by Dwight Furrow
It’s not intimate, it’s philosophy. That sounds like something ChatGPT would say but there is truth in it. Philosophical writing is seldom intimate. When philosophical writing styles are discussed, Nietzsche is usually trotted out as the example that avoids the calculated, dispassionate, heavily qualified tone of philosophy. But intimate? No. Nietzsche was too busy shouting at the reader to achieve intimacy.
One achievement of Scott Samuelson’s To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life is a level of intimacy rarely attained in philosophy. To say the book is well written is an understatement. He squeezes philosophical insight from engaging accounts of relationships fostered through cooking and eating. The tragic irony of his daughter’s struggle with bulimia is genuinely moving. And his facility with anecdote is considerable. Near the end of the book he summarizes his moral ideal which he borrows from Anne Lamott: “Don’t be an asshole and make sure everybody eats.” That captures about 90% of ethics doesn’t it? (I know. That other 10% is a real bear.)
The argument the book makes is straightforward: “…Cooking and sharing a meal is the paradigm for caring for the soul.” Notice the definite article. “The” paradigm, not “a” paradigm, or “one” paradigm. Apparently, cooking and sharing a meal give us unique insights regarding how to live. In philosophy, this is a controversial claim to say the least. Socrates was the first philosopher, as far as we know, to exhort human beings to care for the soul, but that care had little to do with cooking or eating. One’s soul was to be nurtured by seeking wisdom and virtue through relentless philosophical disputation. Cooking, for Plato’s mouthpiece Socrates, was mere flattery and eating a necessity that too often created desires that overwhelmed reason and fostered moral decay. Much of the history of philosophy has agreed with Plato at some level.
Samuelson is having none of that. Read more »
We have slid almost imperceptibly and, to be honest, gratefully, into a world that offers to think, plan, and decide on our behalf. Calendars propose our meetings; feeds anticipate our moods; large language models can summarize our desires before we’ve fully articulated them. Agency is the human capacity to initiate, to be the author of one’s actions rather than their stenographer. The age of AI is forcing us to answer a peculiar question: what forms of life still require us to begin something, rather than merely to confirm it? The best answer I’ve been able to come up with is that we preserve agency by carving out zones of what the philosopher 
It is a curious legacy of philosophy that the tongue, the organ of speech, has been treated as the dumbest of the senses. Taste, in the classical Western canon, has for centuries carried the stigma of being base, ephemeral, and merely pleasurable. In other words, unserious. Beauty, it was argued, resides in the eternal, the intelligible, the contemplative. Food, which disappears as it delights, seemed to offer nothing of enduring aesthetic value. Yet today, as gastronomy increasingly is being treated as an aesthetic experience, we must re-evaluate those assumptions.
In philosophical debates about the aesthetic potential of cuisine, one central topic has been the degree to which smell and taste give us rich and structured information about the nature of reality. Aesthetic appreciation involves reflection on the meaning and significance of an aesthetic object such as a painting or musical work. Part of that appreciation is the apprehension of the work’s form or structure—it is often the form of the object that we find beautiful or otherwise compelling. Although we get pleasure from consuming good food and drink, if smell and taste give us no structured representation of reality there is no form to apprehend or meaning to analyze, so the argument goes. The enjoyment of cuisine then would be akin to that of basking in the sun. It is pleasant to be sure but there is nothing to apprehend or analyze beyond an immediate sensation.
One longstanding debate in aesthetics concerns the relative virtues of formalism vs. contextualism. This debate, which preoccupied art theorists in the 20th Century, now rages in the culinary world of the 21st Century. Roughly, the controversy is about whether a work of art is best appreciated by attending to its sensory properties and their organization or should we focus on its meaning and the social, historical, or psychological context of its production. The debate is similar in the world of cuisine. How best should we appreciate the food or beverages we consume? Should we focus solely on the flavors and aromas or does authenticity and social context matter?
Is there such a thing as tasting expertise that, if mastered, would help us enjoy a dish or a meal? It isn’t obvious such expertise has been identified.
In 
It might strike you as odd, if not thoroughly antiquarian, to reach back to Aristotle to understand gastronomic pleasure. Haven’t we made progress on the nature of pleasure over the past 2500 years? Well, yes and no. The philosophical debate about the nature of pleasure, with its characteristic ambiguities and uncertainties, persists often along lines developed by the ancients. But we now have robust neurophysiological data about pleasure, which thus far has increased the number of hypotheses without settling the question of what exactly pleasure is.
The term “gastronomy” has no agreed-upon, definitive meaning. Its common meaning, captured in dictionary definitions, is that gastronomy is the art and science of good eating. But the term is often expanded to include food history, nutrition, and the ecological, political, and social ramifications of food production and consumption. For my purposes, I want to focus on the conventional meaning of gastronomy for which that dictionary definition will suffice.
