The recent suicide of Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef and 'foodie,' offers food for thought. Why would so apparently successful and well-liked a man suddenly hang himself in his hotel room? One can only speculate on the basis of slender evidence, and it is perhaps morally dubious to do so.
On the other hand, not to wonder about a culture in which apparently sane and mature individuals throw away their lives on impulse is also dubious. But the problem lies deeper than culture. It lies in man's fallen nature.
It is clear to me that we are, all of us, morally sick and most of us spiritually adrift. If Bourdain had a spiritual anchor, would he have so frivolously offed himself, as he apparently did?
Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.
This is what good eating is all about? Seriously?
Bourdain displays the requisite decadent New Yorker cleverness, but he also betrays a failure to grasp the moral side of eating and drinking. There is first of all his moral obliviousness to the questions that divide carnivores from vegetarians, an obliviousness in evidence farther down:
Even more despised than the Brunch People are the vegetarians. Serious cooks regard these members of the dining public—and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans—as enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit. To live life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous.
I am taking no position at the moment on the morality of meat-eating. I am merely pointing out that there is a moral question here that cannot be dismissed — especially not with the cavalier stupidity of the quotation's final sentence.
But much more important is the moral question of gluttony.
Gluttony is a vice, and therefore a habit. (Prandial overindulgence now and again does not a glutton make.) At a first approximation, gluttony is the habitual inordinate consumption of food or drink. To consume food is to process it through the gastrointestinal tract, extracting its nutrients, and reducing it to waste matter. Now suppose a man eats an excessive quantity of food and then vomits it up in order to eat some more. Has he consumed the first portion of food? Arguably not. But he is a glutton nonetheless. So I tentatively suggest the following (inclusively) disjunctive definition:
D1. Gluttony is either the habitual, quantitatively excessive consumption of food or drink, or the habitual pursuit for their own sakes of the pleasures of eating or drinking, or indeed any habitual over-concern with food, its preparation, its enjoyment, etc.
If (D1) is our definition of gluttony, the vice has not merely to do with the quantity of food eaten but with other factors as well. The following from Wikipedia:
Laute - eating food that is too luxurious, exotic, or costly
Nimis - eating food that is excessive in quantity
Studiose - eating food that is too daintily or elaborately prepared
Praepropere - eating too soon, or at an inappropriate time
Ardenter - eating too eagerly.
It is clear that one can be a glutton even if one never eats an excessive quantity of food. The 'foody' who fusses and frets over the freshness and variety of his vegetables, wasting a morning in quest thereof, who worries about the 'virginity' of the olive oil, the presentation of the delectables on the plate, the proper wine for which course, the appropriate pre- and post-prandial liqueurs, who dissertates on the advantages of cooking with gas over electric . . . is a glutton.
In short, gluttony is the inordinate consumption of, and concern for, food and drink, where 'inordinate' does not mean merely 'quantitatively excessive.' It is also worth pointing out that there is nothing gluttonous about enjoying food: there is nothing morally wrong with enjoying the pleasures attendant upon eating nutritious, well-prepared food in the proper quantities.
Someone with a proper sense of values needn't go to the ascetic Augustinian extreme of viewing food as medicine. (This is not to say that fasting and other forms of prandial self-denial are not valuable and perhaps necessary from time to time.) One ought to think of food as fuel, albeit fuel the consumption of which is a source of legitimate pleasure.
We don't live to eat, we eat to live. And we don't live by bread (food) alone. Why not? Because we are not merely animals but spiritual animals whose life is not a merely animalic life but an embodied spiritual life.
There is something wrong with someone who becomes 'rapturous' (see initial quotation above) over Wellfleet oysters. It is spiritually obtuse so to secularize religious language. And it smacks — forgive the pun– of idolatry. Why not just enjoy your oysters without attribting to them transcendent meaning? Spiritual hunger cannot be sated in so gross a way.
Curiously, the attempt to do so is a sort of 'proof' that man is not a mere animal.
And please don't say that some piece of crud is to 'die for.'
We must never forget how vicious and stupid leftists are. Enjoy!
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California Regulators Go After Sriracha Hot Sauce
Pope Francis recently spoke, quite foolishly, of "unfettered capitalism," as if there is any such thing in the world. A more worthy cynosure of disapprobation is the slide toward unfettered regulation and omni-invasive government spearheaded by presumably well-meaning liberal-fascist nanny-staters.
You know things are getting bad when they come after your hot sauce. An Asian restaurant without Sriracha is like, what? A house without a fireplace? Coffee without caffeine? A man without balls?
