FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD

EATING THE WORLD: What four-letter word links desertification, landfills, obesity, the WTO, Walmart and the end of the family? 'Food', of course. A scrumptious essay on the philosophies, cultures, and the globalisation of eating. (ROGER SCRUTON, 5/15/03, Open Democracy)

[E]ating, for us, is not what it is for the other animals. A person?s encounter with food may be an occasion of festivity and celebration; it may also be deeply unsettling, compromising and humiliating. It can even be (for the Christian) a petition for divine forgiveness and an avenue to redemption. Eating has in every traditional society been regarded as a social, often religious, act, embellished by ritual and enjoyed as a primary celebration of membership. Food has therefore become part of the self-consciousness of humanity, and differences in diet often reflect far-ranging differences in the rhythm, ethos and expectations of competing lifestyles.

Indeed, the difference between humans and other animals is never more vividly to be witnessed, than in their contrasting attitudes to food. Animals feed, while people eat. This distinction (between fressen and essen) is one on which Leon Kass has meditated at length in his eloquent book, The Hungry Soul.

Kass concludes that rational beings defy their own nature if they regard food purely as fuel for the body and not also as a moral and spiritual challenge. Rational beings are nourished on conversation, taste, manners and hospitality, and to divorce food from these practices is to deprive it of its true social significance.

The special relation of people to their food finds emblematic expression in the face. Human beings have neither claws nor fangs. They do not eat by pressing their mouth to their food, but by raising their food to their mouth, which is the organ of speech and therefore of reason. The mouth is the centre of the face, and it is in the face that the human person is most immediately encountered, in the form of looks and glances, smiles, grimaces and words.

People therefore place their food into their mouths with special care, usually by means of instruments that create a distance between the food and the face, so that the glance, the smile and the self remain visible while eating. The instruments of choice in African society are the fingers, and we will be carrying an interesting account of the way in which this practice shapes not just the meal that is eaten, but the social outlook of those who eat it.

People rejoice less in filling themselves than in the sight of food, table and guests dressed for a ceremonial offering. Their meals are also sacrifices, and anthropologists have occasionally argued that the origin of our carnivorous ways lies in the burnt offerings of ancient ritual. Only rational beings make gifts, and it is the giving of food, usually as the central episode in a ceremony, that is the core of hospitality, and therefore of those actions through which we lay claim to our home and at the same time mutely apologise for owning it.

(Cat lovers may dispute that sentence, believing that their favourites bring gifts of mouse, frog and lizard into the house. But those would be gifts only if the cat, in surrendering them, simultaneously affirms and relinquishes a right of ownership. That is not something that can be accomplished, by a creature that lacks the concept of a right.)

We are unique among the animals, or nearly so, in our omnivorousness. Our eating is motivated occasionally by need, but also by a love of superfluity
that causes us to rearrange our world and to engage in ceaseless experiment. At the same time we bind ourselves in laws--such as the dietary laws of Leviticus--which reinforce the idea of food as a spiritual commodity.

Vegetarianism can be seen as an attempt to recuperate this idea, by reintroducing a conception of dietary sin. We will debate this idea with the publication of an important article by Steve Sapontzis. Omnivorousness, in the human species, is the result of reason; so too is the refusal to be omnivorous.

There is nothing rational about the refusal to eat a hamburger. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 28, 2003 9:46 AM