"Epicurus, the foodies’ philosopher"

Food has a place -a central one, some would hold -in reflections on the good life. What, how, when, and with whom we eat are questions to which people should attend when considering how their lives might go better. Indeed, food isn't just worth thinking about, it is something which it is good -to amend Claude Lévi-Strauss's remark on animals -to think with. Attention to questions about eating might help to refine people's understanding of what a good life is. It might, at any rate, refine their understanding of different and competing conceptions of it -their appreciation, as it were, of what is on the table.

A short study of philosophical approaches to food, asceticism and pleasure in the ancient world. Published in J. Wilkins and R. Nadeau (Eds.), 2015, A Companion to Food in the Ancient World, Blackwells. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118878255.ch6/summary

The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics

The Pluralist, 2019

begin Philosophers at Table with a simile. Following Mary Midgley, they suggest that philosophy is like plumbing. We post-industrial urbanites and suburbanites rely on plumbing to bring us water and dispose of our waste. We rely on it daily, but we rarely think reflectively about it. In like fashion, we all rely on philosophy; ideas, concepts, values, and guiding principles structure and organize the way we perceive and experience the world. Philosophy lies undetected, out of sight, tucked neatly in the walls and under the floorboards. We typically suffer its dripping faucets, its low water pressure, its slow drain as long as we can because these almost always involve unwieldy, labor-intensive repairs. Like plumbers, philosophers-the good kind-roll up their sleeves and work to ameliorate problematic situations. Boisvert and Heldke, in this book, are unclogging conceptual toilets and cleaning up philosophical messes in the philosophy of food. Boisvert and Heldke write: "[T]o live (and thus to eat) in the contemporary world is to negotiate a treacherous set of conceptual sinkholes, some of which threaten to drown you, others risk only damp feet" (20). They prod us to confront and reconsider particular conceptual presuppositions and commitments that hinder us from taking food as a proper object of philosophical inquiry and reflection. For example, Boisvert and Heldke suggest that philosophers need to recognize the self-inflicted wound that is the mindbody problem. In this case, philosophers are prodded to recognize (1) that we are "stomach-endowed creatures," and (2) that being explicit about the necessities of human persistence does influence how we approach philosophy (41). Some philosophers approach philosophy like the geometer; that is, they model philosophical method on the type of abstract inference-by-inference logical proof one finds in Euclid (45). Boisvert and Heldke argue that the stark distinctions between mind and body (postulated by geometer-styled philosophers) are problematized once we recognize that filling our stomachs is an undeniable feature of human life. We are not mere spectators, cogitating from a God's-eye-perspective. Human values, human knowing, and human well-being are, in many respects, influenced by our bodily pursuits of tasty, hygienic, or nutritious sustenance within the natural environment. And this, in turn, supports the idea that food/eating is a legitimate topic for philosophy. In contrast, they suggest that we approach philosophy like the

Western culture has a schizophrenic (conflicted) relationship with food – we cannot decide whether it delights or disgusts us, whether it is sacred or abject, magical or biological, so we treat it as all of these and more. An attempt to explain these schizophrenic attitudes towards the act of eating in western culture, this project examines representations of eating in five works of contemporary French literature by Amélie Nothomb, Muriel Barbery, and Joy Sorman. It specifically examines the individual’s experience of the act of eating within these works: ‘how’ do we conceptualize the function this act fulfills in our singular being, in our own subjectivity? And furthermore, ‘why’ do we conceptualize eating in this way – that is, schizophrenically? The ‘how’ is addressed by demonstrating the abundance of conflicting sentiments present in these authors’ representations of eating. The ‘why’ is treated through recourse to the philosophical underpinnings of western thought, demonstrating how these ideas actually structure our discussion of and attitude towards food and embodied subjectivity – how we understand ourselves as eating subjects. In short, this is an attempt at a conceptual architecture of the act of eating in western culture. The argument consists in demonstrating how conflicting theories of materiality in the western philosophical tradition undergird our understanding of eating. On the one hand, the legacy of philosophers like Plato, Plotinus and religious belief systems like Christianity, advance a notion of transcendence, where we distance ourselves from materiality and corporeality and aspire towards a superior immaterial dimension. On the contrary, philosophies of material immanence reflecting the ideas of modern science teach us that we are wholly material beings, prompting us to embrace materiality and corporeality. This project concludes that in contemporary discussions of eating, we are forced to grapple with both of these conflicting philosophical frameworks at once – we must reconcile our simultaneous impulse to transcend materiality with our impulse to locate ourselves within it. We resolve this conflict by synthesizing a new framework – immanent transcendence – where we relocate transcendence to matter itself. Food matter thus becomes mystified, endowed with creative powers and divine qualities.

2018

Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of …, 2006

How to Cook?" 6 On the other hand, feminist philosophy has often intentionally attended to just such ordinary aspects of human life-but it, too, has for the most part avoided any discussions of food that are not about eating disorders. The reasons for this avoidance no doubt arise from a different source-the fear of inadvertently reinforcing some kind of unbreakable link between women and food, women and cooking. This kind of problem has cropped up intermittently in the history of feminist theory; do you study "women's sphere" because it will enable you to understand women's experience, or do you reject it because it will trap you? I would argue for the former approach-and would point to the considerable body of feminist work that counts as evidence for it. 7 It may be possible to make this accusation about philosophy as a discipline throughout its entire history, though the accusation will differ in substance across time and place. In the United States much of the discipline of philosophy spent several decades of the twentieth century studiously avoiding a host of real-life social and political crises facing the nation, by confining itself to the analysis of language. For a fascinating account of the rise of analytic philosophy, and its relation to the rise of McCarthyism, see McCumber (2001). 8 On this score, consider how remarkably few of those figures we label "public intellectuals" are philosophers. 9 The linguistic concept of family resemblance is Ludwig Wittgenstein's. 10 Unsurprisingly, the philosophers who do actively work in the area also tend to work in the American tradition, in part because that tradition seems to make a space for this kind of attention to ordinary everydayness. 11 See Kuehn (2001). 12 See his "Philosophy and Food" (Boisvert 2001).

2021

The article is based on Feuerbach's well-known ruling that "man is what he eats", to analyse its possible different meanings, even the most recondited ones. To do this the research winds through a long journey, which begins with a reflection on the role that food has in some Western religions, especially in Judaism and Christianity. Two processes which have deeply characterized the relationship of Western man with food are then examined: the process of industrialization and that of the medicalization of food. Finally, coming to the contemporary, the article goes into the merits of the relationship that different cultures have with food in a multicultural society and offers some indications for alternative models compared to those currently dominant. The conclusion, with Feuerbach and beyond Feuerbach, is that man is yes what he eats, but also what he does not eat and, above all, man eats what he is.

Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, 2014

This essay provides an overview of Plato’s contribution to food ethics. Drawing on various Platonic dialogues, the discussion includes an analysis of the problem of gluttony and the correlate virtue of moderation, the diet of the Republic’s ideal city, and the harmonious order of the tripartite soul.