You see, if these food fascists can go after Sriracha on the ground that it is a raw food, then Tabasco sauce, that marvellous Louisiana condiment from Avery Island, that undisputed king of the hot sauces, recognized as such by true connoisseurs all across this great land, that sine qua non of fine dining, and the criterion that separates, in point of the prandial, the men from the candy-mouthed girly-men, and which is also a raw food — then, I say, Tabasco sauce is in danger, a state of affairs the only appropriate remedy to which would be of the Second Amendment variety, if I may be permitted a bit of holiday hyperbole.
David Tran, founder of Huy Fong Foods, fled communist Viet Nam to come to our shores for freedom and a chance at self-reliance and economic self-determination . Unfortunately, the successors of commies, the leftists of the Democrat Party, may drive Tran out of California into a friendlier environment.
When they came for the soda, you did nothing because you don't drink the stuff. When they came for the Sriracha, you did nothing because you didn't know what the hell it was. But if they come after Tabasco sauce and you do nothing, then you deserve to be shot — figuratively speaking of course.
This is a re-post (re-entry?) from 9 December 2009. Re-posts are the re-runs of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode only once, do you? The message delivered below is very important and needs be repeated and repeated again.
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Can one be addicted to food? If yes, then I am addicted to exposing liberal nonsense. What I have said more than once about the non-addictiveness of tobacco can be applied mutatis mutandis to food 'addiction':
To confuse psychological habituation with addiction is conceptual slovenliness. Addiction, if it means anything definite, has to involve (i) a physiological dependence (ii) on something harmful to the body (iii) removal of which would induce serious withdrawal symptoms. One cannot be addicted to nose-picking, to running, to breathing, or to caffeine. Furthermore, (iv) it is a misuse of language to call a substance addictive when only a relatively small number of its users develop — over a sufficient period of time with sufficient frequency of use — a physical craving for it that cannot be broken without severe withdrawal symptoms. Else one would have to call peanuts toxic because a tiny number of people have severe allergic reactions to them. Heroin is addictive; nicotine is not. To think otherwise is to use ‘addiction’ in an unconscionably loose way.
Avoiding loose talk in serious contexts is a good part of proper intellectual hygiene.
Liberals and leftists engage in this loose talk for at least two reasons.
First, it aids them in their denial of individual responsibility. They would divest individuals of responsibility for their actions, displacing it onto factors, such as ‘addictive’ substances, external to the agent. Their motive is to grab more power for themselves by increasing the size and scope of government: the less self-reliant and responsible individuals are, the more they need the nanny state and people like Hillary, who gives some evidence of aspiring to be Nanny-in-Chief.
Second, loose talk of ‘addiction’ fits in nicely with what I call their misplaced moral enthusiasm. Incapable of appreciating a genuine issue such as partial-birth abortion, they invest their moral energy in pseudo-issues.
The main point is that tobacco products can be enjoyed in relatively harmless ways, just as alcoholic beverages can be enjoyed in relatively harmless ways. I have never met a cigarette yet that killed anybody. One has to smoke them, one has to smoke a lot of them over many years, and each time you light up it is a free decision.
Some people feel that all smokers are irrational. This too is nonsense, if we are talking about means-ends rationality. Someone who smokes a pack of cigarettes per day is assuming a serious health risk. But it may well be that the pleasure and alertness the person receives from smoking is worth the risk within the person’s value scheme.
Different people evaluate the present in its relation to the future in different ways. I tend to sacrifice the present for the future, thereby deferring gratification. Hence my enjoyment of the noble weed is abstemious indeed, consisting of an occasional load of pipe tobacco, or an occasional cigar. (I recommend the Arturo Fuente ‘Curly Head’ Maduro: cheap, but good.) But I would not think to impose my abstemiousness, or time-preference, on anyone else.
And now I have given up eating animal products. What prompted this, however, was not concern for my health. Neither was it concern for animal welfare. It was, rather, something that I had not thought much about before: the devastating environmental effects of animal farming.
I don't have to tell my elite readers who Ray Monk is.
One who lives to eat is almost as ridiculous as one who drives a car to pump gas into its tank. In both cases a vehicle; in both cases fuel; in both cases means-end confusion.
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)
This is surely on the right track, though I would add that food is not merely cultural and normative. Food, we can agree, is what it is socially acceptable to eat and/or morally permissible to eat. But food, to be food, must be material stuff ingestible by material beings, and so cannot be in toto a social or cultural construct. Or do you want to say that potatoes in the ground are social constructs? I hope not. Haslanger seems to accept my obvious point, as witness her remark to the effect that one cannot chow down on aluminum soda cans. As she puts it, "not just anything could count as food."(192) No construing of aluminum cans, social or otherwise, could make them edible to humans.
