Meeting Food Halfway

When Michel Serres writes that there are two tongues (Serres 2016), he neglects to specify which one philosophy should use. Should it be the first—the one made of words, an insipid language capable of controlling and categorizing the universal variety of the world? Or the second—the one that engages with things to savor them, uncovering their mixed and delicious mystery? Both tongues, in their own way, serve as spaces for encounter. The first articulates a form of knowledge that quickly becomes collective, as evidenced by the dialogical roots of philosophy. The second, however, brings us into contact with the absence of a boundary separating us from the world we inhabit, especially when we eat and absorb external entities.The philosophy of food offers a unique space for understanding this communal dimension. Approaching food philosophically means exploring these encounters and experimenting with the idea that communality is already internal to the very experience that shapes philosophical discourse. By eating, producing, and transforming food, we inhabit the continuity between ourselves and the world around us. For this reason, food opens an essential space to reconnect with and further nurture the communal nature of philosophical practice, distancing philosophy from isolation or elitism, which risks marginalizing it in contemporary times.Philosophy of food is, in essence, also philosophy with food (Perullo 2020). When we eat, we break down the boundary that separates us, as humans, into distinct and independent entities. Through eating, we become exposed to a communal dimension, shaped by practices such as chewing, swallowing, cooking, transforming, and producing food. In all these practices, we remain open to encounters with an otherness that must be considered part of us if we are to remain alive. Philosophizing with food means thinking alongside a diverse and complex array of allies—elements that must be handled and ingested to advance and develop reflection. It is a philosophy “with a mouthful” that opens up to an unfinished, collaborative, and non-self-sufficient dimension of thinking, while focusing on the communal and performative components of philosophical practice.In an era when there is a pressing need to reposition ourselves within the world—both ontologically, as human beings, and epistemologically, as philos engaged in the everyday journey of knowledge—food (and eating in particular) suggests a valuable topology. It weaves together intermingling bodies, tacit and manifest knowledge, and individual and collective wisdom. To think about food and with food is to remain poised between the two tongues, doing philosophy “on the tip of the tongue.”Every encounter with food produces an interface, as Laura Tripaldi defines it: “a material region, a marginal area with its own mass and thickness, characterized by properties that make it radically different from the bodies whose encounter produces it” (Tripaldi 2022). The philosophy of food explores this interface that emerges in the mouth every time food enters it, extending far beyond the kitchen into all the cooking rituals and food production practices. In doing so, the reflection inevitably changes, mirroring the same unpredictability and instability of what it seeks to understand. Philosophy of food is itself part of that interface—an open, fluid space for reflection and discussion that benefits from collaboration, exchange, and the evolution shaped by multiple perspectives involved in the same literal and metaphorical meal. Just as food has its performative, collective, and practical roots, so does philosophy, which, when in contact with food, can reawaken these qualities. Reflecting on eating through eating becomes both a practical philosophy and a philosophical practice—one that does not resolve but inhabits the threshold between us and reality, reminding us that “we are part of that nature that we seek to understand” (Barad 2007).The philosophy of food, with food, is an experience akin to that of a funambulist: balancing external and internal elements, solid and fluid matters, units and multiplicities of intra-active elements, the first and second tongue. In Maxence Fermine’s short novel Snow (Fermine 2001), the relationship between a young Japanese haiku poet and his mentor is explored. In it, the master, Soseki, suggests that writing means becoming “funambulists of the word,” learning to follow the thin thread that unites language and the world. Similarly, many texts within the philosophy of food display an acrobatic tension in their language, capturing the struggle to articulate something that must also be relished—an apparent lack of precision that occasionally blossoms into “wild” clarity. Food intersects with many philosophical issues at play in contemporary debates, such as the value of the categories of “object” and “subject,” or the question connected to the active, living status of matter. In all these questions, the philosophy of food opens up spaces for discussions that are never purely theoretical because they are rooted in a web of performative actions that are collectively enacted and discussed.In this sense, the philosophy of food develops a poetics: it is difficult to find a stable word within the fluid topology that emerges from the second tongue. Every effort to think becomes an occasion to find a shared language to perform the task. This is a language that can be spoken from both tongues, reflecting the potentialities of both. Creation, recreation, and understanding become lines in a common knot. This inevitable element of un-rational, performative, and learning-by-doing practice required to think about and with food is precisely why this branch of philosophy has often been marginalized throughout the history of thought. Now, however, it is an open field of exploration.The philosophy of food makes visible the inseparable relationship between philosophy and everyday practices such as writing, rewriting, and narrating. We are always situated (Haraway 1988) in relation to our knowledge of food. “Taste is a kiss that our mouth gives itself through the intermediary of tasty foods.…I taste therefore I exist locally” (Serres 2016). One can only speak and write from this situatedness, which is inextricably collective and communal, even processual. Each philosophy of food corresponds to a search for our position in the world and with the world, alongside other eaters and organisms that constitute our meal—the question of that phantasmatic point where we define our human (Serres 2016) and vocational selves.In conclusion, we can hope that the philosophy of food will become a privileged space for the reappropriation of the communal dimension of philosophy: it is a meal that should be eaten together, cooked together, produced together. By virtue of the intrinsic relationality of any food-related practice, it is safe to assume that the very knowledge that is measured by these practices itself becomes a territory of shared and open encounter and confrontation. This is also thanks to the degree of involvement required by the philosophy of food, which by abolishing the distance between eater and eaten can help to shorten the ever too wide divide between experts and the ignorant, between philosophy as knowledge for the few and philosophy as practice for all.