Food and Language

Food and Language

The central place of food in animal life is undeniable.[1] An animal is a food machine. The reason is fundamental: animals need energy to survive and food is the source of energy (it would be different if they could just get charged up like an electric car). It is fair to say that animals are obsessed with food: for themselves and their offspring, mainly. Starvation is not on the menu. They are designed to obtain and consume food. They know their way around food. Many suffer early deaths for lack of it. They communicate about food: in hunting and food-seeking, in learning about it, in sharing or not sharing it. If they could talk like us, they would surely talk about food constantly. We are animals (not plants, rocks, or gods), so we share this obsession: we need food as badly as other animals. We are also speakers. Go back to our early days as a species when we were still on the inarticulate side: chronically short of food, squabbling about it, eagerly consuming it. We were a cooperative social species for whom the food problem was very real (still is for some). Imagine that spoken language was just getting started: what would we talk about? Food, of course—food, glorious (but scarce) food. We would all be Billy Bunters with his “tuck” obsession. Our first tentative language-game would be food-oriented. We would be talkative foodies. This would help us in our hunting and gathering, in our food preparation, in our feasting (or lack thereof). Let’s be honest: we would talk about food a hell of a lot. Talking is energy-consuming, so you are not going to do it if energy is in short supply; but talking about food is talking about energy and how to obtain it, so you would let the talk flow. You would be a natural-born food-talker: a food critic, a food savant, a food fanatic. You would talk about food from dawn till dusk—even over dinner! Here’s what you wouldn’t talk about: sense-data or Platonic universals or material particulars in space and time. Your ontology would be a culinary ontology, which is quite enough to be going on with. Your tools are also mainly food-involving: tools for hunting, cutting, dining with. Fire is mainly used for cooking. Family meals are the center of social life. Your speech acts revolve around the food arena—sharing, requesting, praising, wondering aloud where your next meal is coming from. As time passes, you branch out a bit: you are not only interested in food talk—you are also partial to a bit of mating conversation or family dramas or even discussions of what the Sun is. But you began with food; that’s where your linguistic resources were forged. It therefore seeps into your more general chatter. You use food analogies, food metaphors, food paradigms, food conceptual schemes, food methodologies. For that is the basis from which your language developed—and your thought too. For example, you needed to distinguish food objects from non-food objects, the edible from the inedible; this led you to the concept of a material object in general. You may also start to wonder about the non-digestive organs of the body and differentiate them from the digestive organs. You get beyond the narrow ontology of food proper.

Suppose that sometime later you even start to ponder what we would now call your mind, including your senses. There’s a reality there, you feel, but how to talk about it? You naturally turn to your tried-and-true food language and its conceptual underpinnings: consumption, digestion, etc. You might then start to talk of your mind (though you don’t use that term) as if it is like your stomach and appended organs: perceiving is like consuming, reasoning is like digestion, knowledge is like satiation, memory is like a full larder. Yes, that’s it, you think, no need to invent some newfangled conceptual-linguistic scheme. Thus, you speak of food for thought, indigestible lessons, a healthy intellectual diet, vomitous propositional content. The senses are clearly food-oriented—good at detecting and tracking food, as well as evaluating it—so they have a lot to do with food. The brain is like the stomach as an ingestive organ that processes and transforms what is fed into it. The mind thus becomes modelled on the body, specifically the food organs. In time, some clever cognitive scientist starts referring to various “mental modules” analogous to physical organs of the body–the food module along with the reproduction module and the aggression module. He claims that the food mental module was the first to evolve and that it led to the other two: that is, it is cognitively fundamental. The cognitive mind in general is run on food-representing computations and suchlike things. We are still anchored to those early adventures in food cognition and food speech. And it is true that food naturally radiates outwards, requiring competence in object tracking, inference from evidence, fire management, utensil production, communal dining, fair shares, moral rights, laws governing the proper control of food distribution, and so on. You can’t just be focused on food itself; you need knowledge of the whole matrix in which it is naturally embedded. There is even food science, food medicine, food culture, food ethics, food politics, food art, the foody lifestyle, food disorders and phobias, and food snobbery. It’s a big field, conceptually rich, but all stemming from those early days of anxiously scrambling to put food on the table (an anxiety that has never left us). In the beginning was the meal (deeds were food-directed).

A well-fed naturalistic ethicist might venture the hypothesis that our ethics is rooted in food ethics: altruistic sharing, natural eating rights, duties to the starving, promises about when lunch will be served, admonitions against stealing food from others. And it is perfectly true that a pride of lions, say, is sorely in need of ethical instruction when jostling for a bite of a freshly killed carcass (greedy buggers). The political theorist might likewise insist that distributive justice primordially requires that food be distributed according to certain abstract principles of fairness, with all other cases ultimately reducing to the food case. Capitalism might be defined as accumulating all the food you can lay your hands on in a free market, including the means of food production; at any rate, this is the basic case. Charities will plead that famine is the worst evil to befall man. Philosophers of physics, not to be left out, will contend that physics is founded on a bedrock of concepts that go back to the hunting and gathering age when we had to chase big lumps of matter through the jungle and then chop them into small pieces (this leading to ancient atomism). What is mass, after all, other than the size of your helping? At any rate, our conceptual scheme and spoken language have a history, and what kicked them off was an obsession with food—this being what led to our species supremacy and the very existence of physicists. We must thank God for giving us a brain that enabled us to solve the food problem—next gravity! A brain that can perform as well as ours in the food department has essentially all it needs to achieve greater things. Even mathematics was invented to do agriculture and count herds. (Is it an accident that a circle is the shape of a pie? I should think not.) Food is at the root of it all (plus some), as a matter of biological fact. That is a truth recognized by our most respected religions: the apple in the Garden of Eden, food rituals, food taboos, religious feast days, fasts, and so on. I conjecture that religion began in food-related contexts and then expanded out from there—no doubt anxiety about food will have fueled early religious practices. Food crops up everywhere in human and animal life; it is part of our natural history (as Wittgenstein would say), a major part. It deserves more recognition in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology.[2]

[1] See my “Evolution by Nutritional Selection”.

[2] A key theoretical tool should be evolutionary derivation not just conceptual analysis and family resemblance: how did some existing adaptation begin and how did it develop over time? This would be a truly biological (naturalistic) philosophy. Of course, it involves expanding biology beyond its narrow professional boundaries. Bio-philosophy will take in food and its conceptual expression. It beats sex and war (with which it is strongly connected).