Okay TakesThis is a personally challenging one. I was reading All About Love by bell hooks yesterday. During a passage on the dominance of the culture of greed over a culture of love, I started to feel uncomfortable about having just bought some fancy pu-erh tea.
My pu-erh habit is an artifact of foodie culture. Foodie culture prioritizes connection with food-as-commodity over connection with human beings. Foodie culture is in this way a specifically capitalist culture.
I got this feeling even though I bought the pu-erh explicitly toward a fantasy of sharing it with friends. This doesn't break with foodie culture, either— it's often said that what matters most about fine dining is who you go with.
But this seems troubled. How do we reconcile an ethic of love, which prioritizes human connection, with our knowledge that consuming nice things can be profoundly pleasurable? I suggest three routes.
One is to say that there can be some meaning in pleasure. The epicurean answer. Any approach to thinking about meaning in life ultimately reaches an experiencing subject. This is the direct route.
Another is to say that the pleasure of a friend's cooking or a partner's lovemaking participates in love. I think hooks would agree if we're careful about how we define "participates." Applying this to Marx yields that commodification, the abstraction of goods from the labor that produced them, tears pleasurable things away from a context of love. Commodities are things that have lost their ability to participate in love.
But perhaps commodities can be re-imbued with meaning and again participate in love, as gifts. Perhaps sharing an experience of the same commodity, the same amazing food, can participate in love. This is our third route. People-oriented foodies would be vindicated.
I suspect that each has some truth to it, in different measures. I still have the feeling that connecting with a friend over some pu-erh is less loving than making them lunch, and that tasting pu-erh with a friend comes at the expense of connecting with that friend, themselves. Maybe there's value in variety among these things, and each has its time.
Sorry for more rambling than usual. I can't promise that it'll stop.