In the final book of his Metamorphoses, Ovid gives a dramatic presentation of the Greek thinker Pythagoras’ philosophy of food in a speech that many scholars take to be a good summary of the underlying idea of the poem as a whole. Under Ovid’s pen, the heart of Pythagoras’ philosophy springs from a reflection on the nature of nourishment as the most important form of metamorphosis in the life of the cosmos. Through Pythagoras, Ovid implores readers to take what they eat seriously, since the choices we make are not just mundane questions of diet but ethical commitments that put us in touch with the cosmos and everything living within it:
Forbear, O mortals,
to spoil your bodies with such impious food!
There is corn for you, apples, whose weight bears down
the bending branches; there are grapes that swell
on the green vines, and pleasant herbs, and greens
made mellow and soft with cooking; there is milk
and clover-honey. Earth is generous
with her provision, and her sustenance, is very kind; she offers, for your tables,
food that requires no bloodshed and no slaughter . . .
Oh, what a wicked thing it is for flesh
to be the tomb of flesh, for the body’s craving
to fatten on the body of another,
for one live creature to continue living
through one live creature’s death.[1]
Pythagoras continues, emphasizing that “when [we] taste the flesh of slaughtered cattle,” we are also “eating [our] fellow-men,” because “the spirit comes and goes, / is housed wherever it wills, shifts residence / from beasts to men, from men to beasts, but always / it keeps on living.”[2] The life of other beings on Earth, in other words, could just as easily be our own, a fact that is made immanently evident through consideration of the food that nourishes us.
Ovid’s Pythagoras understands the first moral imperative to be grounded in our manners of eating and hosting others: when we eat, we should be mindful of the life that is housed in, or hosted by, the forms we ingest. Life is simply the movement of the soul from one living thing to another, connecting the eater with the cosmos with every plate of food. The theory underlying Pythagoras’s speech is one of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from form to form through the processes of living and dying, eating and being eaten. Metempsychosis thus presents at least a metaphorical explanation for the metamorphoses in the myths of Baucis, Philemon, and Lycaon, stories from the Metamorphoses centered on eating and hospitality in which the choice of food presented to the gods, and the way they are treated in the home, are reflected in the forms into which the mortals transform. In these myths, Ovid posits a fundamental link between being and eating, the choices we make in the kitchen and the way we exist in the world. As the nineteenth-century gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin says, “Tell me what [or how] you eat, and I will tell you what you are”; and with Ovid, we might add, “or will at least tell you what you will become.”[3]
The Metamorphoses is a book of change, of transformation, of becoming, of echoes and displacements, of identity in difference and difference in identity. People become stones, stones become human, nymphs become trees, beautiful boys become flowers, physis flowers forth, and life becomes incarnate in new forms in a world that is continuously in flux and displays the infinite ways, and reasons, that life becomes other than itself. There is a sense, in Ovid and in many others from antiquity, that Being and living consist not just in change but also in the specific form of change called metamorphosis. In his poetry, Ovid shows us that living itself is metamorphosis, and life as we know it is the appearance of the living earth in various processes of metamorphosis. Emanuele Coccia, a twenty-first-century philosopher influenced by Ovid, writes of the relation between life and metamorphosis that “life is but the butterfly of this enormous caterpillar that is Gaia[;] it is the metamorphosis of this planet.” His magnum opus, also entitled Metamorphoses in explicit reference to the work of Ovid, considers the various ways that beings change forms, with sections on the processes of birth, migration, building homes, cocooning, and, most importantly, eating. Although some of the metamorphoses in Ovid’s texts and Coccia’s are extraordinary, many are much less strange, much more mundane: people age, things are born, lives undergo momentous transformations at certain points, people alter their gender and take on new names, and there are other transitions that occur every day. Above all, however, Coccia argues that it is nourishment (alimentation) that is “the most common and the most practiced [répétée] form of metamorphosis.”[4] If to understand life means understanding metamorphosis, then understanding metamorphosis means understanding nourishment.
Further, Brillat-Savarin, of “you are what you eat” fame, tells us that “the Universe is nothing without the things that live in it, and everything that lives, eats.” Brillat-Savarin, like Coccia, insists that to understand both life and the world, we must view them from the point of view of gastronomy. Both view the cosmos first and foremost as a place where things eat and are eaten, where to speak of “life” is the same as speaking of things that need nourishment. Brillat-Savarin’s claim about the nature of the universe demonstrates the importance of this notion to his own project, so much so that it serves as the first lines of his only published book, The Physiology of Taste. He calls this pithy remark—along with a list of twenty others, including the famous one about being what you eat—the “Aphorisms of the Professor,” and through them he aspires to create “a lasting foundation for the science of gastronomy.”[5] We see the sheer ambition of Brillat-Savarin in his claims that there is nothing beyond the realm of the living and that the definitive feature of life is eating in the title of the science he claims for this approach to the world: transcendental gastronomy. This term tells us that he is concerned not just with the principles of dining and cooking but also with the principles of the cosmos itself that create the conditions for the possibility of life in the first place. The Physiology of Taste is famous for the eloquence with which Brillat-Savarin addresses questions of how to eat well, and with delicious examples of gourmandism, the history of cooking, and the influence of truffles on human sociability, but only insofar as these illustrate the role that eating plays in the life of the universe itself. The work is “transcendental” in the sense of his near contemporary Immanuel Kant in that both are interested in exposing the conditions that make the world possible; and it is a “gastronomy” insofar as he finds these transcendental conditions to be fundamentally about food and the ways that we eat. The book defines food as “all those substances which . . . can be . . . changed into life by digestion, and can thus repair the losses which the . . . body suffers through the act of living,” which is to say, “everything that nourishes.”[6] To him, then, gastronomy’s subject matter is whatever in the universe nourishes individual living beings, beyond which there is “nothing.”
