Abstract
This chapter calls attention to the absence of philosophic study on the subject of food and explores its implications. The essay frames this absence in terms of a “bi-fold non-appearance of food” (a widespread mindlessness and ignorance toward the essential component of life that is food). The consequences of food’s bi-fold non-appearance can be viewed clearly in our increasingly distanced relationship with food, our rapid loss of cultural food knowledge, and companies purposefully concealing knowledge about their practices. The essay warns that the dire state of our relationship with food is a symptom of a much larger “non-appearance of nature,” where mindlessness has led to massive man-made ecological disasters.
The essay turns to the thirteenth century Zen master Eihei Dōgen for insight into how to remedy this situation. Dōgen was known for encouraging bottom-up philosophy—starting with small, often overlooked aspects of our environment, such as food, as the basis for philosophic study—as opposed to top-down philosophy, where theoretical discourse attempts to fit a philosophic model onto the world. The essay then discusses Dōgen’s writings on Zazen—a meditative practice that seeks to develop a state of Zen consciousness where the boundaries between subject and object are dissolved. Finding the Dao in food preparation can also attain this state of consciousness. The essay challenges us to reckon philosophically to see food, because, without it, one cannot see at all. We need to recognize our lack of seeing as the force by which our ecological destruction is propelled.
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Notes
- 1.
Unless custom prevails otherwise, I adhere to the East Asian practice of listing Asian authors by family name followed by their given name.
- 2.
For some instructive approaches to some aspects of this problem, see Nietzsche and Science, ed. Gregory Moore and Thomas H. Brobjer (2004). For a retrieval of the philosophical question of food, see Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, ed. Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke (1992) as well as Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature (Kass 1999).
- 3.
In his 1880 pamphlet, Religion and Art, Wagner blamed the biological compromise of Teutonic stock on a meat heavy diet. Only vegetables and fruits could reawaken our racial prowess. Bernard Förster’s Paraguayan racist utopia, Nueva Germania, which included his wife (who was Nietzsche’s sister), Elisabeth, was founded on similar racist vegetarian ideals.
- 4.
Zazen is literally the “front gate” to life and to all other possible practice.
- 5.
Joan Stambaugh: “I myself am not a substantial thing (svabhāva), nor is anything else in the world. This means that fundamentally there is no obstruction between me and anything else. I myself am being-time and so is everything else in the world. If I can stop my habit energy from substantializing everything, including and especially myself, I will no longer see things exclusively as dead, static objects and I can slip out of the subject-object structure of experiencing. Then, when I look at a mountain, I become the mountain and the mountain becomes me” (Stambaugh 1990, 110).
- 6.
Fukanzazengi: “For the practice of Zen, a quiet room is suitable …Do not think good, do not think bad” (Dōgen 2002, 3). What strives not to eradicate discriminatory thinking, but to get at its root or seat (hi-shiryo).
- 7.
I very occasionally and ever so slightly modify this translation, not in order to correct it, but to align its style with that of this essay. I also rely heavily upon Warner, 2001. I greatly benefited from the translation of Tenzo Kyōkun therein by Griffith Foulk.
- 8.
As Edward Brown, the celebrated tenzo of the San Francisco Zen Center, put it: “One shifts out of the mind-world of ‘What’s in it for me?’ into the world of mutual interdependence and interconnectedness. And this is not simply something to talk about but something to be done” (Dōgen 1996, xiv). Brown and the Tenzo Kyōkun are the focus of the beautiful film, How to Cook Your Life.
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Wirth, J.M. (2017). When Washing Rice, Know That the Water Is Your Own Life: An Essay on Dōgen in the Age of Fast Food. In: Kuperus, G., Oele, M. (eds) Ontologies of Nature. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 92. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66236-7_12
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