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Food

Do You Really Know How to Cook?

Lisa Heldke sticks up for the pastry chefs against Plato and the physicians.

In Plato’s dialogues, food and food-related references spring up with a frequency that becomes rather impressive when one begins paying attention to them. They are nearly always found intertwined with discussions of bodily health, virtue, and knowledge. In the Republic, for example, he discusses the diet of inhabitants of the so-called city of pigs in surprising detail. He pins the arrival of war in the luxurious city to its residents’ demands for meat. Socrates observes that if the residents of the city are not content to subsist on a “pig’s diet” of vegetables, acorns, and cheese, but demand meat to eat, then “there will be [need] for many other fatted beasts…” As a result of this need,

The land which was adequate to feed the earlier population will become small and inadequate instead… We must therefore annex a portion of our neighbours’ land if we are to have sufficient pasture and ploughland, and they will want to annex part of ours… So our next step is war, Glaucon…

Socrates also prescribes the diet that guardians in the luxurious city should eat – meat, roasted – and praises the virtues of a plain diet.

…