Despite the different directions their projects take, Ovid, Coccia, and Brillat-Savarin all see the cosmos as a place fundamentally woven together by food. Understanding the world, for all of them, begins with an understanding of the nature of life, which in turn begins with an understanding of the primacy of nourishment. So far, this is an idea that we have treated in the abstract as an issue of the world in general, but it becomes somewhat clearer when we focus our attention on our own particular existence.
For Brillat-Savarin, then, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”[7] In the most general sense, we become everything that we eat, and vice versa. The unbroken eggs, the cherries, the endive, the sacrificial animal that we ingest and digest all come to constitute the very material of our flesh. Taken another way, if you show me what you eat, I can understand what you are because I know which sorts of beings eat the same fare. One reader notes that Brillat-Savarin is clear that he cannot tell you “who you are [qui tu es]” but rather “what you are [ce que tu es],” because “in the first instance the implication is that what you eat defines you as an individual and reveals personal traits whereas in the second, what you eat defines you in a broader . . . context.”[8] That is, rather than telling us about our own subjectivity, what we eat signifies the kind of being that we are and the form of life in which our being is housed. Because certain foods impress a particular form onto an eating subject, by eating like others, we are likewise (in)formedby the qualities of that food and take on a similar form of life to it. For example, in one of the myths mentioned earlier, King Lycaon of Arcadia becomes a wolf, an animal notorious for eating human flesh, because eating similar foods makes all of us of a kind with others through the reception of similar materials and forms. Baucis and Philemon, likewise, become trees, both because they offer resources to Zeus and Hermes and because the fare they feed them does not rely on the deaths of animals.
At the same time, it is just as true to say that edible things become us in the process of digestion. The life in them sheds its previous form—an egg or a banana or a cow loses its shape—and becomes formed by the eater and incorporated into the body. That is, the form of the edible thing becomes similar to our own form through a process of transformation.
To will that some thing, whether a plant or an animal product, become our meal is to will that our own body, our own living, be composed of that thing. Through ingestion, we choose to carry that other body within us, to make it our own. When I consume plants on the plate in front of me or the dead animal that itself ingested a plant, I am at once myself and, by way of carrying it within me, the other thing as well. To elect something as my meal is to elect that my very being incorporate that something, and therefore to elect that my project of living take a new form, one that is at once what I was before the meal and the thing that I have since ingested. Through ingestion, then, we will a metamorphosis of our body according to our taste.
All this is possible because the elements that constitute our flesh are the same as those that constitute the flesh of the cosmos. What might make a given thing edible is that it is constituted by the particular elements an eater needs to sustain life; the eater’s flesh is constituted precisely by those elements. We call the moment when those elements and flesh meet “nourishment.” That is, when the elements in some edible being meet with some other being in such a way that the life of the latter is restored by the incorporation of the former, we say that the latter has been “nourished” by that being. The word comes from a Sanskrit complex of words meaning “to flow” or “to let flow.” When nourishment occurs, we can understand that act to be one in which elements flow from one form to another—and in some cases, move back again. Nourishment reveals a certain universal community of life on Earth, one in which we are linked one to another through extended chains of edibility. As Coccia puts it in his Metamorphoses, nourishment is “the thought of that single life which at once and with the same authority animates us and the thing eaten, the thought of the life which lives everywhere, in us and outside of us.”[9] Nourishment names, then, the fact that life is sustained not just by other life, or even just by some particular other life, but also by the same life that animates the eater. Life itself is the subject, site, and object of its own nourishment.
Notes
[1] Ovid, trans. Rolfe Humphries. Metamorphoses. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983, 15.74-93.
[2] Ovid, 15.111, 15.163-6
[3] Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, trans. Fayette Robinson. Physiology of Taste. Boston: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1854, 25.
[4] Coccia, Emanuele. Metamorphoses. Paris: Bibliotheque Rivages, 2020, 124; translation mine.
[5] Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 25
[6] Brillat-Savarin, 91
[7] Brillat-Savarin, 25.
[8] Hyman, Philip. “Aphorisms and Editions: What Exactly Did Brillat-Savarin Say?” Petits Propos Culinaires, no. 103, Aug. 2015, pp. 22–30.
[9] Coccia, Metamorphoses, 116.
