught the “basis of a radical materialism which dispensed with transcendent entities such as the Platonic Ideas or Forms,” so that “he could disprove the possibility of the soul’s survival after death, and hence the prospect of punishment in the afterlife,” according to the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The materialism taught by Epicurus is radical because it frees humans up to stop worrying about death, deities, and the afterlife and pursue pleasure in the life that can be perceived by the senses. ²

The philosophy of Epicurus might be hedonism, depending on how one defines hedonism. However, it’s not gluttony or self-indulgence. It may not even be pleasure-seeking (and it’s certainly not whatever a Google search using the search terms “pleasure” and “seeking” would return). More accurately, from what I understand, Epicurean philosophy could be described as “anxiety avoidant.”