Editorial Letter
Not long after the publication of this issue, philosophers (yours truly among them) will acknowledge, and perhaps even celebrate, Immanuel Kant’s 300th birthday on April 22, 2024. While a bit premature, this editorial letter marks the occasion by recognizing one of Kant’s contributions to the discipline of food studies beyond his well-known works on moral philosophy and the aesthetics of taste. In his later years, Kant was also an accomplished host and regularly held dinner parties—or perhaps more accurately, dinner conversations—notable for their lively discussion and modest formality: guests were expected to serve themselves and wine was readily available on the table. As Thomas de Quincey recounts, Kant’s light touch as a host mirrored his intellectual restraint—he would neither steer the conversation toward his own theories nor harbor disdain for those who disagreed with his point of view (de Quincey 2009: 7–8). For the host, the value of the evening’s details would be measured in light of the evening’s larger goal.
As one might imagine given Kant’s notoriously regimented life, his approach to every aspect of the dinner was rather methodical (which he outlines in a brief section of the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View). His recommendations—a philosopher’s list of hosting dos and don’ts—appear at the end of his analysis of the faculty of desire, where he addresses the tension between the human inclination to pleasure and the human inclination to virtue—or, to phrase it in a decidedly gastronomical register—whether what is good to eat can partake in and even be “the good.” For Kant, the purpose of a dinner party was not simply to feed the body or provide entertainment but for the pleasure of food and drink to encourage and support an evening of edifying conversation. Such exchanges, while not the moral good per se, nonetheless approximate the highest human good and thus constitute “a dress that properly clothes virtue” (Kant 1996: 191).
The rules for the evening’s conversation were rather straightforward: choose topics of interest to everyone and allow all to participate; keep the conversation flowing; do not change the topic of conversation unnecessarily; avoid being dogmatic; allow mutual respect and good faith to prevail. Kant notes that the guests’ enjoyment should persist even as they later reflect on the evening: “if the mind cannot find a connecting thread, it feels confused and realizes with displeasure that it has not progressed in matters of culture” (Kant 1996: 190). The evening is a success, in other terms, when reason guides the conversation and unifies the diverse contributions of the guests. The host establishes the conditions required for a good conversation, but the participants produce its coherent outcome and meaning.
Kant’s somewhat quaint vision of a dinner party—we can weigh its merits against competing models in Plato’s Symposium or Dante’s Convivium—suffers from many of his well-documented philosophical and cultural prejudices. Nonetheless, his thoughts on dinner parties are more than an interesting footnote to his renowned critical philosophy and highlight its central theme and relevance for everyday life: reason requires limits. In the face of life’s diverse and often chaotic experiences, reason provides unity, coherence, and meaning; left unchecked, however, reason can also transgress its proper bounds, become dogmatic, and lead to valid (but unverifiable) assertions of truth. Kant’s dinner party models how reason should guide but also limit our judgments, particularly when diverse (and potentially incommensurable) perspectives resist a coherent unity, or when a lack of evidence feeds (rather than constrains) reason’s ability to infer and speculate. The productive conversation that “properly clothes virtue” should, in a manner of speaking, bear the marks of its seamstress, reveal its composition, and make its dimensions available for alteration.
A host’s duties are certainly more complex and demanding today than Kant might have imagined or desired (he famously never left the city of Ko¨nigsberg and only ever entertained small groups of educated men). Nonetheless, Kant’s dinner party remains relevant. His critical approach suggests that the tension between pleasure and virtue, along with the dinner party that provides the model for its resolution, require a reinterpretation sensitive to the changing material and social realities that confront the host. In the broadest sense, our shared coexistence on a shrinking planet requires a host willing to pose the most fundamental questions: What should we eat? Who should sit at the table? At what cost (physical, social, moral) should we partake in this pleasure? More importantly, the host should recognize that the topics used to frame the discourse are themselves constructs of our embodied and inherited reasoning— concepts shaped by experience while simultaneously providing access to it. The essays gathered and arranged in this issue reflect my attempt to frame the conversation around three such concepts.
