Review: Annemarie Mol, ‘Eating in Theory’
Review of Annemarie Mol’s Eating in Theory (Duke University Press, 2021), 208 pages
Abstract
Eating in Theory is an attempt to re-orient our understandings of the philosophical quandaries of being, knowing, doing, and relating by drawing cues from the activity of eating. Anchoring her perspective in the body rather than the Cartesian mind, Mol deploys an empirical philosophy that draws ideas from real-world examples and privileges the relational core of human existence. Combining socio-materialism, social philosophy, and physical anthropology, Mol launches the reader into a theoretical realm that is a style of speaking and responding, rather than a hierarchy of calcified propositions.
Reviewed by Robert Beauregard
As a scholar, Annemarie Mol is more contrarian than most. The normal science to which Thomas Kuhn (1962) pointed, a science that strives to refine, on its own terms, the findings which others have painstakingly produced, is not to her taste. Rather, her approach in this book and in her earlier The Body Multiple (2002) is to question the presumptions on which others have based their investigations. What did Rene Descartes have to presume, she asks here, in order to announce ‘cogito ergo sum’? What conditions of possibility had to exist for him to ground being in the mind and not, say, the body? And, what would being look like if we started not from seeing and hearing, the senses associate with thinking, but from taste or smell? What about eating? Manduco ergo sum?
In Eating in Theory, Mol re-considers how we understand the four, philosophical quandaries of being, knowing, doing, and relating. She does so by theorizing from the perspective of the body rather than of the mind. Specifically, she argues, we need to “stop celebrating ‘the human’s’ cognitive reflections about the world and take our cues instead from human metabolic engagement with the world” (3). Eating is her preferred bodily function and central to her argument is the necessity of thinking relationally.
Her adversaries are Hannah Arendt and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although an admirer of both, she criticizes them for failing to break from the hierarchy that sets seeing and listening on top (touch is less acknowledged – see, though, Young, 1990:193-196) and taste and smell on the bottom, thereby fixing their philosophical and theoretical relevance. Her specific contention with Arendt stems from the distinction Arendt makes among labor (i.e., tasks such as cooking required to keep humans alive), work (i.e., the making of things), and action (i.e., inserting ourselves in the world through word and deed) (Arendt, 1958). What bothers Mol is that Arendt privileges action over labor. This further privileges the mind over the body and humans over the Nature without which labor cannot occur. Arendt also claims that action has a special relation to ‘being together,’ thus devaluing the relationality that Mol believes applies to labor. This is particularly concerning to Mol since it dismisses from philosophical importance the humanity of labor; i.e., its performance mostly by women, slaves, indentured servants, and low-wage workers. A socio-materialist, Mol views labor as essential for survival and thus where philosophical investigations should begin. As for Merleau-Ponty, he earns praise for taking thought out of the transcendental realm and situating it in the embodied human that experiences a three-dimensional, material world. However, praise is lost when he elevates sight, hearing, and touch over taste and smell, effectively ignoring the body’s metabolism. Having rightly rejected hierarchy along one dimension, he reinserted it along another. For Mol, this just will not do.
To investigate what it would mean to philosophize from eating rather than thinking, Mol again unleashes her contrarian self. She rejects the intellectual division between empirical facts residing in the world (as with the natural and social sciences) and meaning residing in the mind (pursued in the humanities and, particularly, philosophy). She prefers an empirical philosophy that dispenses with the fact-value dichotomy and its materialist-idealist, objective-subjective correlates. Her empirical philosophy is derived, in part, from Ludwig Wittgenstein who discredited the philosophical precept that any serious intellectual discussion has to begin with defining one’s concepts. For Wittgenstein, Mol, and most people, fuzzy concepts and ambiguity are perfectly reasonable ways to proceed and hardly interfere with how life is managed. Conceptual inconsistency and murky understandings do not mean that “things necessarily fall apart in practice” (17). This shift from philosophical to ordinary language combined with her socio-materialism licenses Mol to search not for truths but for exemplary situations—empirical realities--that illuminate our understandings of what have been considered philosophical questions. This is what empirical philosophy does. She also uses the term philosophical anthropology which is a more appropriate here given the sources of her examples. However, she complains that philosophical anthropology has “downgraded physical labor and elevated humans above other creatures” (20).
Consequently, Mol draws on both her personal experiences and social science (mostly anthropological) research to re-imagine being, knowing, doing, and relating. We read of clinical approaches to the inability to swallow, the food choices available in a facility for people with dementia, the flow of human waste through water treatment facilities, the use of self-reporting score cards to encourage children to eat vegetables, the tasks and ingredients involved in making a frittata, cultural disinclinations to eat certain foods (e.g., a mincemeat sauce of pork and mealworm served on spaghetti), the problematic labor consequences of free-trade coffee, and more about Mol’s bowels than the average reader might prefer to know.
To begin, her investigation of being draws on a body that “overflows into her surroundings” (43). Eating connects the body to numerous other humans and non-humans and simultaneously requires and instigates a host of bodily processes involving digestion and expulsion, Being does not dissolve in a metaphysical realm. It is not of the mind and transcendent. Instead, it is bodily, local, relational (i.e., thriving on “the energy of others” (142)), and immanent. We know ourselves because of our bodies and we know our bodies because we eat. She makes being (and thinking) a “fleshy affair” (51). (Sexual activity, not discussed, is another bodily function that situates being.
