While Julian Baggini was writing this book about the "philosophy of food", he bought me lunch at a gastropub near the British Library. I had a chicken burger, served for no apparent reason in a wooden box. In between mouthfuls of barbecued bird, I attempted to explain my hostility to our society's decadent and obscene obsession with cooking and eating. I am not too good, however, at cogitating while ingurgitating. Luckily, I had already written my arguments down in a book, You Aren't What You Eat, about which Baggini in the present volume says nice things. Perhaps all I needed was a book to instruct me, as this one promises to, "how to eat and think".
Baggini is in some ways anti-foodist, in his sceptical account of faddish modern nostrums about what it is right to eat. He expertly dismantles self-congratulatory assumptions about the evils of large industry and chain restaurants or the superiority of organic food and local eating. He even dislikes recipes ("codification is the death of judgment"), and so offers charmingly vague guidelines for making a pasta sauce, a fish stew, or "a muffin-like bun that is so wholesome as to be virtually monastic". (He calls them "monkins".) On sentimental worries about keeping cows indoors for the winter, he comments beautifully: "To imagine that Ermintrude is wistfully dreaming of roaming free from field to field is infantile." In such moments, Baggini can certainly be recommended as the thinking person's Michael Pollan.
Nonetheless, I remained serenely unpersuaded by his overall argument, which is that those of us who aren't already self-regarding lifestyle gluttons should spend more of our awfully limited time pondering food. Curiously for a philosopher, one strand of his reasoning is that thinking about more rarefied matters might be bad for you. Baggini doesn't like airy-fairy theorising, which "can easily lead us up into the clouds". Do not object that the clouds might be a nice place to be. To such disastrous ascent, anyway, a lamb burger or a nice cheese is the perfect antidote. "Food grounds us," Baggini writes. "There is nothing more basic than the need to eat and drink." I'm pretty sure the need to breathe is more basic, but let's not be pedantic.
Great philosophers of the past, on Baggini's account, offer mixed inspiration. Hume boasted about his cooking, but Kant died in part from scoffing too many Cheddar sandwiches. According to a letter by Keynes, meanwhile, Ludwig Wittgenstein heroically "declared that it did not much matter to him what he ate, so long as it always remained the same". Despite this lamentable paucity of fascination with his grub, Wittgenstein nonetheless managed to be quite a good thinker.
So why should we meditate on food any more than Wittgenstein did? Baggini suggests there is some sort of duty to find out about the provenance of our nosh. But he later praises Fairtrade, the whole point of which is that I can (allegedly) trust the bananas or coffee sporting the label to be, well, fair. I don't need to do any further research. So, even if I believe this kind of knowledge is necessary, I can outsource its gathering to such trusted bodies and experts and still give scant thought to dinner.
More important might be what food can allegedly tell us about our humanity. Throughout the book, Baggini runs two general arguments on this theme simultaneously. I fear their combination might be circular. A focus on food is alleged to illuminate who we are, to imply some facts about "human nature"; on the other hand, a particular theory of "human nature" is used to justify a gastrocentric worldview in the first place.
Baggini says human beings have a "psucho-somatic nature": they have minds (or, if you like, souls), but these are embedded in and do not survive the death of the body. (The Greek is the same as "psychosomatic".) Mindful foodism allegedly follows. "By being willing to kill and eat," he writes for example, "we show that we are willing to accept that death is a fact of life, and that what matters is how we live while we are alive, not that we continue to live indefinitely. Eating meat is therefore life-affirming." The animal's opinion is not here solicited.
There are other ways to affirm life, of course. Some like art, but Baggini complains that art deceives us in a way that gnawing on a beef rib does not. "The problem with art," he writes, "is that it can fool us into forgetting that we are mortal, flesh-and-blood-creatures." You might think that forgetting this from time to time is quite enjoyable if not a psychic necessity, but Baggini is severe. "Art flatters us into thinking we have depths that our animality cannot explain," he complains. "This may make us feel like a better class of being, but the reassurance is false." Spoken with confidence, though if anyone in the world is in possession of a complete explanation, via our animality, of what it is to be human, I didn't get the memo.
For Baggini, though, it is more noble and honest to concentrate on stuffing one's face. While describing a €350 meal he gobbled at a high-class Swedish joint, Baggini argues that food conveys a bracing tang of truth to the palate. "Fine food is about the aesthetic of the immanent, not the transcendent." So, rather than arguing full-bloodedly that food rises to the level of art, Baggini wants to take art itself down a peg or two. We thus are faced with the paradoxical phenomenon of a philosophical and artful book that denigrates philosophy and art in order to valorise a determination never to let one's nose stray too far from the trough.
One vice that Baggini does not share with most foodists, at least, is humourlessness. His chthonic philosophy may sound austere, but he is quite nice about it. In response to a hedonist who says you shouldn't die with a bottle of champagne in the fridge, the Bagginian merely implores: "Don't die with two bottles of champagne in the fridge." Indeed, there are many interesting philosophical passages here (on self-control, the virtues of "routine", or Aristotleian "practical wisdom" in general) that are pegged to food but didn't have to be. This rather undercuts the book's thesis that right philosophy somehow rises out of food, like a delicious umami aroma. If Baggini persuades some foodists to get into philosophy, he will have done a great service, but it seems unlikely that his philosophy will persuade everyone to become more foodist.
Even if you accept Baggini's ontology of the human, after all, you are still not obliged to agree that heavy absorption in chow is the best way to illuminate it. Such claims, ubiquitous among foodists, always have a slightly corked bouquet of special pleading for their own gastromonomania. When I read that eating is "the ideal domain in which to understand our psucho-somatic nature", I think: really? Is it? Why not martial arts? Or shagging?
