The Techne of Nutrition in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Abstract

The preparation of food and nutrition is a pervasive techne in the classical Greek world. Indeed, food technology may be a defining characteristic of humanity (Levi-Strauss, 1964). We begin with a glimpse of a tension in the use of the word techne in relation to the preparation of food in Plato’s Gorgias 462d-e. Turning to the Presocratics, we discern three distinct perspectives on food, those of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the treatise Regimen (Περὶ Διαίτης). In Regimen, we find an anticipation of the distinctions made by Plato in the Gorgias passage, and trace some of the implications in what we may call the “food technology” of this treatise that manages to be both philosophical and technically informative.

Epistemic demarcations as social erasures: taste and the politics of distinction from the ‘revolutions of wisdom’ to the ‘Green Revolution’

“…25 In Gorgias, the example given of an empeiria is opsopoia, which is interpreted as food making and cooking. 26 Cooking was the privileged domain of gustatory taste and thus engaged all that was intellectually and socially devalued from the philosophers' perspective. Plato explicitly expressed his denigration of eating and drinking as lowly bodily activities driven by the stomach's animalistic appetite, and of the lowly pleasures they brought to those who lustfully abandoned themselves to these illusions.…”