Julian Baggini’s new book The Virtues of the Table explores the subject:
He argues that the way we taste has a lot to do with other factors. He cites [gastronome Jean Anthelme] Brillat-Savarin’s observation that the pleasures of the table are not the pleasures of eating. We are less likely to enjoy our Nespresso, he suggests, if we know how it was prepared. This leads us to another level of taste: the sort we use when we express distaste at another’s ethics. He doesn’t use the word in that way, preferring to talk about “judgment” when urging us to make our own decisions about what to cook. As a philosopher, he feels the need to give us some criteria with which to make these assessments, and urges a balance between mind and body, arguing that food tastes better when we’ve thought about it.
Alex Renton describes a chapter on food and routine:
Routine, says Baggini, can be thought a virtue – Aristotle’s hexis, or habit, is an active condition, not a passive one. Routine and repetition are the key to kitchens great and small – whether it’s Baggini’s Italian grandmother preparing her fabulous ravioli at Easter, or a sushi shokunin practising his precise art. Some 30% of us, he quotes a recent survey, always have the same thing for lunch – is that a bad thing?
“There is nothing more tedious than culinary innovation for the sake of it,” Baggini concludes the chapter. “Every restaurant trend of recent decades, for example, has ended in a giant yawn… The knack is not simply to fall into routines and be limited by them, but to choose them well and hence be enriched and liberated by them.” This is interesting, arguable stuff and shows Baggini at his best, drawing from a glorious range of sources (I’m desperately trying to avoid a cooking metaphor here) to produce engaging thought.
Erica Wagner appreciates that Baggini considers the morality of eating meat:
[O]n our behalf he heads to an abattoir and describes in clear but not gruesome detail just what happens when a pig goes to slaughter. The conclusions he draws are rather more forgiving than those of Jonathan Safran Foer in his largely excoriating Eating Animals – but Baggini is not talking about factory farming here, rather about animals that have been raised humanely. But then, what does “humanely” mean, when it comes to animals? How much consciousness or awareness do they have? It’s a question Baggini considers too – though admitting that it’s impossible to know the answer. He decides, however, “that treating animals with respect is not incompatible with eating them”.
Meanwhile, John Crace provides a “digested read” for the book. Previous Dish on the philosophy of food here and here.
The Dish 