Sex, Death, and Pineapple Candies

My orientation as a philosopher begins with food. If Freud viewed life through the lens of sex, I see life through the lens of eating. Two memories centered around food mark critical moments in my life. The first occurred when I was about three or four years old. I remember making chocolate chip cookies with my mother and hungrily licking the dough off the mixing paddle. The second memory took place when my father was dying of brain cancer, and we fed him pain medication hidden in spoonfuls of chocolate pudding. From a philosophical perspective, these pivotal food-related memories represent my initiation into pleasure and the onset of my struggle with the heartbreaking inevitability of what Heidegger calls being-toward-death. In this way, food offers us access to the deepest recesses of who we are, how we relate to each other and the environments in which we live. For me, the crucial thread that links food to questions of existence, identity, inter-relationality, and environmental responsibility is ethics. Ethics is the discipline that deals with notions of good and evil, moral duty, obligation, and how to live well. The ethics of eating spans from what we ingest to with whom we share our meals and how food is grown, harvested, raised, and prepared to broader geopolitical issues and the impact of our food systems on the planet. In the ethics of eating, we often face tangled configurations of conflicting choices. My philosophical practice focuses on how to navigate these complex ethical knots.I have always been drawn to art and see food-related art as a compelling site to explore difficult ethical issues. For me, art is a powerful modality to radically question, critique, and reimagine the ways in which we might live. Art liberates thinking by providing a free space to confront and challenge reality; it is a sensuous medium that offers experiential access to abstract theories. The discourse on food and art in the food studies community has primarily focused on aesthetic taste and the aesthetic value of food. However, less has been written on food-related art as it pertains to ethics.Food-related art, as I define it, ranges from the representation of food (think seventeenth-century Dutch still life paintings) to performance art (Rirkrit Tiravanija serving Pad Thai in the gallery) to artistically driven restaurants (Ferran Adrià’s elBulli). Gustatory art is intimately tied to ethics. From sixteenth-century depictions of Eve and the apple to contemporary works that deal with the technological future of food, food-related art (directly and indirectly) wrestles with ethical and moral considerations. One of the reasons food-related art is so intriguing, in terms of challenging ethical models and pushing us toward more liberatory thinking, is how it engages with complex, interconnected issues. I argue that food-related art is a generative locus for critiquing classical ethical frameworks and developing alternative, multi-dimensional ethical models. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s artwork “Untitled” (Placebo) (1991) utilizes eating to address the complex moral and ethical dimensions of homosexuality, the AIDS crisis, American politics, consumption, desire, and death. Unraveling this thorny ethical constellation exposes the shortcomings of the ethics of hospitality and underscores the need for a more radically open, flexible ethical model.Ethics as a discipline begins with Aristotle’s fourth-century treatise on what it means for human beings to flourish. Aristotle offers a semi-open-ended query on how to use reason to live well and achieve the highest good. What the highest good is remains open to interpretation. Since then, philosophers have proposed various models or conceptual frameworks to determine how best to live and exist with others. Scholars working at the junction of food and philosophy often consider hospitality the ideal ethical model for communal flourishing. There is hopefulness in the ideals of equality and reciprocity that pervades the notion of hospitality as host and guest are bound through mutual recognition and responsibility. Philosophers Raymond Boisvert and Lisa Heldke see the host-guest relationship as an effective model for guiding humans toward living meaningful lives and navigating complex choices. Hospitality emphasizes relationality and provides a framework to “face real, irreducible clusters of elements in tension” and resolve conflict with “thoughtful resolutions” (Boisvert and Heldke: 53, 65). Boisvert and Heldke do an excellent job of acknowledging complex ethical situations. Yet, one of the holes in the hospitality model is the question of who or what gets left out. In their focus on the home and the dinner table, scholars often skip over ethical relations that exceed the roles of host and guest, for example, who cooks, who cleans, and who is excluded from the table. The hospitality model also fails to address external forces, non-human entities, or ethical knots that transgress the roles of host and guest.In