DISCOURSE ABOUT FOOD, MIDDLEMEN AND METAPHORS

FOUCAULT ON GREEK, CHRISTIAN, POSTMODERN CONCEPTIONS OF FOOD


© June 2010 Mukesh Williams

In Use of Pleasure Foucault explores the overarching discourse on food, the body and pleasures as a function of subjectivity and argues that the Greeks were quite preoccupied with the process of eating and yet their ethics emphasized the mastery of the self over appetites, pleasures and passions. The ethical substance in the Greek episteme was aphrodisia or the “acts, gestures, and contacts that produce a certain form of pleasure.” Aphrodisia were forms of pleasure associated with eating, drinking and sex. Though they are natural they need to be moderated. However early Christianity began to see a dichotomy between the carnal and the spiritual. It started to deny the natural appetites. Most of the modern scientific discourse about food and health was created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries out of the Christian religious and philosophical preoccupation with gluttony, indulgence and excess. This food and health discourse entered the social organization of home, school and hospital emphasizing nutrition as moral in nature. Children are often told to eat healthy food and avoid junk food and chocolates. Obesity is therefore occasionally referred to as moral laxity or degradation.

MIDDLEMEN
We should do away with middlemen that may enter between philosophers and their readers. Middlemen often adulterate food and convert accident into cuisine.

NIETZSCHE ON WORDS AND ORIGINAL ENTITIES
Nietzsche argues that though we use words to describe “original entities” and celebrate metaphors in poetry and rhetoric there is no clear one-to-one correspondence between metaphors and things. He writes,
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873).