Embodiment and Eating

This essay explores the way in which a phenomenological theory of embodiment can contribute to food philosophy in examining the act of eating as a complex activity linked to our basic bodily functions and to the expression of our belonging to a tradition. More precisely, the phenomenology of the body can be considered a paradigm for broadening the analysis of eating to involve a wide spectrum of food-related issues. The body is ground zero, orienting all our experiences. These include eating, feeling satisfied, or being disgusted by food. Contrary to other animals, eating is not for us an automatic response to hunger but is always inscribed in socio-cultural contexts. Eating stands at the intersection of the biological necessity to survive and the ethical possibility to choose food according to individual principles and commitments of human societies. In what follows, I will articulate two concerns related to the embodied nature of eating: the problem of food perception and that of eating practices. My analysis will be developed with reference to three theories of embodiment: Merleau-Ponty’s study of embodied perception, Bourdieu’s conception of embodied habitus, and Simmel’s understanding of the interaction between the body and social patterns. The choice of these authors is significant as long as it allows us to apply the paradigm of embodiment to the analysis of the complexities of food intake through the combination of reflections on the corporeal existence and the incarnated subject, cultural and practice theory, and sociology of taste and consumption. Yet, these authors share many similar interests and their domains intersect and influence each other. In conclusion, eating will be understood as a multisensory individual and collective experience as well as a personal and social practice.Merleau-Ponty writes: “there is always a duality which reappears on one level or another: hunger or thirst prevents thought or feelings.” (Merleau-Ponty 1965: 210) In his view, human beings are not passive spectators of the world, and their actions are not limited to the linear mechanism of stimulus-response. Rather, human beings are actively embedded in the world as offering things to be perceived and evaluated. He describes the perceptual experience not as a disinterested perspective upon the things in the world, but in terms of a bodily affective and effective engagement with it. Focusing his attention on sight and touch, Merleau-Ponty argues that human beings can have synesthetic perceptions since senses are united in one body. Thus, synesthesia and synesthetic metaphors such as those concerning food—“sharp cheese” or “robust wine”—are grounded on the perception of the world as unified by means of the body. It is through language that we can split immediate experience into perceptions corresponding to sensory domains. As he puts it, “‘hard’ produces a sort of stiffening of the back and neck, and only in a secondary way does it project itself into the visual or auditory field and assume the appearance of a sign or a word. Before becoming the indication of a concept it is first of all an event which grips my body.” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 273) To explain multisensory unity, Merleau-Ponty uses the example of a lemon’s sourness. As he observes, “honey is a particular way the world has of acting on me and my body…its various attributes do not simply stand side by side but are identical insofar as they all reveal the same way of being or behaving on the part of honey. The unity of the object does not lie behind its qualities, but is reaffirmed by each one of them.” (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 62) Our relation with food depends not only on objective properties (size, color, shape, etc.) of sensed things, but also on subjective conditions such as desires and beliefs. As such, perceptions have an affective dimension in that they are linked to the perceiver’s claims about things (edible, appetizing, reachable, dangerous, etc.) as developed on the basis of the capacity to interact with them, to be attracted or repelled. How to explain the existence of different claims? A phenomenology of embodied perception can find a meaningful extension in the socio-phenomenological analysis of life’s cultural and social structures in relation to the act of eating.Bourdieu is influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s reflections about the primacy of the pre-reflexive and corporeal relationship with the world. However, Bourdieu criticizes the phenomenological tradition for not having given sufficient attention to the internalization of socio-cultural conditions, failing to provide an adequate account of self-consciousness. Bourdieu is one of the first sociologists to have used the concept of taste to discuss how social positions influence human beings’ preferences toward objects, including tastes in food. As he argues, “the elaborated taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the elementary taste for the flavors of food” (Bourdieu 1984: 1). Preferences relate to what Bourdieu calls the habitus of different social classes. He defines habitus as a system of dispositions for the generation of practices. Habitus is, then, a learned behavior and “behavioral dispositions are collectively synchronized and attuned to one another by means of the body” (Csordas 1990: 1). For example, a bourgeois habitus can refer to the way someone learns to incorporate norms by displaying the corresponding body postures or manners. Hence, the body is the mode through which tradition is learned and put into practice. Bourdieu’s discussion of habitus incorporates a detailed analysis of class-based preference for food. Eating desires are constitutive of habitus as involving socio-symbolic structures, societal discourses, and lifeworld experiences. Dealing with the balance between economic and cultural capital, food preferences are the manifestation of a system that structures class-based consumption. As such, eating is an experience through which human beings configure their individual and collective identities. Bourdieu argues that the dominant classes’ taste is marked by exclusivity, whereas for highly educated people, taste is inclined toward ascetic rather than conspicuous consumption. Bourdieu acknowledges that eating habits are inseparable from the “styles of preparation and cooking” (Lupton 1996: 96). He also adds: “tastes in food also depend on the idea each class has of the body and of the effects of food on the body, that is, on its strength, health and beauty” (Bourdieu 1984: 190). Bourdieu’s analysis of eating is grounded on a conception of the body as the bearer of social meanings. As he writes: “the body is in the social world but the social world is in the body” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 20). In short, eating is not only an individual multisensory experience, but it consists of a material and a symbolic activity inscribed onto our body as situated and participating in social roles and world cultures.Shared identities can be forged through commensality, that is by means of experiences of eating together at the same table. Eating is experienced through individual and commensal practices. Embedded in socio-cultural contexts, commensality is one of the most important forms of human sociality and it is often associated to religious, ritualistic, and sacrificial aspects. In his 1910 article The Sociology of the Meal, Simmel focuses on everyday commensalism, namely he argues that commensality does not only refer to ceremonial occasions, formal feasts, and festivals but also to the sharing of the common mundane meal. Simmel’s insights about the meal lead him to discuss how eating has been civilized through the rules set for eating, the use of pots, plates, cutlery, and the adequate decoration of the dining room. He explains that eating as a selfish act is transformed through the experience of sharing into a social experience. The meal is, then, the moment in which the individual necessity and the social aspect of eating are bound together. Daily experiences of commensality can enable both social inclusion and exclusion. When we cook or eat together, we do not just share our knowledge of recipes or a moment of our time. Through the preparation and the consumption of food we are committed to a setting where relationships among the participants can be enriched or threatened. Commensality as the sharing of spaces, practices, and portions is an embodied experience. Specifically, when cooking and eating together, we use “our bodies in very intimate, sensual, vulnerable ways—sharing knowledge, balancing power, and in turn transitioning from strangers to friends” (Vanderslice 2017: 40). In Simmel’s perspective, the fact that the meal has a social dimension means that it is a place for emotional and symbolic belonging. To feed our body implies at once to nourish the affective life of the mind.