 I make radio programmes about food and I'm fascinated by the long tradition of people from outside of the kitchen who've asked us to reflect and think again about our relationship with food. From Michael Pollan today and way back 200 years ago to Brie Severin, the first speaker at MAD4 is part of that tradition. He is a British thinker and writer and his book, The Virtues of the Table, is a invitation to us all to ask big questions about the food we eat and how we cook. So please welcome Julian Bajini. Thank you very much indeed. It's absolutely incredible to be here. It's always a bit nerve-wracking giving a talk. It's always a bit nerve-wracking talking about philosophy actually because when you're talking about philosophy, you're trying to steer a kind of path between saying what is completely obvious and what is complete bullshit. The problem is that that path is often a very, very narrow one. When you're talking about food and philosophy, then I think the gap becomes even smaller. The thing about philosophy is the danger is you end up going up into the clouds, into abstractions which have nothing to do with real life at all. Whereas when you're talking about food, you're talking about something which is very, very grounding. It involves the very basic things of existence. If you start to intellectualise about food and you get too far away from the reality of everyday life, you soon get exposed. I'm going to have a go anyway. What I'm talking about today is actually the theme of what is cooking. Also I'm going to talk about conviviality. There's a quite perhaps surprising start to a discussion on both conviviality and what is cooking. I don't know if you know what this is up here, but this is a glass of soilent. I don't know how many of you have heard of soilent. Soilent is basically a kind of powdered preparation which is meant to give you all the nutrients you need. You mix it with water and you have it. It means you don't have to really worry about meals anymore. You've got everything you need to survive in that glass, take it three times a day, get on with life. There are lots of scary things. People are interested about food. The whole idea is instantly frightening. There are lots of things that are dubious about it. From a nutritional point of view, the actual premise behind soilent is dubious. The idea is that if you can work out what the key nutrients are that a human being needs, and then you create each individual one and then you mix them up, you will therefore have a healthy food. That's actually somewhat dubious because I think there's a lot of evidence that it's not just about those little packets of nutrients. It's the way in which they all fit together. How we absorb them and digest them and process them is going to depend upon the form in which they come. Even setting that aside, I think a lot of us will feel there's something fundamentally wrong about soilent. What is it? The person who invented soilent, this guy called Rob Reinhart, he said a few things about this and why it's good. He says that in the future we'll see a separation between our meals for utility and function and our meals for experience and socialisation. He put it even more pithily another time. He said I see a difference between eating and dining. You can see where he's going with this. His idea is really that most of the time what you want to do is just refuel. Soilent is meant to be healthy, easy and convenient and much cheaper as well than what most people eat most of the time. When I heard those words, it reminded me of something. It reminded me of a very famous quote by Brea Savaran who said that animals feed and humans eat and that only a creature of intellect knows really how to eat. I thought there's a distinction, which I think is a very important one. You've got Reinhart saying distinction between eating and dining and you've got Brea Savaran's distinction between eating and feeding. I think really what's going on here is that Reinhart thinks that what Savaran calls eating, which is not merely feeding, not merely refueling, is something that we only really do on special occasions. We might occasionally want to go to a restaurant and have something really nice. But most of the time we're just eating, which to him means we're just feeding. Now I think this is worth thinking about because I think this really gets to the heart of a very mistaken idea about the role that food has in our lives as human beings. This obviously will relate to cooking as well because if you think there's a difference between feeding, merely refueling and eating, as in eating in that fuller sense, then there's also a difference between cooking and preparing. There's a difference between cooking food to be eaten and simply preparing something like soilent to feed you with. And I think it's good to understand what that difference is if we want to understand the role cooking plays in our lives. Well what is the difference then between eating and feeding? Well I mean in broad terms I think we all get an easy intuitive sense of what that difference is. Feeding, you take food, you put it in your mouth, it goes through your stomach and it ends up in a sewer to put it crudely, right? When you're eating on the other hand you take that food, what are you doing with it? Well actually what's happening I think in eating is to put it perhaps a little bit romantically is it's about mind, body, heart and soul coming together in some way. When you're really eating and not just feeding, what humans do when they gather to eat does, and not exaggerate it, I think involve their whole being in a way and I want to get some sense of what that means, what it means for a human being to eat in a way that really brings everything about human life together and isn't just about feeding. Now this is where conviviality begins to come in because obviously when people think about the aspects of eating which are more than just feeding they often immediately think about the conviviality of a lot of eating and this is a very famous painting by Bruegel the peasant wedding and this is a typical sort of like representation if you like of the fact that a lot of the time when we eat it's about social occasion it's about celebration, it's about sharing, it's about hospitality it's about being together with people, it's about joy and so forth and I think we all kind of know that and this is often sort of said as a sort of like a justification for placing some importance on food and what's interesting about this scene as well of course is that it's a peasant wedding and I don't know I mean in Britain I think there is still despite everything a certain suspicion of taking too much concern over food and eating and you know when I wrote my book on this a lot of people the first question they would ask is all this stuff you're talking about food and particularly getting philosophical about food you know this is just kind of some middle class indulgence this is the kind of phrase they would use and you know for most people eating is actually about survival and how can you talk about anything else about food when we've got this situation I think that's fundamentally mistaken