Could it be that certain food stuffs are by nature food, and not by convention? Could it be that the flesh of certain non-human animals such as cows is by nature food for humans? If beef is by nature food for humans, then it is normal in the normative sense for humans to eat beef, and thus morally acceptable that they eat it. Of course, what it is morally acceptable to eat need not be morally obligatory to eat.
Haslanger rejects the moral acceptability of eating beef but I don't quite find an argument against it, at least not in the article under examination. What she does is suggest how someone could come to accept the (to her) mistaken view that it is morally acceptable to eat meat. Given that 'Beef is food' is a generic statement, one will be tempted to accept the pragmatic or conversational implicature that "there is something about the nature of beef (or cows) that makes it food." (192)
For Haslanger, 'Beef is food' is in the close conceptual vicinity of 'Sagging pants are cool' and 'Women wear lipstick.'
Surely there is nothing intrinsic to sagging pants that makes them 'cool': 'coolness' is a relational property had by sagging pants in virtue of their being regarded as 'cool' by certain individuals. It is not in the nature of pants to sag such that non-sagging pants would count as sartorially defective. We can also easily agree that it is it not in the nature of women to wear lipstick such that non-lipstick-wearing women such as Haslanger are defective women in the way that a cat born with only three legs is a defective cat, an abnormal cat in both the normative and statistical senses of 'abnormal.' One can be a real woman, a good woman, a non-defective woman without wearing lipstick.
These fashion examples, which could be multiplied ad libitum (caps worn backward or sideways, high heels, etc.), are clear. What is not clear is why 'Beef is food' and 'Cows are food' are like the fashion examples rather than like such examples as 'Cats are four-legged' and 'Humans are rational.'
Cats are four-legged by nature, not by social construction. Accordingly, a three-legged cat is a defective cat. As such, it is no counterexample to the truth that cats are four-legged. 'Cats are four-legged' is presumably about a generic essence, one that has normative 'bite': a good cat, a normal cat has four legs. 'Cats are four-legged' is not replaceable salva veritate by 'All cats are four-legged.'
Why isn't 'Cows are food' assimilable to 'Cats are four-legged' rather than to 'Sagging pants are cool'? I am not finding an argument. Haslanger denies that "cows are for eating, that beef just is food":
Given that I believe this to be a pernicious and morally damaging assumption, it is reasonable for me to block the implicature by denying the claim: cows are not food. I would even be willing to say that beef is not food. (192)
Beef is not food for Haslanger because raising and slaughtering cows to eat their flesh is an "immoral human practice." But what exactly is the argument here? Where's the beef? Joking aside, what is the argument to the conclusion that eating beef is immoral?
There isn't one. She just assumes that eating beef is immoral. In lieu of an argument she provides a psycholinguistic explanation of how one might come to think that beef is food.
The explanation is that people believe that beef is food because they accept a certain pragmatic implicature, namely the one from 'Beef is food' to 'Beef has a nature that makes it food.' The inferential slide is structurally the same as the one from 'Sagging pants are cool' to 'There is something in the nature of sagging pants that grounds their intrinsic coolness.'
Now it is obvious that the pragmatic implicature is bogus is the fashion examples. To assume that it is also bogus in the beef example is to beg the question.
We noted that not everything edible is food. To be food, a stuff must not only be edible; it must also be socially acceptable to eat it. Food is "a cultural and normative category." (192) But Haslanger admits that "cows are food, given existing social practices." (193) So beef is, as a matter of fact, food. To have a reason to overturn the existing social practices, Haslanger need to give us a reason why eating beef is immoral — which she hasn't done.
October 1st is International Coffee Day. Herewith, some tunes in celebration. Not that I'm drinking coffee now: it's a morning and afternoon drink. I am presently partaking of a potent libation consisting of equal parts of Tequila and Campari with a Fat Tire Fat Funk Ale as chaser.
Commander Cody, Truck Drivin' Man. This one goes out to Sally and Jean and Mary in memory of our California road trip two years ago. "Pour me another cup of coffee/For it is the best in the land/I'll put a nickel in the jukebox/And play that 'Truck Drivin' Man.'"
What is wrong with people who don't drink or enjoy coffee? They must not value consciousness and intensity of experience. Poor devils! Perhaps they're zombies (in the philosophers' sense).
