Any account of cooking should take us outward, in his view, to the nature of society itself because cooks are at the centre of and integrate a vast activity of acquiring, organising and distributing nutrition and good in its broadest, social and ethical senses. But up until now, and because we have reduced cooks to menials, we have understood what they do by disaggregation downward to the technical, the nutritional and the economic. To redeem cooks, Symons thinks, is to reclaim life. It is also to banish modern doctrines that repudiate life. In his view the most dehumanising and least true of our recent heresies is the reduction of our complex and ethically rich systems of sharing and cooperation to the selfish and ethically neutral acts of production and exchange imagined by classical economics and its modern epigones.
Cooks share, and nothing they do is more important.
Pudding is in the last analysis an argument in morality and political economy, a reclamation of the ethical drives of nineteenth-century sociology represented in the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel. Defining and defending gastronomy, and teaching us to think gastronomically, is Symons' second great task. He enlists the aid of politics, economics, history, sociology, philosophy, theology, science, literary criticism and philology. There are no modest proposals here. Since food and cooking are everwhere in time and place, Symons decides he must be too.