As we taste chew swallow digest and excrete our foods transform us while our eating in
its turn affects the wider earthly environment. In Eating in Theory Annemarie Mol takes
inspiration from these transformative entanglements to rethink what it is to be human. Drawing
on fieldwork at food conferences research labs health care facilities restaurants and her
own kitchen table Mol reassesses the work of authors such as Hannah Arendt Maurice
Merleau-Ponty Hans Jonas and Emmanuel Levinas. They celebrated the allegedly unique
capability of humans to rise above their immediate bodily needs. Mol by contrast appreciates
that as humans we share our fleshy substance with other living beings whom we cultivate cut
into pieces transport prepare and incorporate?and to whom we leave our excesses. This has
far-reaching philosophical consequences. Taking human eating seriously suggests a reappraisal
of being as transformative knowing as entangling doing as dispersed and relating as a matter
of inescapable dependence.
