Cooking, Eating, Thinking : Transformative Philosophies of Food

Philosophy has often been criticized for privileging the abstract; this volume attempts to remedy that situation. Focusing on one of the most concrete of human concerns, food, the editors argue for the existence of a philosophy of food. The collection provides various approaches to the subject matter, offering new readings of a number of texts—religious, philosophical, anthropological, culinary, poetic, and economic. Included are readings ranging from Plato's Phaedo and Verses of Sen-No-Rikyu to Peter Singer's "Becoming a Vegetarian" and Jean-François Revel's Culture and Cuisine. This reader will have particular appeal for philosophers working in social theory, feminist theory, and environmental ethics, and for those working on alternative approaches to such traditional subject areas as epistemology, aesthetics, and metaphysics.