Book review: The Virtues of the Table, by Julian Baggini
Julian Baggini is in some ways anti-foodist, in his sceptical account of faddish modern nostrums about what it is right to eat.
by Julian Baggini
Granta
3 stars
Steven Poole
Julian Baggini is in some ways anti-foodist, in his sceptical account of faddish modern nostrums about what it is right to eat. He dismantles self-congratulatory assumptions about the evils of large industry and chain restaurants or the superiority of organic food and local eating. He dislikes recipes ("codification is the death of judgment"), and so offers charmingly vague guidelines for making a pasta sauce or "a muffin-like bun that is so wholesome as to be virtually monastic".
Great philosophers of the past, on Baggini's account, offer mixed inspiration. David Hume boasted about his cooking, but Ludwig Wittgenstein "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 we have a duty to find out about the provenance of our nosh. 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. 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 but these do not survive the death of the body. Mindful foodism allegedly follows. "By being willing to kill and eat," he writes, "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."
There are other ways to affirm life, of course. Some like art, but Baggini says art deceives us in a way that gnawing on a beef rib does not. "The problem with art is that it can fool us into forgetting that we are mortal, flesh-and-blood-creatures."