Food Moves

In an earlier post, I wrote about the issues around Plato’s philosophy toward food. In seeing it as too mundane to have any art to it, Plato basically subjugates anyone involved in cookery to a lower class than philosophers. Although it has been changing recently, this kind of thinking has persisted in Western philosophy long after Plato. As Lisa Heldke puts it in “Do You Really Know How to Cook?,” embodied knowledge has mattered less than mental knowledge:

The discipline of Western philosophy tends to be suspicious of new domains of inquiry, particularly when the domain in question seems so commonplace and ordinary—quotidian—also so embodied and temporal. Western philosophy characteristically has concerned itself with lofty mailers, with minds and the mental, and has left other fields to consider physical bodies—bodies that grow hungry, grow old, and die. Food—let it be said clearly—belongs unambiguously on the side of the bodily, the temporal, the quotidian (202).

But there is a case to be made that food can be seen as embodied, lived philosophy. “What happens if we think of cooking not only in terms of food and its benefits for those who eat it, but also in terms of the benefits of cooking for the cook?” she asks. By focusing not on the product of cooking, but on the process, Heldke challenges Plato’s assumption that there must be a distinct hierarchy between pursuits of the body and pursuits of the mind. “Consider the possibility that it is an activity the very practice of which can improve those who engage in it. To suggest that cooking might be such an activity again involves challenging Plato’s distinction between bodies and souls and between knowledge and knack.” Cooking might be beneficial precisely because of its embodied-ness. Heldke writes, “Cooking might in fact be an activity which improves one precisely because it requires a constant interplay between so-called mental work and manual work.”

To this, I would add that the mindful cook–and what philosopher cook wouldn’t be mindful?–must also think in terms of food supply chains, ecologies and temporalities. (One must find food. One must not deplete food sources. Food spoils over time.) This means that the philosopher cook must navigate (or oversee the navigation of) complex networks of people, places, and things over distances in a race against time.

Heldke writes, “[Cooking’s] virtue lies in part in the way it resists neat divisions between bodies and souls.” There’s a reason why all religions have important ceremonies involving food, why they leave important texts with instructions about food, and why many great foods grew out of the traditions that rose from the ceremonies, texts, and gatherings. Just as there is a philosophy of dismissing food as too base, there is a philosophy of working through or living with, the complexity between the celestial and the terrestrial that happens at the intersection of cooking and rhetoric. How we work through, resist, or accept that confusion shapes our philosophy and our communication. Our decision to lean into or to turn away from, say, roasting meat and/or the social and religious tradition that grew up around it, is an example of the interplay between mental and manual work that tradition requires.

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.