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A review by paulfrankh
The Virtues of the Table: How to Eat and Think by Julian Baggini
My experience with 'books about food' is nothing kore than a reading of Foer's 'Eating Animals' 3 and a half years ago, an experience that then prompted of a sort of, but not really change in my eating habits. It's a book I now want to revisit, but it's not the one I'm reviewing here.
This book has a pretty poor start, at least, that was my experience. I almost gave up on it after thirty pages as I didn't want to read a recipe book with some cod-philosophy unceremoniously stuffed between the cooking suggestions.
Thankfully, I persevered. This book does occasionally vere into the preachy territory of the man standing in the street with a megaphone telling you 'meat is murder' but Baggini makes a far more subtle argument than that. This book does what is says on the cover, in that it encourages you to look at how you eat, as well as what you eat.
Refreshingly it doesn't work too hard to convince you of one particular point of view, but at the same time it's not a complete white wash of the subject matter. Food is a tricky issue, we have to eat to survive but this doesn't mean we shouldn't enjoy the experience. Perhaps the most fascinating and original chapter is when the author draws a comparison between the appreciation of art and that of food.
It's not straightforward. Humans don't just feed, we eat. Similarly we don't just reproduce, but we have sex. We take pleasure in those things that other creatures do to survive and to further the existence of their species.
The advantages of this book are it's length (it's relatively short) and it's prose (easy to read, but without using pathetic metaphors). Unlike some cases, Baggini makes justified use of references to Kant, Derrida and Heidegger amongst others.
A good starting point if you want to take a closer look at something that is so ingrained in our daily routine, that we rarely take the time to think about abstractly.
Oh, and you can skip over the recipe ideas. I did and I still really enjoyed it.
This book has a pretty poor start, at least, that was my experience. I almost gave up on it after thirty pages as I didn't want to read a recipe book with some cod-philosophy unceremoniously stuffed between the cooking suggestions.
Thankfully, I persevered. This book does occasionally vere into the preachy territory of the man standing in the street with a megaphone telling you 'meat is murder' but Baggini makes a far more subtle argument than that. This book does what is says on the cover, in that it encourages you to look at how you eat, as well as what you eat.
Refreshingly it doesn't work too hard to convince you of one particular point of view, but at the same time it's not a complete white wash of the subject matter. Food is a tricky issue, we have to eat to survive but this doesn't mean we shouldn't enjoy the experience. Perhaps the most fascinating and original chapter is when the author draws a comparison between the appreciation of art and that of food.
It's not straightforward. Humans don't just feed, we eat. Similarly we don't just reproduce, but we have sex. We take pleasure in those things that other creatures do to survive and to further the existence of their species.
The advantages of this book are it's length (it's relatively short) and it's prose (easy to read, but without using pathetic metaphors). Unlike some cases, Baggini makes justified use of references to Kant, Derrida and Heidegger amongst others.
A good starting point if you want to take a closer look at something that is so ingrained in our daily routine, that we rarely take the time to think about abstractly.
Oh, and you can skip over the recipe ideas. I did and I still really enjoyed it.