Philosophical Quotes on Food

Philosophy of food is an emerging branch in philosophy. Here is a list of quotes that are pertinent to it; if you happen to have additional suggestions, please do send them along! Quotes on Food Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.Ludwig Feuerbach: Man is what he eats.Immanuel Kant: As regards the agreeable, every one concedes that his judgment, which he bases on a private feeling, and in which he declares that an object pleases him, is restricted merely to himself personally. Thus he does not take it amiss if, when he says that Canary-wine is agreeable, another corrects the expression and reminds him that he ought to say: ‘It is agreeable to me’ [ †¦ ] With the agreeable, therefore, the axiom holds true: Everyone has his own taste (that of sense). The beautiful stands on a quite different footing.Plato: Socrates: Do you think that the philosopher ought to care about the pleasures – if they are to be called pleasures – of eating and drinking? – Certainly not, answered Simmias. – And what do you say of the pleasures of love – should he care about them? – By no means. – And will he think much of the other ways of indulging the body – for example, the acquisition of costly raiment, or sandals, or other adornments of the body? [†¦] What do you say? – I should say the true philosopher would despise them.Ludwig Feuerbach: This work, though it deals only with eating and drinking, which are regarded in the eyes of our supernaturalistic mock-culture as the lowest acts, is of the greatest philosophic significance and importance†¦ How former philosophers have broken their heads over the question of the bond between body and soul! Now we know, on scientific grounds, what the masses know from long experience, that eating and drinking hold together body and soul, that the searched-for bond is nutrition.Emmanuel Levinas: Of course we do not live in order to eat, but it is not really true to say that we eat in order to live; we eat because we are hungry. Desire has no further intentions behind it†¦ it is a good will.Hegel: Consequently, the sensuous aspect of art is related only to the two theoretical senses of sight and hearing, while smell, taste, and touch remain excluded.Virginia Woolf: One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.Mahatma Gandhi: There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.George Bernard Shaw: There is no love sincerer than the love of food.Wendell Berry: Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.Alain de Botton: Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance. Further Online Sources The Philosophy of Food Project website, collecting a list of useful online sources on the topic.The entry on Philosophy of Art at the Britannica Online Encyclopedia.The entry on the definition of art at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.The American Society for Aesthetics website, containing news and information on the topic.The British Society of Aesthetics website, which aims to promote study, research and discussion of the fine arts and related types of experience from a philosophical, psychological, sociological, historical, critical and educational standpoint.The British Journal of Aesthetics, one of the leading journals in the field.The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, one of the leading journals in the field.A collection of philosophers’ perspectives on the philosophy of art.