We might as well begin with Plato. I mean, I wish we didn’t have to, but to understand how persuasion and food work together in Western culture, we kind of have to. We don’t have to dwell on Plato. We don’t have to read Greek. But we have to wrestle with his perspective.
In “Dietetics in Ancient Greek Philosophy: Plato’s Concepts of Healthy Diet,” P.K. Skiadas and J.G. Lascaratos write that the extensive references to food, drink, and nutrition in Plato suggest that food and persuasion were integrated on multiple levels. They write that “the philosopher does not omit to use even the human diet as an example and background for intellectual quest but also takes this opportunity to criticise harshly the materialistic concept of life and to condemn the attachment of the individual to earthly possessions” (533). Food was not just an example for Plato, it was an opportunity to teach his theory of mind and body. “For there ought to be no other secondary task to hinder the work of supplying the body with its proper exercise and nourishment” writes Plato in Laws (qtd. in Skiadas and Lascaratos 533). Plato includes passages on olive oil, cereals, legumes, fruits, meat, dairy, fish, honey, desserts, salt, and wine (a lot) (533-5). But it is not only specific foods that Plato ponders; Plato explored thoughts on excess and diet in general. Skiadas and Lascaratos write, “As opposed to the limitless desire for food and drink, self-restraint is considered by the philosopher to be the power of compliance with logic” (535).
Plato’s work on food is significant insofar as it intertwines with his philosophy and weaves its way into our contemporary thinking (and marketing) about food. If we look at Plato’s views on food we can see a contempt for mundane, material, earthly pursuits and the promotion of a logos-based self-mastery that persists to this day in many parts of our culture.
This is summed up by Socrates’ oft-quoted comparison between rhetoric and cookery in Gorgias:
In my opinion then, Gorgias, the whole of which rhetoric is a part is not an art at all, but the habit of a bold and ready wit, which knows how to manage mankind: this habit I sum up under the word ‘flattery’; and it appears to me to have many other parts, one of which is cookery, which may seem to be an art, but, as I maintain, is only an experience or routine and not an art […] another part is rhetoric.
In a different translation of Gorgias, another part of the exchange between Socrates and Polus goes like this:
Socrates
Ask me now what art I take cookery to be.Polus
Then I ask you, what art is cookery ?Socrates
None at all, Polus.Socrates
Then I reply, a certain habitude.Polus
Of what? Tell me.Socrates
Then I reply, of production of gratification and pleasure, Polus.Polus
So cookery and rhetoric are the same thing?Socrates
Not at all, only parts of the same practice.
The practice he’s talking about he calls “flattery” and he lumps together rhetoric, cooking, and fashion as basically superficial endeavors. It’s not just that they don’t rise to the level of statesmanship, medicine, and exercise; they are base endeavors with “nothing fine” about them. The problem with this viewpoint (in my opinion) is that it plays out in racist, classist, and sexist ways for centuries. I take him to mean that people who focus on words or preparing food or sewing garments can’t be philosophers because their professions are base.
I’m no classicist, and I have to admit that I’m using Plato as a straw man, here. Surely there are nuances that I can’t grasp. But I do think it is important to consider what we lose when we debase practices (and people) because of a conception of the soul that is too narrow to allow those practices in. If food moves us in ways emotional and logistical, can it not also move us spiritually? Can food and cooking not move the soul? Is taking pleasure in eating always debauched? Are we always tricked by our senses to follow our most base instincts? These are mostly rhetorical questions, but I’ll try to answer the last question: I’m not sure, but the human sensorium seems to play a big role in everything we do, and that includes philosophizing and even worshiping god(s). Socrates can’t have his hierarchy without the practices that sustain it. Without the base, there could be no philosophy.
Turning toward the base, the material, is itself a philosophical position. Addressing things like food forces us back into an understanding of rhetoric and philosophy that is necessarily embodied, where clear distinctions between rhetor, message, and audience are again muddled by emplaced, embodied realties. This is nothing new. There is a tradition of complicating the Cartesian mind/body dualism that goes back at least hundreds of years, as Ben Highmore writes in “Bitter After Taste” in the The Affect Theory Reader (119). However, as we can see elsewhere in our culture, a turn away from an ideology does not mean that we’ve moved on. The pendulum swings back toward conservative values and it wouldn’t surprise me if, in our current political climate, Plato comes back into fashion, which is a shame because Epicurus might have more to teach us at this moment.