Animality

Descartes and his obsession for clear ideas are largely responsible. Too earthly, too internal, too associated with the “body-machine” deprived of reason, it was bound to displease the philosopher and his naturalist disciples. “Anything that wasn’t based on clear and distinct ideas – of which the senses are a part – was avoided. And this sense relates back to our animality. It is difficult to control and can easily lead to excesses. It is also too intimate: it is the only one that allows part of the world into the body.”

Another inevitable reason behind this banishment: the Christian religion. Which, by continuously recommending the elevation of the mind and detachment from all things material, ended up considering taste as too earthly and even useless to the development of thought. Since the Middle Ages, haven’t anorexic saints practiced fasting to become closer to God and thus become exceptional souls?

For the historian, these practices say a great deal about the religious guilt that surrounds taste. “We already find common points with anorexia as we know it today. These female saints wanted to feel control over themselves, it was a means for them to empower themselves and to oppose their family as well as their hierarchy.” A – male – hierarchy which, already at the time, had a very dim view of this extreme behaviour, to the point of accusing these women of being witches or mentally ill. But some managed to find another way of demonstrating this: since they had to eat, why not destroy any notion of pleasure associated with food? Why not mix it with earth or ashes? Guilt, always guilt...

Greed and gluttony

Not to mention greed (which by then had the same meaning as gluttony), which features on the list of the seven deadly sins. “Even though it has never been considered one of the most serious sins, the others are dependent on it. If we give into this one, we will give in to all the others. It is necessary to place ourselves in the context of the time, when food wasn’t always abundant. If we eat too much then we are, of course, depriving others...”

Before the advent of Christianity, those living in Antiquity were more inclined to value sensory and corporal pleasures. “But the denigration of taste occurred well before the birth of Christianity, for instance by Plato. More than Christianity, it is the philosophic system of dualism between the body and the mind, the sensible and the intelligible, that has had a profound impact on the entire history of Western thought and has contributed to the denigration of taste.”