Food as a Gateway to the Transcendental

Allow me to make your mouth water and shock you with unexpected conclusions!

Here is a question you may have asked yourself upon occasion: why does food have to be so outrageously delicious!?

Maybe it was a steak you ate, grilled to perfection. Juices dripping with every bite, squelching filling your ears as you chew into it; just the right combination of stringiness and flavour. A hint of herbs, perhaps? Rosemary? Garlic? Thyme? Estragon? Oregano?

Or perhaps it was some truly divine ice cream on a hot summer day. Velvety and refreshingly cool, but not too cool. Smooth in your mouth as it melts into its flavours at just the right pace. Sweet and earthy pistachio? Decadent, rich chocolate? Cream-toned vanilla? Bitter-sweet cappuccino? Perhaps something more exotic?

Why, oh why does food have to be so absurdly delicious? It might seem like a silly question, the kind we ask ourselves in a volatile mixture of excitement and frustration.

Give me more! I’m so full! Its too expensive! I’m gaining weight! FoOoOD!

But it’s a question with deeply philosophical implications, for it speaks, fundamentally, to the question of what it is that makes us human. And this is a question that more or less every philosopher of note has attempted to answer one way or another. It is at the centre of questions of ethics; who has what moral status and why? Why is a human life worth more than that of a toad’s? What makes humans human?

Many prominent philosophers appeal to the soul as what sets humans apart, amongst them both Aristotle and Descartes. To our modern minds this might seem like a needlessly mystical way of characterising the difference between our pawed and furry brethren and ourselves, but what they refer to by the soul is our ability to reason and think. What makes us human rather than animals is that human reason and think, whereas animals do not, and as evidence for this they point to language.

Wittgenstein arrives at a similar conclusion; our language is what makes us human. As a writer, I have to say I am slightly partial to his view; that the human language is what defines the human world, and thus that other animals are not human in that they do not possess human language.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (5.6)

I think, however, that the thought of most philosophers on this subject could be summed up as follows: what makes humans human is that we are in touch with something transcendental. In a way, this is a tautology, to transcend simply means to go beyond, and the human nature is understood as precisely that which goes beyond the animal nature. We are animals, with needs and desires and so forth, yet we also possess the ability to choose, think and act contrary to our “animal” natures. We see this idea at play in the philosophies of thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Augustine, Nietzsche, Epictetus, Socrates, Aristotle, Mill, Locke, Heidegger… the list goes on.

“Humanity transcends itself.” — Blaise Pascal

Within the transcendent is where we find music, poetry, literature, art, virtue and vice, good and evil and… the undeniable deliciousness of hamburgers.

Soft and sweet freshly baked buns, meat that gives in all the right ways, crispy lettuce leaves, melted cheddar, pickles and a sauce that complements it all beautifully… just mmm.

No other animal prepares their food the same way we do, not only for utility, but for enjoyment, and this simple fact makes food a potentially transcendental enterprise. This elevates food from the earthliness of mere survival to an experience of something beautiful or hideous, something Good, or Evil; something divine. As a transcendental experience, delicious foods attain to that same power as music and art, to drag us momentarily out of the stupor of mundanity and belay the nagging voices of our lurking existential anxiety.

This is true not only in some vague, experiential sense, but literally. Unlike animals, we are not content to go on eating the same things over and over, and though we can do that, it contributes to the stagnation of our cognitive abilities. We don’t simply enjoy a variety of things; we have a taste for variety. Seeking out new experiences contributes to maintaining neuronal plasticity and the process of neurogenesis. That means, seeking out and eating delicious foods (within reason, please) protects us from neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia and enhances our capacity for learning.

All of that aside, a delicious meal is an excellent remedy for an average day.