The eighteenth-century food philosopher J.A. Brillat-Savarin tells us in his wide-ranging masterwork The Physiology of Taste that dining is one of the great rewards of being human. First, the bad news: “Man is incontestably, among the sentient creatures who inhabit the globe, the one who endures most pain.” Perhaps, given our increasing sensitivity to non-human sentient creatures, one might dispute this, but let it stand for the moment to savor the next sentence. “Nature from the beginning has condemned him [man, that is] to misery by the nakedness of his skin, by the shape of his feet, and by that instinct for war and destruction which has always accompanied the human species wherever it has gone.” Fair enough. To compensate for the maladies to which the flesh of man is prey, we have the pleasures of the table, which our author develops over time, concluding early on that the art of dining together with other humans must have been the occasion for the birth of language. Why? “Either because meals were a constantly recurring necessity, or because the relaxation which accompanies and follows a feast leads naturally to confidence and loquacity.”
Diary: Jean McGarry, How to write about food
Diary: Jean McGarry, How to write about food
Diary: Jean McGarry, How to write about food
The eighteenth-century food philosopher J.A. Brillat-Savarin tells us in his wide-ranging masterwork The Physiology of Taste that dining is one of the great rewards of being human. First, the bad news: “Man is incontestably, among the sentient creatures who inhabit the globe, the one who endures most pain.” Perhaps, given our increasing sensitivity to non-human sentient creatures, one might dispute this, but let it stand for the moment to savor the next sentence. “Nature from the beginning has condemned him [man, that is] to misery by the nakedness of his skin, by the shape of his feet, and by that instinct for war and destruction which has always accompanied the human species wherever it has gone.” Fair enough. To compensate for the maladies to which the flesh of man is prey, we have the pleasures of the table, which our author develops over time, concluding early on that the art of dining together with other humans must have been the occasion for the birth of language. Why? “Either because meals were a constantly recurring necessity, or because the relaxation which accompanies and follows a feast leads naturally to confidence and loquacity.”