a recent piece for this publication, anthropologist David Sutton questioned the efficacy of hospitality in terms of its functionality outside the home. Sutton’s analysis of contemporary media on the hospitality industry discloses that restaurants are, in fact, not so hospitable, particularly in this post-pandemic environment where they reproduce “so many of the exploitations of our current world” (Sutton: 1). The concept of hospitality, especially in fine dining, is a well-practiced illusion; to admit to the illusion is part of a hard reckoning that “so many of our hopes of ethical consumerism” are difficult to sustain (Sutton). The notion of hospitality as an ideal ethical paradigm shows distinct limits regarding its inclusiveness and the ability to hold up to real-life social and economic pressures. To further a philosophical critique of hospitality, it is helpful to dig into “Untitled” (Placebo).“Untitled” (Placebo) is an artwork meant to be eaten. The work consists of 1,200 pounds of silver-wrapped, artificially flavored pineapple candies that form a glittering carpet commemorating the loss of Gonzalez-Torres’s partner Ross to AIDS and the lack (at the time) of a foreseeable cure (Storr). Since museumgoers are unaccustomed to eating art, guards encourage visitors to take a piece of candy. Eating the work creates a dialogue between desire and mortality and the complex historical and environmental contexts in which we exist. Savoring and sucking on the hard candy hints at the pleasures of oral sex and evokes the way AIDS slowly eats away at the body. “Untitled” (Placebo) has no host or guest. The artist is absent—Gonzalez-Torres passed away in 1996 from AIDS-related complications. The candies are not served; they must be picked up off the floor. In some sense, museum guards act as hosts, as they embolden visitors to eat the work, but they are also employees hired to enforce rules and explain the art.The word Placebo in the title refers to the fact that in early pharmaceutical trials for AIDS and HIV, most patients were given placebos instead of the actual drugs. The ethics here are frustratingly complex—for many of those with the disease, the clinical trials only rendered the illusion of hope. Eating the artwork is not an act of hospitality but a cannibalistic ritual of remembrance that calls up bedrooms, hospitals, closed-doored government offices, pharmaceutical boardrooms, and protests on the street. Activities and forces that trespass the ideals of hospitality.To taste the pineapple-flavored candy is to be surprised by its sweetness and horrified by decay, to become aware of a plurality of complex relations that reach beyond the roles of host and guest. “Untitled” (Placebo) offers no easy solutions and undermines any clear-cut relation of responsibility or mutual exchange. What the artwork offers is a meaningful site for philosophical reflection. Highlighting the trifecta of food, sex, and death reminds us of what lies underneath the veneer of hospitality—survival, desire, and fear. Dead lovers, false assurances, epidemics, and the queer ostracized body are subjects traditionally swept under the table. Recognizing what lies under and beyond the table stresses the need for a non-traditional ethical framework that can flexibly grapple with a plurality of complex dynamics, some of which are almost too difficult to bear.Defining an ethical framework that can flexibly address a plurality of complex dynamics is beyond the scope of this article. It is, however, worth mentioning that several convincing models for ethics come from speculative feminists such as Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers. These authors emphasize assessing the specifics of the situation and attending to the multiple stakeholders’ (human, non-human, political, or environmental) desires and needs. Many questions exist regarding how these non-traditional models relate to the issues Gonzalez-Torres raises. However, the critical takeaway is that analyzing food-related art, such as “Untitled” (Placebo), dares us to think beyond normative frames. “Untitled” (Placebo) forces a consideration of how consumption, transience, and communion challenge the idea of hospitality and signal toward other ways of wrestling with complex ethical knots.In his introduction to Ethics: The Essential Writings, Gordon Marino states, “[t]o live is to abide within the chilly coordinates of constant choice, choices about what to value, about how to live our lives” (Marino: ix). The pressing question is how to navigate these chilly coordinates of constant choice. In my daily practice, thinking through food, art, and philosophy is a relentless search for multiple ways to flourish despite living amid complex realities and impossible choices. Investigating food-related issues through art and philosophy affords a space to play with ideas, to play with reality, to play with creative possibilities—to come face to face with love, sex, death, and artificial-flavored candies and continue to be astounded at the joy and terror of life.