Patrick Kurp recommends Rick Danko and Paul Butterfield, Java Blues, one hard-driving, adrenalin-enabling number which, in synergy with a serious cup of java will soon have you banging hard on all synaptic 'cylinders.'
Chicory is a cheat. It cuts it but doesn't cut it.
"The taste of java is like a volcanic rush/No one is going to stop me from drinking too much . . . ."
We'll stop appropriating your food when you stop appropriating our mathematics, science, technology, and high culture generally including our superior political arrangements, not to mention our superior methods of cooking food.
There was a dust-up back in 2012 over Chick-Fil-A. But now the company is back in the news because of an attack by the leftist mayor of NYC, Bozo de Blasio. Story here.
You can do your bit in countering these totalitarian bastards by observing my maxim, 'No day without political incorrectness.' Each day you must engage in one or more politically incorrect acts. Some suggestions:
Smoke a cigar
Use standard English
Practice with a firearm
Read the Bible
Enunciate uncomfortable truths inconsistent with the liberal Weltanschauung
Read Maverick Philosopher
Think for yourself
Use the Left's Alinskyite tactics against them
Patronize Chick-Fil-A
If your alma mater coddles cry bullies, refuse to lend financial support
Give your baby baby formula
Get your kids out of the public schools
Read the Constitution
Cancel your subscription to The New York Times
Use the mens' room if you were born with the primary male characteristic
Find more examples of politically incorrect things to do
You probably knew that Elizabeth Warren, aka Fauxcahontas, contributed recipes to the cookbook, Pow Wow Chow. You might even know that some have alleged that these recipes were plagiarized by the Indian maiden. But I'll bet you don't know that Jean-Paul Sartre worked on a cookbook. Another reason why you need to read my blog.
We have recently been lucky enough to discover several previously lost diaries of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre stuck in between the cushions of our office sofa. These diaries reveal a young Sartre obsessed not with the void, but with food. Aparently Sartre, before discovering philosophy, had hoped to write "a cookbook that will put to rest all notions of flavor forever.'' The diaries are excerpted here for your perusal.
October 3
Spoke with Camus today about my cookbook. Though he has never actually eaten, he gave me much encouragement. I rushed home immediately to begin work. How excited I am! I have begun my formula for a Denver omelet.
October 4
Still working on the omelet. There have been stumbling blocks. I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone. I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, and instead they taste like cheese. I look at them on the plate, but they do not look back. Tried eating them with the lights off. It did not help. Malraux suggested paprika.
October 6
I have realized that the traditional omelet form (eggs and cheese) is bourgeois. Today I tried making one out of a cigarette, some coffee, and four tiny stones. I fed it to Malraux, who puked. I am encouraged, but my journey is still long.
October 7
Today I again modified my omelet recipe. While my previous attempts had expressed my own bitterness, they communicated only illness to the eater. In an attempt to reach the bourgeoisie, I taped two fried eggs over my eyes and walked the streets of Paris for an hour. I ran into Camus at the Select. He called me a "pathetic dork" and told me to "go home and wash my face." Angered, I poured a bowl of bouillabaisse into his lap. He became enraged, and, seizing a straw wrapped in paper, tore off one end of the wrapper and blew through the straw. propelling the wrapper into my eye. "Ow! You dick!" I cried. I leaped up, cursing and holding my eye, and fled.
Merry Christmas everybody. Pour yourself a drink, and enjoy. Me, I'm nursing a Boulevardier. It's a Negroni with cojones: swap out the gin for bourbon. One ounce bourbon, one ounce sweet vermouth, one ounce Campari, straight up or on the rocks, with a twist of orange. A serious libation. The vermouth rosso contests the harshness of the bourbon, but then the Italian joins the fight on the side of the bourbon. Or you can think of it as a Manhattan wherein the Campari substitutes for the angostura bitters. That there are people who don't like Campari shows that there is no hope for humanity.
Starbuck's CEO, Howard Schultz, wants his baristas to write "Race Together" on coffee cups to facilitate a conversation about race between baristas and customers and presumably also among customers.
Now this is profoundly stupid — assuming it is not just a cynical try at boosting sales. I'll be charitable and assume the former.
Anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed that we agree on less and less, and not for a lack of 'conversations' about the issues that divide us. The notion that more talk will help is foolish when what we need is less conversational engagement and more agreement to avoid divisive issues, together with the resolve to interact as well as we can on the common ground that remains — such as love of coffee.
The pot belly is an outer sign of an inner lack of self-discipline. We should be grateful that our sexual excesses do not have a corresponding physical manifestation.
