A Substack excursus into the alimentary.
This article ought to be of interest to James TaIarico who, in meat-eatin’ gun-totin’ Texas, is quite quixotic the candidate; but I fear he is too stupid to understand it. He thinks God is non-binary. That makes no sense. Sean Hannity’s response makes no sense either. Hannity tells us that he was taught the “Our Father” as a child, and apparently Hannity holds that God is a Big Guy in the Sky with a penis hanging between his legs. To discuss whether a purely spiritual, and thus wholly immaterial being is sexually dimorphic is the sort of debate that belongs in a loony bin. I plan to rant further on the conservative inability to operate on the plane of ideas in a separate Substack entry.
Today’s Substack article starts out like this:
Beef is the flesh of a formerly sentient being, a dead cow. And of course beef is edible. For present purposes, to be edible is to be ingestible by mastication, swallowing, etc., non-poisonous, and sufficiently nutritious to sustain human life.
But is everything that is edible food? Obviously not: your pets and your children are edible but they are not food. People don’t feed their pets and children to fatten them up for slaughter. So while all food is edible, not everything edible is food.
What then is the missing ‘ingredient’? What must be added to the edible to make it food? We must move from merely biological concern with human animals and the nutrients necessary to keep them alive to the cultural and normative. Sally Haslanger: “Food, I submit, is a cultural and normative category.” (“Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground,” Chapter 11 of Feminist Metaphysics, 192)