As for knowing, she reminds us how eating brings us into cultural engagement with the world rather than passively apprehending it. Eating “increases a person’s perceptive skills but also her appreciative propensities” (67). To eat in a conscious way, to taste and savor food, to treat it as not just nutritional (and necessary) but as a social occasion and even a cultural signifier, is to subconsciously develop a greater sensitivity to one’s surroundings, to others, and to differences. Eating and knowing are transformative. Because she rejects the monopolization of the normative by philosophy, the normative is not, cannot be, and should not be separate from the empirical. Knowing is inclusive and tolerant, not exclusionary and intolerant, and deeply normative.
Regarding doing, the third of her four quandaries, she brings socio-materiality further into the foreground. Eating, she points out, reminds us that doing is distributed across various actors, a key understanding of actor-network theory (Latour, 2004). When we eat, our eating requires our internal organs to function appropriately, our metabolism to activate, our bowels (later) to perform, not to mention our nose to warn us of food gone bad or to entice us to partake. Eating is also distributed across activities such as shopping, toting the food home, putting it away in cupboards, prepping for cooking, serving, commenting on it to our eating companions. All of these things and activities are integral to the act of eating. Mol’s doing is a rejection of the autonomous self. One acts only through willful choice. Choice, though, often involves harm and eating calls for an ethics that situates worth in a doing that is “caring, self-reflective, curious, attentive, adaptive. And tenacious” (101).
These observations flow into how Mol connects eating to relating, a fourth philosophical quandary and one essential to how she conceptualizes being, knowing, and doing. Here, she abandons human exceptionalism and narrows the focus to the animals, birds, and plants that we eat, thereby departing from a human-to-human conception of relating. Additionally, her understanding of relating dispenses with its basis in “sharing a commonality” (116) and searching for and privileging similarity. Relating is better understood as “negotiating a difference” (116). This allows her to sidestep the fraught issue of what we have in common with animals (Rees and Sleigh, 2020). To this extent, she acknowledges that eating necessitates the death of fish and birds and animals along with the uprooting of plants and that what we eat deprives other fish, birds, and animals of their food. Eating is a violent intervention in the food chain, another hierarchy of dubious utility. For us to eat, we must disrupt Nature. But for us to continue eating, we must care for it. Eating is an asymmetrical relationship (some eat, others are eaten) and fraught with ethical dilemmas.
The normative qualities associated with being, knowing, doing, and relating involve a political stance that favors diversity, tolerance, community, and compassion for strangers and the weak. These are all values of a liberal humanism. Yet, she describes this project as “seeking to escape the arrogance of humanism” (126). What she rejects, however, is not the qualities just mentioned but the exclusion of non-humans from our thinking. Mol prefers a politics of things awash in a multitude of meaningful relations. Her ideal is an alterity “between different ways of organizing socio-material realities” (132) that includes non-humans. Politics “can also take the shape of cooking things up one way or another” (134), an observation that returns us to the people (mostly women) who labor.
Where does all this counter-theorizing lead? Certainly the aim of the book is to add to our knowledge. But what is being added, and to what body of knowledge? Over and over, she flags her findings with the phrase “Here is the lesson for [insert philosophical quandary here].” The implication is that interrogating eating can contribute to philosophy and, given that this is empirical philosophy, to social theory. Mol tells us that the book “takes its cues from eating” (5); eating “provides lessons for theory” (5). But what theory?
The answer to that question clearly depends on what Mol means by theory. The book begins with a bold claim that this is a theory-disrupting project (6). And, the theory that is being disrupted is the 17th century Cartesian philosophy with its mind-body dualism and the normative ambitions--stripped of empirical referents--of 20th century social philosophy. Both have worked to bring order to the world. Contrarily, Mol wants to recognize and work with the world’s disorder and the ambiguity and instability in our understandings of it. For Mol, theory is not a set of internally coherent propositions, but “a repository of metaphors to write in, models to think with, ways of speaking and forms of responding” (25). This implies that we cannot improve or add to it as one would an addition to a house. Her ‘theory’ is amorphous, a style of being, knowing, doing, and relating with all the flexibility that the term ‘style’ suggests. In this way, she hopes to forestall dogmatism as well as its coincident hierarchies: theory rising above practice (in the academy I presume), the abstract over the concrete, the general over the specific. Her ‘theory’ is and is not theory and we are asked to live with this indeterminacy. What she is offering, are ‘openings’ (143) that lead to further musings. Her ideal theorist is Michel Serres: “he goes ‘out to play’” (20). (One wonders why the term ‘theory’ is not simply tossed aside.)
Eating in Theory is an inspiring piece of scholarship. Deeply knowledgeable, Mol is also, in her contrary way, sharply perceptive. Her observations and interpretations are insightful and her arguments convincing. We are encouraged to think against the grain as well as empirically and relationally. That her contrariness never fully escapes the historical weight of prevailing ideas hardly detracts from her accomplishment. It simply makes her human, someone who eats.
References
Arendt H (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Kuhn T (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Latour B (2004). Nonhumans. In Harrison S, Pile S, and Thrift N (eds) Patterned Ground. London: Reaktion Books, 224-227.
Mol A (2002) The Body Multiple. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rees A and Sleigh C (2020) Human. London: Reaktion Books.
Young, I M (1990) Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Robert Beauregard is the author of ‘Planning Matter: Acting with Things’ (2015) and Cities in an Urban Age: A Dissent (2018) and professor emeritus at Columbia University (USA).
Email: rab48@columbia.edu