because of course it's true that there are people for whom there is a real survival issue around food but throughout history over the world in every culture even the poor have always seen eating as being much more than just about staying alive there is always like feasting, celebration even amongst the poorest people in fact some of the greatest hospitality people have reported receiving on their travels is often from people who have very little themselves but will share with a stranger and with a traveller I think that's just a very important corrective to that idea that what we're talking about here is something that only a privileged few people can talk about but this idea of conviviality and the archetype of conviviality being the large gathering and the sociability of it that's true but I think that I want to focus a little bit on something a bit wider than that I want to take the idea of conviviality and really expand it now in general when it comes to understanding words and concepts I'm always a little bit suspicious of looking back to etymology but in this case I think it really does work quite a lot quite well the origins of this word come from the Latin and there's com which is together, vivere which is to live now what's interesting actually is that the words that are formed historically when those things came together actually are in a sense a bit more than the sum of the parts because live together is just a descriptive plain thing but convivere is to corounds together, convivium the noun to feasts it's like this living together becomes something which is more than just a sort of a functional dry thing so the way I put it here is for me conviviality is the art of living together not just in the sense of rubbing along or with mutual toleration but with a kind of warmth and a pleasure and a joy now the point I want to remake though is that I don't think we should think of that conviviality solely in terms of the archetypal occasion where people gather around a table and talk together and in fact you can even see an important aspect of what conviviality in this broad sense means when you think about eating alone and I want to use an example here some lovely memoirs by MFK Fisher, the great food writer who wrote a few things about the experience of dining alone and this was a woman in 1930s America so you've got to think of how the times were and she reports how when she'd go out and eat alone which we did a lot in restaurants people looked strangely at me resentfully with a kind of hurt bafflement when I dine alone and she resisted that she saw no reason why she shouldn't as a single woman go out and enjoy a meal in a restaurant and she says if I must be alone she accepts that perhaps the best thing is to be able to share a meal with people you love but if I must be alone I refuse to be alone as if it was something weak and distasteful now I think if you think about the experience a single person has when they go out and eat in a restaurant or a cafe and the way people look at them that in itself tells you something about conviviality in the broad sense the person is eating alone but if they're made to feel strange for that if they're not being, they're looked at as weird and they're not being served in the same way as though their pleasure is something they don't have a right to then in that sense that's a sort of unconviviality from the people around them and the person themselves if they feel awkward they're not feeling as though they have a place in the world with others which is okay they're made to feel out of place if you as an individual person can eat alone and you can have a good, you know, and with the waiting staff and the people around you there is that respect and there's that good interaction and you seem to have the right to enjoy then again although you're eating alone there is a broader sense in which you are still eating in that convivial sense because you are allowed to have your place in the world with others in a way which where there is joy and respect and I think it's quite interesting the final thing there I just thought it was an interesting thought perhaps a bit overstated that sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly that might be a little bit too strong but I think there's a point there which is that there is a way in which the kind of conviviality which is most celebrated is something you can only really have with certain people at certain times and I think if conviviality is an important value then it's something we should be thinking about as being part of eating in a broader, much, much broader sense so the way I want to look at it is this I want to say that if we take this broad sense of what it means to eat convivially then whenever we eat, whether we're with people or by ourselves then we're always in a sense should be thinking about our place in the world and how that experience relates to people around us so I'm kind of trying to imagine who's at the table with us not physically, literally, but in an other important sense so there is the diner and there is the diners but when you're eating anything you are living in the world, you're eating in the world and you have to think of your connections with other people not just other people, first thing to think about is animals if you're a carnivore or you eat animal produced dairy products then the animals who have provided that food are part of that connection of people you are with things creatures you are with and you can have a good convivial in that sense relationship with them or not if the animals have been reared with respect and treated well, that's a good relationship if the animals you're eating have been sort of, you know get inside in small huts and given a feed and given a miserable life that's not representing the ideal of that harmonious living and eating together of course there's also farmers and producers and again, you know, I think that this is something that people ought to think about if you're sitting down to your food and it's come through suppliers who have no care for the producers and the farmers and people making it are just not able to even earn a decent living send their children to school have decent sanitation a lot of the time then in what sense are you really endorsing that value of conviviality you're failing to live together with others in that way which is about, you know, harmonious and sharing of joy and so forth also of course this is true of the environment now for some people the environment is kind of almost like a person who they want to have a kind of relationship with I don't think you need to think about it in those terms even if you think about it purely as a kind of resource it's a resource which we share with other people so again, if in our eating we're not mindful of that and we're not aware of that and we're abusing the resource we're failing to eat in a way which involves that good, you know, living with others in a positive way the failure of conviviality in that broad sense if you're in a restaurant it's important also I think that all the staff of the restaurant are involved in that I think it's just quite interesting because