Authenti-cities
A city’s identity seems to be always underway—an ongoing interpretation of the social and material forces that constitute its authentic character. However, this character exists primarily through its representations: the values expressed by its residents and their way of life, but perhaps even more so in the value that others seek to extract from it as producers and consumers. Natasha Bernstein Bunzl begins our conversation with an ethnographic study of Shuk, an Israeli restaurant in the heart of London. Bunzl explores how the restaurant produces representations of “modern Jerusalem cuisine”: dishes and practices that construct, but also silence, narratives about the social and political realities of the region. Despite the apolitical intentions of the restaurant’s creators and employees, their performance of a contested cuisine reveals its complex political and social reality. Such performances are not, however, confined to a curated restaurant space. Pooja Kalita examines changing notions of authenticity in the preparation and sale of one of Assam’s emblematic foods: pithas. Kalita’s fieldwork ranges across various modes of pitha production and performance—from vendors on the streets of Guwahati to highly commercialized and industrialized operations serving the broader region. Across this spectrum of contexts, it is bishakh—trust—that not only assures a quality product for consumers but re-interprets gender roles within the broader imaginary of authentic pitha production. Anna Greenspan’s photo essay chronicles Shanghai’s unique challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. In her account of the days before and during lockdown, notions of (its) authentic city life suffer the unique challenges that urban spaces create during a pandemic—ones amplified and distorted through the particularities of Shanghai’s geopolitical situation but never exempt from the more persistent reality that for and within cities “joy is always imperiled.”
Sustain-abilities
Perhaps pleasure should be included among the planet’s precarious resources when the conversation turns to sustainability. Sophie Wennerscheid proposes a novel interpretation and application of one of food literature’s most iconic dinner parties— Karen Blixen’s “Babette’s Feast.” Wennerscheid’s analysis rethinks culinary pleasure from the perspective of sustainability rather than extravagance or abundance—not to condemn it as the Puritan context of the story might suggest, but to find new forms of enjoyment within a more coherent and harmonious approach to the culinary arts. Her study concludes with a workshop designed to explore this narrative and multisensorial vision for sustainability, an approach that stands in stark contrast to a sustainable future achieved through advances in technology. Hallam Stevens, however, considers the more scientific approach to sustainability and reflects on ethical and existential repercussions of a “monstrous” meatball cultured from the genetic material of an extinct wooly mammoth. This technological resurrection unearths something coeval with our own origins as a species—namely, the question of whether achieving a sustainable good requires a transformation of technology or simply of behavior. Such transformations are not so distinct, however, when new products leverage their material and perceptual authenticity. This is the context for Brian Silverstein’s essay on “The Re-Making of Turkish Olive Oil.” More than simply an exploration of Turkey’s entrance into the crowded market for high-quality olive oil, the author traces how shifts in ownership, marketing, and sensory perception enact a “quality turn” in Turkish olive oil production that aims for economic and environmental sustainability.
Commemo-rations
As the conversation nears its end, sweeter fare encourages reflection and the construction of lasting memories. In “Sacred Leftovers: Hosting and Eating after the Ancestors,” Indira Arumugam illustrates how food offerings for departed loved ones bind the sacred and the profane through narratives, images, and acts of care— thoughtfully prepared dishes that renew the bonds of family and culture by invoking origins and sustaining memories. For Jason A. Reuscher, discovering the origins of swarn’s tangled history becomes an exercise in lost cultural and etymological knowledge. Personal memories converse with the broader narrative of the German culinary diaspora to reconstruct the dish’s history and provide renewed access to a lost past. Sandra Trujillo’s bittersweet reflection memorializes her father through “Mr. De la Rosa’s Agua de Jamaica.” As with all recipes, this one commemorates the past by reproducing its material inspiration and sustaining those committed to its future.
These essays encourage and model a conversation that achieves a certain degree of coherence while remaining transparent about the operations and effects of their critical practice. The guiding threads of authenticity, sustainability, and memory do not lead us back to a lost origin or an elusive essence but instead reveal their purposeful interweaving as conceptual tools for analysis and reflection. Each author’s gesture—respectful and yet critical of these issues’ complexities—contributes to a coherent and meaningful conversation about how and why eating should be more than sustenance, often pleasure, and ideally something good.
—Robert T. Valgenti, for the Gastronomica Editorial Collective, Lebanon, PA,
December 2023
References
de Quincey, Thomas. 2009. “Thomas de Quincey: ‘The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,’ 1827.” Le
Télémaque 36.2: 7-8.
Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. by V. L. Dowdell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.