Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting

Encountering an artichoke, one might wonder how the first person to eat that vegetable ever got past the exterior spines and the interior core of throat-raking needles to discover the sweet heart hidden within. Many foodstuffs present similar mysteries, such as rhubarb, whose poison parts surround succulent stems, or vegetables and meats whose toxins require hours of careful flushing before they relinquish edible substances. The vast family of peppers can bur the tissues of the mouth, eyes, and nose so painfully that they are sometimes used as punishment, yet they also have become immensely popular in the diet of many peoples. None of these examples represents bounties of the earth immediately inviting to the palate, and given the sheer difficulty of finding the nutriments to be had from fierce, dangerous, or toxic substances, we might well wonder that human beings ever learned to eat anything beyond the first fruits of the garden of Eden-one of which proved to be the most dangerous of all! The ultimate origin of our diets is lost in the shadows of prehistory and evolution, though one suspects that sheer necessity often prompted discovery of food from forbidding sources. The remarkable thing is not just that we managed to eat, but that we managed and continue to manage to take considerable pleasure in foods that present us with challenges to both our senses and our sensibilities. It is the perplexing and elusive nature of this pleasure that will occupy me here, especially the difficult pleasures to be had from what I call "terrible eating." Discussing pleasure in eating is a surprisingly delicate theoretical undertaking. Food and the sense of taste are not standard topics for philosophical discussion for reasons that have to do with the nature of this sense and the kind of pleasures it affords. Since classical antiquity, our philosophical tradition has ranked two senses above the others, elevating sight in particular to the top of the list because of its role in the development of knowledge. Sight is the chief sensory means by which we make discoveries bout the world, assess practical decisions, and achieve aesthetic insights. Vision and its companion hearing are philosophically, scientifically, and in common parlance considered the "higher" senses, while touch, taste, and smell are "bodily" senses, and by the long tradition that ranks mind over body, they are also considered "lower" senses. While sight and hearing opera e at a distance from their objects, food and drink are taken into the body, providing it life-sustaining nutrition. Indeed, the chief purpose of food is to nourish, and this heavily functional ole is another factor that commonly excludes eating from the intellectual interest of the philosopher. Food is merely functional, keeping the body healthy so that more important mental busi ess may proceed. Socrates probably speaks for the majority when he declares that a philosopher should care neither for food and drink nor sex (Phaedo 64d). All of the senses can give us pleasure, but again we find a crucial distinction drawn between the "intellectual" pleasures of sight and hearing and the "bodily" pleasures of touch, sme l, and taste. Enjoyment of objects of the eyes and ears-beautiful scenes, sounds, works of art-directs attention outward to the world around. The "objective" intentional direction of vision and hearing aids our knowledge of the world and gives us aesthetic pleasure. (Indeed, in modem philosophy beauty is actually identified as this particular brand of pleasure.) By contrast, the pleasures of touch, smell, and taste