if you go back to that stereotypical scenes of conviviality you might think of something perhaps from earlier centuries where you have that very, the table set with all the candles and all the different courses and plates and cutlery and everyone sitting around there having a jolly good time quaffing their ports and their fine burgundy whatever it might be and their truffled turkey and around them all these people who are serving them and those people serving them are from a totally different class they don't get, they're not treated well really they work all hours that God sends and again this is I think the shallowest kind of example of conviviality you can imagine where the group at the table are just feeling isn't this wonderful we're all together and it's all harmonious and we're sharing the joy and there's almost like a blindness to the way in which the people around them are being served and living if that's what conviviality means then I don't want any of it and I think you really notice this I think if you go to restaurants I think it makes a big difference to your experience you never actually know of course what's going on behind the scenes but if you feel that the staff are put upon that they're not being treated well you don't feel comfortable you can't really have that kind of full joy with your companions on the other hand when you do get the sense of the opposite it really does enhance the occasion and certainly Rene's restaurant Noma if anyone has been there you get a very deep sense that everyone there all the staff there there's such respect and joy in there and they are sharing in your joy contributing to it and that really does help to a proper full sense of conviviality and you can take this idea of conviviality even broader in a sense you think about the culture that whenever we eat in a sense we are members of a society and in a way everything we do is relating to the other people around us it's all situated and of course that also follows around with our ancestors as well I mean this is something that's perhaps been a bit lost to a lot of people of my generation who perhaps you know the generation before has lost a lot of the cooking traditions but it's quite a wonderful thing when you can be eating and cooking with an awareness some sense that what you're doing is a continuation of something which has been passed down if not literally by your parents but the generation before you and the generation before that and that's all part of it so if you put all these kind of things together all you really see is that the way you're eating and the way you're expressing or feeling your conviviality of your values and beliefs about the world and food actually everything that you what you're bringing to the table attitudes towards the environment the other people, the producers, the animals these are deeply moral things and they're involved I think every time obviously sometimes we do just eat through convenience because we have to and so forth but I think a lot of the time we either do or we ought to be mindful of these things because it goes back to that distinction because we do these things it's because eating actually does involve aspects like this that it is eating and not feeding in merely the animal sense and of course there's one more person here at the table I haven't mentioned which is of course the cook so this goes back to the theme of the symposium which is what is cooking everything I've said so far has been about the diner but of course it's all equally true of the cook the cook is situated in this network the same as everybody else they too are related to animals, farmers, producers, ancestors, cultures earth and so forth and their values and beliefs are also deeply part of it so if a cook is to be genuinely a cook preparing for eating and not someone who is merely preparing feed to fuelers then the cook too is involved in this conviviality in the broad sense now there's just one sort of a general point I want to make from this which is that this really does relate to this way of thinking about food to some people seems like highfalutin it seems excessive but the reason why I actually think you know food should be taken seriously philosophically is actually it's a very very good window into perhaps what is one of the most important questions we have about how to live if we want to know how to live we need to understand what kind of creatures we are and I think that historically and even in contemporary times the problem is that we fall into one of two extremes one which I think is currently quite dominant is to say look let's just accept it we are just animals right so this idea that yes we do just feed we are just animals and there's a song you may have heard which has this line you and me babe we ain't nothing but mammals so let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel that's a zeitgeist idea and so it's kind of like yes let's just be like those animals there that that just is just so so so wrong and it's not wrong because I have some unrealistic ideal about what humans are I'm not denying the animality of the human being but nothing but mammals well here's the proof of it even the person who said those words have you known any other mammal who will try to seduce another mammal by using music and rhyme no right so in a very act of saying that the guy proves it's completely wrong so when we think we're just animals we don't do justice to the full richness of our experience on the other hand no we're not angels we're not spiritual entities in that complete form we're not just the intellects who happen to have the inconvenience of having bodies we are to understand how to live to understand how to live you understand how we are as human beings and that understands the way in which we really are not a combination of mind and body as though they were two things but we are mind and body in some kind of real unity and when you think about how we eat I think this is a very very important and very useful way of doing it because when you think about how we eat you always find it's never really just about feeding or very rarely just about feeding so you can see how we're more than just animals but you're always rooted to the physicality you don't get carried away with yourself so that's the broad point I wanted to make here so the conclusion I really want to just leave you on here is that I think it's quite obvious that how we eat and cook tells us a lot about how we live with others in the world we share and that's why it's important to think about that now if you're going to think about the theme of the thing what is cooking then I think that cooking as part of that reflects those same things how we cook tells us about how we live with others in the world we share and given the idea of conviviality which I've commended to you which is to think about conviviality not just about that kind of party atmosphere around a table but that broader sense of how we live together in a way which brings joy and respect to all then in that sense at least one part of the answer to the question what is cooking is that cooking is a form of conviviality thank you very much indeed