Hunger in a food-producing country: a philosophical approach to a worrying issue

In 2001, in the midst of the crisis, Matías Bruera began to take an interest in a contradiction that persists in Argentina: that of being a country that produces tons of food and yet maintains high percentages of its population suffering from hunger .

Since then, the sociologist, professor and researcher of the history of ideas at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of Quilmes, and former civil servant, has written several books on the subject of food. In "Eating and Being Eaten: Clues to a Phenomenology of Incorporation" (Fondo de Cultura Económica), a work derived from his doctoral thesis, he addresses the problem from a philosophical perspective .

A quote from the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk inspired one of the book's starting points, which places the notion of "incorporation" at the center of its reflections. Rather than focusing on representation—that is, the relationship between the intellect and things—Bruera was interested in reflecting on food as an embodied, corporeal phenomenon, which involves allowing oneself to be absorbed into something.

Eating is a vital necessity, but also a social experience permeated by thought and aesthetics that often mask the violence of production. Wherever one eats, as the title implies, something is being eaten.

“While eating is a deep-rooted social act inherent to any civilizing process, it is also a predatory exercise, an animal act. Thus, all attempts at refinement—from the most basic use of fire for cooking to the use of utensils to bring what we cook to our mouths using industrialized means and elements—seek to mask the instinct to feed that we possess as living beings. Sublimating this act and transforming it into something social, cultured, clean, and spiritual, allowing us to transcend our animal nature, has only been possible through an aesthetic imaginary or regulated forms of behavior,” Bruera postulates in a passage.

Inspired by Walter Benjamin, among others, the book's composition is fragmentary and consists of quotes that weave together discourses and interpretations surrounding the act of eating.

An act that, to the extent that it establishes a relationship between something external (food) and a person, has subjective implications , an act that weaves around itself webs of meaning and ways of relating to the world. As the popular saying goes, "we are what we eat."

Incorporating food is also a way of internalizing imaginaries . In contemporary society in particular, says Bruera, food appears to be influenced by the rise of gourmet and dietetics, two discourses that structure eating behaviors that, however, do not reach those who lack a secure daily livelihood.

“Food is no longer what it once was, but rather, fundamentally and in one of its most weighty senses, an object of moral dispute or an artifact of physical well-being —healthy or not—that has produced a dissociation between its libidinal dimension and its technical character. Thus, disconnected from its historical context, it has become more than anything an artifact of technical reproducibility,” Bruera affirms.

Food hasn't always been measured in nutrients and calories; what's now prevailing is a logic that turns it into a means to various ends : from delaying aging to protecting the environment.

If sight has been the privileged sense in Modernity, Bruera's approach gives way to taste, a sense usually considered "inferior" by philosophical traditions .

At the same time, he discovers the connection between words and food , insofar as they both find a common ground in the same part of the body: the mouth. This further connects food with thought.

Eating and Being Eaten: Clues to a Phenomenology of Incorporation , by Matías Bruera (Fondo de Cultura Económica).