Good Food, Good Eating, Good Living

Philosophy and food, do they go together? After all, isn't philosophy about the higher things in life, while food deals with lowly, everyday concerns? These are misconceptions. Eating and drinking are altogether essential elements of human life. When we eat, we connect to reality, to nature around us. What's more, it becomes part of us, we taste it and feel it. We renew our body by partaking of products from nature. Food issues have been ignored for too long by philosophy, for philosophy deals with the essential issues of human life. Food and philosophy belong together, like body and nature. That is why it is a serious oversight, a blind spot in the thinking of philosophers, that so few philosophies of nutrition have ever been published in the English-speaking world. So let's get to work!

Nutrition, food: what is it really? We consume food products: fruit, vegetables, meat, potatoes, you name it. All of these are products of nature that we produce, process, eat and drink, and make a part of ourselves. Our bodies convert products from nature like bread, cheese, wine, fish, and meat into good or bad thoughts, into heroic or cowardly actions. Every bite into a juicy apple converts this wondrous mixture of smell, color, and taste into flesh and blood. And possibly into amusing thoughts, smooth talk, a good laugh, or a kick in the ass. It does not sound at all odd to say that the sentences I am writing down here and now, is the omelet I feasted on this morning changed into words. Through nutrition, nature becomes human thoughts and actions. It is often said: you are what you eat, we are what we eat. What does that mean? Are the stories that I tell right here and now already contained in that omelet?