For the politics and politesse of dietary constraints and the guest/host relationship, debate is probably too strong a word, but it is certainly a fraught issue on both sides of which I have found myself at different times in my life. I have spoken to many people—lapsed, lapsing, and prolapsed vegans and vegetarians—who explained that they did not want, for their hosts’ sakes, to find themselves in situations where they could not eat what was put before them. This is laudable as a matter of courtesy, but also as a recognition of the essential role of food as a social coherent,1 and of the importance for many people of being able to provide for the nourishment, and share in the nourishment, of another. Breaking bread together, and all that.
This is not a one-way street. The egalitarianism implied by sharing food—the recognition that, fundamentally, we are all united by our mortality, our need to pause, to rest, to eat—suggests a willingness to meet one’s guest halfway, as it were. Food is the bridge, and it is upon that bridge we meet, held aloft however precariously over the chasm of difference. I refrain from using the language of duty or obligation on either party’s part, because that is not what I’m trying to get at. It is, in fact, exactly what I am trying to get away from. When hosting, one wants to have one’s guest feel comfortable, safe, and (potentially) at home. This need not follow from an ethical imperative, but arises out of co-feeling, of compassion. Thus, to place before someone a food with which they are uncomfortable, or which they cannot eat, for political or constitutional reasons, is to interrupt that circuit of compassion and mutuality. To aver in an authoritative tone that one should “eat what is put before them” is to succumb to the stridency of the wounded ego, and become again the Master of the House, at whose board the philia of the neighbour is at pains to survive.
I recently heard a pastry chef from a famed NYC avant-garde restaurant reflect on the tensions between virtuoso celebrity restaurateuring and what somebody (not me) might call an “ethics of care” in cooking:
If a friend of mine was coming over for Thanksgiving and brought a guest I didn’t know, and that guest ended up being a vegan or disliking turkey or having an issue, as much as that’s inconvenient to me, or goes against what I had planned, you’re in my home and you’re uncomfortable, and I’m going to figure out a way to make you happy. You know, I feel like that has to kind of be the starting point. Otherwise, a lot of people lose why they started cooking in the first place… I made Jell-O for my mom when I was six and it made her cry; that was the starting point. It’s funny how far you can go and how that can get lost, and I think it’s important not to lose it.2
Pride, then, is something that should be left at the threshold even in one’s own home, to emerge again in concert at the table, from the satisfaction of the host to have provided for the happiness and satiety of one, and of the honour of the guest to have dined at the table of the other. What pride we arrive at should thus be born of the recognition of the pleasure of good company, of being together.
That said, are we expected to honour the whims, the fickle prejudices, whatever provincialisms our guests carry with them? Of course not. Or, you know, maybe? Just as a guest—vegan, celiac, mycophobe—must respect what is at stake in their refusal to eat, so too must those who take wild offence at what they see as a vegan’s fundamental ingratitude re-examine what they are presupposing the table represents. The claim that such ethical conceits as vegetarianism or veganism should acquiesce to the social function and decorum of the table is not far from the insistence upon unity and uniformity that is so essential and yet so dangerous in the formation and performance of the nation or, equally, of the nationalist struggle. It is indeed the crisis of the Other that lends such tension to the act of eating together, itself a performance, presumption, and production of commonality. The question of how much Otherness can be accommodated before the circuit of compassion breaks down is problematic as much for the meal as for the nation, the movement, the community. It is this sharing that is supposed to both transcend and align each of us in our indissoluble difference, and is simultaneously jeopardized by that same difference.
This is a conceptual analogy, and I do not want to stray too far from dinner itself, for it is precisely the difference between dinner and nation that I am trying to elucidate here, even if one remains a flashpoint for the other, as controversies over halal school lunch options in France, England, Canada, and the United States have recently demonstrated. Importantly, what the nation cannot rely on—affect, compassion, and good humour—is precisely in what spirit dinner must be assembled.3 It is a mistake to couch the work of the host and the guest in the language of duty and obligation, as is often done. Rather, it is essential that such work remain beyond or before the Law, which is not to say pre- or a-political, but on a terrain where the political, as a negotiation of love and trust and the basic necessities of living together, remains in process. If we seek to codify such interaction, we risk falling back into the labyrinth of manners and affectations that suborn the vital political into vacuous politicking. So I guess what I’m saying is Hannah Arendt can take her polis as space of freedom only for those freed of need or the thought of need and, you know, mourn it.4
1 I am fully aware that coherent is not a noun, but can’t it be? A “coherent” as that which imparts/participates in coherence? That which, as a depressant depresses, and an adulterant adulterates, coheres? I think it is a successful nominalization.
2 WD-50’s Alex Stupak in conversation with Adam Gopnik for the New Yorker podcast. Another point of interest from the interview is when Stupak makes his appeal for the term “technoemotional cooking,” in lieu of “molecular gastronomy” or “modernist cuisine.” Although still just as unpleasant to say or read, technoemotional cooking—along similar lines to the previous discussion of Pomiane and technical precision as a dimension of love—at least attempts to counter the impressions of coldness, calculation, and heartless abstraction that may be evoked by the terms. Much of the anxiety and incredulity of the pedestrian response to molecular gastronomy seem to hinge on the denaturing of the food, but I have found a lot of the big “molecular” cooks tend to talk a lot about using high technique as a way of getting playful with the emotional associations we have with food (Adrià in El Bulli: Cooking in Process, for example), even evincing a sort of nostalgic romanticism very much in line with the friands of Pomiane’s childhood.
3 Hence the notion of law justified by making up for the moral deficit of its subjects, if you buy that kind of thing.
4 This may seem an oblique reference, coming seemingly out of nowhere. Even I, upon rereading this in manuscript form, had to pause and ask, “What did I mean by that?” So, doing you and me both a favour, what I am referring to here is Arendt’s desire, expressed in The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958), to recuperate a model of Athenian democracy as part of her critique of modern political life. Accordingly freedom, or philosophy, or truly political thought and action, can only exist in the space of polis or public space. The polis is defined in opposition to the oikos – the private sphere, the space of the home, of animal necessity and the provision for those needs, indeed the space of social reproduction. Freedom must be freedom from need. Now, obviously Arendt’s analysis goes well beyond some reaffirmation of the separation of public/private in the modern sense, but I still think this is a problematic place to start, and that perhaps there is a conception of politics and even of freedom that proceeds from or within the realm of need and nourishment, rather than being predicated only upon its satisfaction. So that’s what I meant. Leave no quip unfootnoted!