Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Eatting
The action of eatting can be either complex or very simple. Everyone living thing has to do it in one form or another. I guess its what the indivdual makes it. Different people have different tastes. People all cook there food in different ways. Some people have to watch what they eat at all times to stay healthy and trim, but some can eat whatever they want whenever they want. Now the question is does it fit in to one of the catigories of philosophy, science, craft, or art. I would have to say that it is a craft becuase it is a repeated action that is made by all. We have already have been tought and figured out how to eat when we were young so the science has been done.
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It may be that a this stage in things -- and I'm sorry I had the wrong URL for your blog so didn't come to this until now -- you were under the impression that each human action would fall into one of the four modalities philosophy, art, craft, or science SOLELY... eating, like other general actions, must be interpreted as an interface of the four modalities.
Having said that, your observation that eating is craft because it is a repeated action is right on. You are also correct in observing that at least certain aspects of eating are learned early and therefore may not seem to have a science component.
BUT...
Observe a child learning to eat. The process involves a great deal of trial-and-error. It may not be immediately obvious whether a "food item" is "something to be eaten" or "something to be squished in the hand" or "something to be smeared in the hair" or "something to be tossed into the face of the person providing the food." My daughter, ever the scientist, tried all of these. At 12, she now has a better general notion of what food is all about. It is "something to be complained about".
This points to a philosophical observation of food. What is food for, after all? What makes pasta and marinara sauce "food" and witchity grubs "not food"? For traditional folks in certain parts of Australia, witchity grubs may be prime tucker (GOOD food),but for my daughter, anyway, insect larvae are NOT on the menu, roasted or not! But WHY is this so? It may not be my daughter's private, individual, unique philosophy that leads her to reject larvae as food, but it is nonetheless derived from philosophy in the respect of a consideration of what is acceptable and what is not.
It may not be too difficult to see how cooking might be an art form -- but what about eating? Well, the WAY we eat, as well as WHAT we eat, certainly is related to our self-expression. While eating may be a sort of performance art in which the act is quickly performed and then lost (no fair arguing for a photograph or video of eating, because in that case the art is not the eating so much as the recording of the event), it is nonetheless interpretable through the modality of art: eating can be an art form.
And, Larry Flynt at least would have us believe, so can be shitting. But maybe that is all part of the art form of eating.
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