An Appetite for More Than Mere Sustenance

Eating as a window to our nature

Years ago, as a young mother, I committed to instilling liturgical rhythms and practices in how our family marked and prepared for holidays and Holy Days. Observe Advent, then celebrate Christmastide. Remember there are 40 days of Lent followed by 50 days of Easter. Should I keep Ember Days? Not required since 1969, the practice has seen a quiet resurgence, and possible restoration. The latter did not fully take.

There were several catalysts: marriage and motherhood, cultural retentions and rejections, aesthetic, and creative draws. I took inspiration from a flurry of blogs and their visually-rich culinary catechisms. I was given the unmerited grace to desire that my children become not just good - but holy. To not only be civilized (“Use the fork.” “Have a napkin.” “Wait until we all sit down.”) but to have gratitude, joy, restraint, and appreciation for the goods of creation, to grow in health and in virtue, to be formed in body and soul.

A few weeks ago the gift was returned to me by my son, home from college for the break.

“Mom, I think you really should read this book.”

I have so many others piled up here. But okay, this sounds urgent. Leon Kass.

“Absolutely, I’ll read it.”

I write this post with gratitude to my son, and to his philosophy professor for assigning The Hungry Soul this fall semester.

It is 30 years since this unique work was published. I cannot think of a more important book to read - to ponder - in the era of instant gratification - amid the tacit awareness that alongside abundance and the ever-increasing wonders and comforts of technology we are at once overfed and malnourished.

Kass brings his knowledge of bioethics, medicine, philosophy, the Torah and the Talmud, literature and history, to the question of what it means for humans to eat. For humans, and humans alone, eating is not only nourishment, it is the basis of civilization, a school of virtue, an expression of our dignity, and our connection to nature and the divine.

The chapters themselves emerge in an order that echoes the Days of Creation: from the first, which describes the human need to eat and the workings of metabolism and biology, to the sixth chapter, a treatment of eating as a means of sanctification bounded by Levitical law and Jewish religious practice that placing man at the pinnacle of Creation, under the care of the Creator.

The Hungry Soul is also an application of Aristotelian philosophy. In particular Kass draws on De Anima to offer an original explication of the relationship between matter and form. He achieves this by demonstrating the primacy of form over matter in the workings of metabolism. In animal metabolism, the organism itself, (form), remains whole, but the materials (matter) consumed do not. In eating, we do not become what we eat.

We consume, transform, and absorb matter and we are not perfectly efficient at it. That is not a defect in our biology. Kass asks us to consider that inanimate crystals grow by incorporation, without waste. Simple bacteria consume glucose nearly waste-free. Such “no-to-low waste” efficiency is not true of higher order (animate) animals. Why hasn’t evolution preferenced organisms that are better at recycling? Is it the Second Law of Thermodynamics at work? Or the fact that animals must expel toxins that would otherwise be poisonous?

Here Kass shows that materialist answers do not suffice nor provide deeper meaning to the “whys” of the natural world and our place in it.

“But a philosopher will wonder whether these necessities are not, paradoxically also good for the organism. For lack, experienced as desire, is the spur to all aspiration, to action and awareness, to having a life at all. Bodies as incorruptible as diamonds, or bodies lacking in nothing beyond themselves, would have no impulse, or orientation toward the world beyond their borders. Waste makes need, and need makes for everything higher than need. Here in the germ of hunger, is the origin of all the appetites of the hungry soul.” p. 27

To see eating through an Aristotelian lens moves us from deconstructing eating into a list of biochemical facts to a considering what it means to be alive. Eating is not, contra the strict materialist, ‘fueling the machine’. We eat for nourishment: to maintain, preserve, and restore living cells, to grow, and to heal the whole body. Metabolism itself illuminates the presence of a soul - a force that animates the body - and points to a telos for all living creatures

“Without any trace of conscious intention, in metabolism all organisms face forward in time and engage in self-directed purposive behavior aiming at a future goal. Even lowly metabolism, mindlessly conducted throughout the animal kingdom, is unintelligible save as a purposive, goal-directed activity.” p. 50

Is this why we immediately recognize as alien science fiction’s many dystopias in which dead-eyed automatons ingest nutritionally-adequate food facsimiles administered through drips, pills, and other technological subterfuges? Creepy. Cold. Sterile. It isn’t…human.

The ensuing chapters examine prohibitions against cannibalism and the practice of vegetarianism as contained in Greek myth (Cyclopses and Lotus Eaters) and the Biblical meaning of hospitality (Abraham and Lot). Kass continues with reflections on the rise of agriculture and the significance of our “discovery” of bread and wine as civilizational markers. What other animal is capable of the transformations and technologies necessary to turn wheat grain into loaves and to select and distill grapes into wine?

Over the centuries, eating was refined and transformed into dining, and gradually perfected into an elevated form capable of transmitting culture, teaching virtues, expressing talents and enriching friendships. Perhaps no better way to draw this out than in Kass’s beautiful interpretation of the 1987 film, Babette’s Feast.

It’s lamentable that we’ve abandoned even more of the habits and customs of civilized eating since 1994 in the name of efficiency and ease. There are base pleasures in grazing on leftovers in front of the TIVO, or slurping ramen at the kitchen island. And yet, I cannot imagine my grandmother ever doing this. Once these concessions to convenience become habits, the memory and even desire for something better is weakened, and eventually lost.

Kass is a scholar and not a scold. He writes with a true love his subject. May his book inspire a new generation of readers who are reaching for the intangible gifts to be found at a dining table set for others.

Abraham and the Three Angels, Jacopo Vignali, early 17th century, public domain via WikiMedia Commons