Instinct impels us to eat. But it does not drive us to eat more than our body requires. Nor does it inspire us to discriminate between foods on the basis of taste instead of nutritional value. This is easy for people from the middle and upper classes of the developed world to forget. We spend so much time worrying about what to eat that we blind ourselves to the fact that the majority of the world's inhabitants worry everyday about whether they will have anything to eat at all.
Taste only becomes a problem when instinct recedes into the background.
In other words, taste is an effect of surplus. When we have more than enough food, food becomes every bit as aesthetic as books, museums, and televison. This is why we should subject it to the same critical scrutiny that we reserve for a novel or painting. The contributors to this issue focus on the impact that food and drugs have on the way we make sense of our world. They explore what happens when consumption goes beyond the realm of necessity, when want can no longer be defined biologically.