Eating as a Wrong Relationship

This first chapter will be looking at our relationship with food and drink. Usually, such relationship is appreciated and valued either for the enjoyment, the pleasure that the eater or drinker may take out of it, or just for what can be eaten or drunk. Both assumptions are criticized. First, the former approach is questioned by criticising both fast and slow food, as two sides of the same subject-centred attitude to eating. Then, such approach is further investigated through an entirely philosophical—not psychological or biomedical—notion of such phenomena as bulimia and anorexia. The latter approach is discussed, instead, by looking at the food choices of vegetarianism and veganism, as ways of basing our food choices on what can be a source of food for us. In particular, the assumption that feeding always involves a violent act and the ethical consequences of such assumption are discussed. To solve such issues, it is assumed that, instead of building our relationship with food either mostly on the subject or mostly on the object, it should be considered an actual relationship, and a point of balance should be found in it that is neither destructive for the eater nor for the source of food. Finding such balance is actually the task of an ethics of eating and drinking.