15 Jan 2014 02:54:27
"Coarse rice for food, water to drink, and the bended arm for a pillow – happiness may be enjoyed even in these," says Confucius. "You should eat to live, not live to eat," pronounces Socrates. This is how we like our philosophers: ascetic, skinny, far above the terrestrial joys of the table, drinking a cup of wine only for the hemlock at the bottom.
And generally – except for Kant, who may have died from a surfeit of cheese sandwiches – the philosophy faculty seems to have stayed away from the delights and the excesses of food. Ludwig Wittgenstein would cook dinners chiefly from powdered egg, telling one guest who complained that what was good enough for Wittgenstein should be good enough for him.
In 1929, already Europe's most celebrated philosopher, Wittgenstein came to stay with John Maynard Keynes ("God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train") in Cambridge. Lydia Keynes gave Wittgenstein rye bread and Swiss cheese for lunch, which he liked. "Thereafter," John Maynard Keynes wrote, "he more or less insisted on eating bread and cheese at all meals, largely ignoring the various dishes my wife had prepared. Wittgenstein declared that it did not much matter to him what he ate, so long as it remained the same."
Julian Baggini declares this "somewhat dull and puritanical", though I find it interesting – more so than if Wittgenstein had turned out to be a practising home-baker and aficionado of heritage artisanal cheese. Baggini, as he would be the first to admit, is no Wittgenstein. He's a deal more popular, to begin with: author of 10 books of light philosophy in the past decade, whereas the great Ludwig published just one in his lifetime, 75 pages, not light at all: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
More to the point, Baggini is a rare thing: a philosopher-cook. In this collection of essays on problems of modernity and food, he establishes his food credentials by listing the staple dishes that he makes at home. Foodies will have no trouble parsing it: pasta all'arrabbiata, risotto, "cheese, bread and tomatoes", fish and chips, and marmitako, an obscure Basque fishermen's tuna stew. Recipes – not entirely convincing – are provided at the end of each chapter.
Baggini raises Wittgenstein's functional, "fuelist" diet to kick off a piece on food and routine. The last, he says, is "a dirty word in a consumerist world", commonly used by overstimulated restaurant critics for food they cannot fault but don't much admire. (Baggini doesn't much like critics – he gives this paper's Jay Rayner a slap for being "excessive". Imagine!) Routine, says Baggini, can be thought a virtue – Aristotle's hexis, or habit, is an active condition, not a passive one. Routine and repetition are the key to kitchens great and small – whether it's Baggini's Italian grandmother preparing her fabulous ravioli at Easter, or a sushi shokunin practising his precise art. Some 30% of us, he quotes a recent survey, always have the same thing for lunch – is that a bad thing?
"There is nothing more tedious than culinary innovation for the sake of it," Baggini concludes the chapter. "Every restaurant trend of recent decades, for example, has ended in a giant yawn… The knack is not simply to fall into routines and be limited by them, but to choose them well and hence be enriched and liberated by them."
This is interesting, arguable stuff and shows Baggini at his best, drawing from a glorious range of sources (I'm desperately trying to avoid a cooking metaphor here) to produce engaging thought. I liked him very much running through the ethical quandaries offered by a hotel breakfast buffet (he eats it backwards) and on the peculiar tyranny of the recipe.
At other times, though, he can be plodding. Baggini likes to set up debate with a soft controversialism: "At the moment, the commonest and laziest moral heuristic around food is that small, local independent stores are good, while chains are bad." OK, you think, I'll argue about that. But Baggini usually dodges a set-to. Instead, he sets out the familiar views from most of the sides and then delivers an equivocatory conclusion. At the end of the big-versus-small-stores section: "All we can do is strive to maintain our moral balance as best we can."
"Dare to know", he asks us, quoting Kant – but sometimes he doesn't seem to have dared very much himself. In a promising chapter about fear and love of technology in cooking, Baggini wanders off to sing an extended hymn to the Nespresso machine. If you don't know what that is then you're not a well-off foodie: it's the capsule coffee gadget that, thanks to pimping by George Clooney, has seduced every kitchen style-junkie, coffee snob and Heston. It reduces the art of making coffee to something less complex than toasting a Pop-Tart.
It doesn't matter if Baggini's blind taste-test proves that the best espresso comes delivered in Nespresso's proprietary individual aluminium pod, any more than that the best cola comes in a red and white tin. It remains a really stupid, wasteful and immoral way of delivering a drink, designed to maximise the already enormous manufacturer's profit margin on coffee beans.
Nestlé, the world's biggest coffee company, is the maker of Nespresso and its capsules. It made $12bn in profit last year, and, as Oxfam will tell you, has done much over the decades to keep the millions of people who grow coffee stuck in abject poverty. Where's the ethics, Dr Baggini?
As you can probably tell, I enjoyed that section. But generally, the arguments are not so inflaming. I think Baggini was writing in some fear of the Guardian's Steven Poole, whose hilarious savaging of self-regarding foodism in You Aren't What You Eat, published last year, he quotes more than once. Baggini appears to be nervous of being serious about food, as much as he's frightened about being too dense, or even philosophical, for the pop-philosophy/self-help shelves this book is aimed at. That leads him to be bland. "The proof of the pudding is, as always, in the eating" is not a phrase you like to see used without irony in any book, let alone one that features puddings. Sometimes he may be downright Discovery Channel: "As Aristotle first recognised back in ancient Greece…"
I suspect that Baggini may have been bullied into this easy-read stuff. The annoying didactic threat of the subtitle smacks of the marketing department's orders. In another time the book would have been more usefully titled "What we think about when we think about food…"
This is not a book for me, or for anyone who thinks being serious – and overserious – about food can be a lot of fun. Maybe it would be better to have lunch with Baggini, a long one of dishes replete with lore and metaphor. We wouldn't invite Wittgenstein, but we might have John Lanchester and James Hamilton-Paterson, both of whom have tackled food and intellectualism hilariously in novels. And Julian Barnes, whose Pedant in the Kitchen, recently republished, is the funniest book ever in which a large, wry brain approaches a stove and chopping board.
