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Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food
Philosophy has often been criticized for privileging the abstract; this volume attempts to remedy that situation. Focusing on one of the most concrete of human concerns, food, the editors argue for the existence of a philosophy of food. The collection provides various approaches to the subject matter, offering new readings of a number of texts―religious, philosophical, anthropological, culinary, poetic, and economic. Included are readings ranging from Plato's Phaedo and Verses of Sen-No-Rikyu to Peter Singer's "Becoming a Vegetarian" and Jean-François Revel's Culture and Cuisine.
This reader will have particular appeal for philosophers working in social theory, feminist theory, and environmental ethics, and for those working on alternative approaches to such traditional subject areas as epistemology, aesthetics, and metaphysics.
This reader will have particular appeal for philosophers working in social theory, feminist theory, and environmental ethics, and for those working on alternative approaches to such traditional subject areas as epistemology, aesthetics, and metaphysics.
- GenresFoodPhilosophy
416 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1992
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About the author
Deane W. Curtin
7 books2 followersDeane Curtin is professor emeritus of philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 22, 2014
I first read this book twenty years ago, when I was working on a master's thesis, and it changed my life. Even though the book doesn't advocate vegetarianism or even veganism (it's an anthology after all), my experience with the book was one of the reasons why I became a vegan. CET was published at the very outset of a flourishing of interest in food and agriculture, and may, in its small way, have contributed to that outgrowth of consciousness. It's a challenging, politically engaged, and always thoughtful study of food and its many meanings—cultural, epistemological, social, political, and, of course, gastronomical.
Reading Curtin and Heldke’s anthology again after two decades, I'm struck by how many of the issues raised in the book have yet to be addressed seriously in public policy itself. Cash and commodity crops are still being grown and traded at the expense of food security around the globe. Varied food cultures continue to vanish amid the global consolidation, homogenization, and corporatization of the production, distribution, and consumption of food. And climate change (then newly popularized by Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature in 1989 and Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance, published in the same year as Curtin and Heldke’s anthology, and at the time largely a theoretical and not present danger), is now threatening human and biotic communities throughout the planet.
The emergence of “foodism” as a very visible manifestation of the lifestyles and identities of upper-middle-class white urbanites can all too easily disguise the continued challenge many other Americans face finding fresh natural produce at affordable prices to feed their families. Although published when Earth’s population (as the book notes) was four billion, Cooking, Eating, Thinking’s admonishments about the need for food justice have in general yet to be heeded or acted upon. The severe consequences of the globalization of industrial animal agriculture on food security, health services, and climate change (let alone animal welfare) have yet to register in the corridors of power. One shudders to imagine what readers will make of this anthology twenty years hence, when the global population will have doubled since the early 1990s and Earth’s ecosystems are even more compromised, perhaps unrecoverably so.
Reading Curtin and Heldke’s anthology again after two decades, I'm struck by how many of the issues raised in the book have yet to be addressed seriously in public policy itself. Cash and commodity crops are still being grown and traded at the expense of food security around the globe. Varied food cultures continue to vanish amid the global consolidation, homogenization, and corporatization of the production, distribution, and consumption of food. And climate change (then newly popularized by Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature in 1989 and Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance, published in the same year as Curtin and Heldke’s anthology, and at the time largely a theoretical and not present danger), is now threatening human and biotic communities throughout the planet.
The emergence of “foodism” as a very visible manifestation of the lifestyles and identities of upper-middle-class white urbanites can all too easily disguise the continued challenge many other Americans face finding fresh natural produce at affordable prices to feed their families. Although published when Earth’s population (as the book notes) was four billion, Cooking, Eating, Thinking’s admonishments about the need for food justice have in general yet to be heeded or acted upon. The severe consequences of the globalization of industrial animal agriculture on food security, health services, and climate change (let alone animal welfare) have yet to register in the corridors of power. One shudders to imagine what readers will make of this anthology twenty years hence, when the global population will have doubled since the early 1990s and Earth’s ecosystems are even more compromised, perhaps unrecoverably so.
Displaying 1 of 1 review