Author: Meals Matter

David Dale’s last taste

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Duck press, Porcine, May 2025

I WAS FORTUNATE TO DINE OUT frequently for nearly six decades with journalist David Dale (27 March 1948-6 August 2025). This was often along with Suzie Anthony.

Our paths crossed early, when he was still a student and I was starting to make a name at the Sydney Morning Herald. He wrote me a long letter arguing that I didn’t understand guitarist Eric Clapton (or something like that).

I was the paper’s first or maybe second deliberate hire of a university graduate (my degree was in maths, and they had a “new maths” education supplement to bring out). When David and Suzie joined, they became “graduate cadets”, who were required to learn shorthand. I always reckoned he had the world’s most useless skill, shorthand slower than his long.

As young journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald, the three of us had lunch and dinner out many times a week for four or five years. 

Later, in 1975, after a particularly beautiful lunch at Watson’s Bay, we three sat on a wall above the sand, and swore lifelong allegiance, which we honoured. We kept up meals together with a few unavoidable interruptions, such as living in different countries.

From my perspective, David seemed to lead a compartmentalised life. Early on, he had a girlfriend that Suzie and I never met. Mischievously, we knocked at his address, and were welcomed by a mother desperate to meet some of her boy’s friends, and she laid some of her concerns before us . Never met his father.

He also deliberately shied away from deep thoughts. When we met, he had completed Honours in Psychology, but was keener on Mad magazine, and turning to early Woody Allen movies.

David and my paths crossed more than once in Italy – and he never let me forget about revealing to both him and my father where to find the key to our ancient Tuscan watermill during one of Jennifer Hillier and my absences; David terrified my father in bed asleep, with Christopher demanding: “Do you know Bob Hope?” This was someone (the partner of colleague Julie Rigg’s expatriate mother) whom we all got to know well over there.

By then, he had joined the classy little gang putting out the radical media critic, the New Journalist (which I had co-founded with Leo Chapman and another old colleague who died this year, Paul Brennan).

Without hesitation, David became a third partner (along with Gabriel Gaté) in Duck Press that published my One Continuous Picnic in 1982. He leapt in as its editor.

In the late 1980s, I was invited to lunch in Adelaide, at his suggestion, by a visiting Bulletin journalist, Susan Williams, who grilled me about her editor. They married in Paris, without guests! When I married Marion Maddox in 1995, Suzie was my best person and David her assistant.

Towards the end, David increasingly talked streaming tv (that I never watch). Suzie and I found him reluctant for Friday lunches, but he was, we now imagine, in considerable pain. Our last get-together at La Riviera, he came with a walking frame.

He’d enjoyed sauce from a duck press at Tour D’Argent (I think that was when he secretly got married). Not only the name of our publishing house, it remains my email address, but I hadn’t experienced a duck press.

Accordingly, for our little lunch group’s celebration of my 80th this year, we dined with a duck press at Porcine in Paddington. David needed a walking frame, and my wife a wheelchair; when we discovered the restaurant was up a flight of stairs; the chef generously offered to bring the paraphernalia down to a table set up in the wineshop below.

That was in May. It would be our final meal together. Our paths crossed a last time not many days ago. Marion had two recent stays at the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse. Only on the second, we learned David was in a nearby room all the time. Being a small world, Porcine chef Nik Hill’s wife Milly is a palliative care nurse there. (In an accumulating tragedy, Marion died on 16 September, back there again, two rooms from where David had been.)

When I popped in, he was true to himself, avoiding thoughts of imminent death. On another quick visit, I offered to bring some wine the next night. He was unable to drink, he said, on account of his nausea. He did admit, nevertheless, to wanting the best possible red to be his last mouthful.

That led me to recount how yet another friend with cancer had a few months ago quietly shared an aged burgundy that she happened to “just find in the cellar”. Fortunately, I thanked her profusely for a genuinely amazing experience. Only later, I discovered a bottle online for an equivalently amazing price. Definitely worth a last mouthful and, within days, our friend disappeared forever from our tables.

I hope David got his last taste.

Duck, Porcine. Photo: David Dale

What the world needs now – cooking therapy!

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Illustration: AI

PSYCHOTHERAPISTS have moved into “cooking therapy”.

Cooking therapy might help a person for whom the kitchen was a dangerous place when a child. Our bodies carry memories and meanings, including of meals. Couples can benefit.

More generally, chopping onions and listening to pots encourage mindfulness. Kitchen activities even work for aphantasics (like me), who do not visualise flowing streams for relaxation. Slicing potatoes keeps us in the here-and-now.

Counselling academic, and foodie, Michael Kocet taught a course on culinary therapy in Chicago in 2014. By then, cooking had also moved beyond psychotherapy. Psychosocial gains include socialisation, self-esteem and mental health.

Cookery schools promise improved health and welfare. Self-help books now include Charlotte Hastings. Kitchen Therapy: How to Become a Conscious Cook, and Debra Borden, Cooking as Therapy: A beginner’s guide to building mental wellness in the kitchen.

To quote Hastings: “The power of conscious cooking can shift us from the isolation of the individual journey into the security of human experience.”

Food therapy goes beyond the kitchen. Gardening proves beneficial, and the senses are even more involved when dining. The Epicurean “pleasure of the stomach” derives not least from the gut being the source of 95% of the body’s mood-lifting serotonin.

Beneath all this, cooking is the pivot of gathering up and sharing meals and so the basis of society, culture and civilisation. I have written books on that.

Meals put people back in touch with reality, which means ideologies necessarily put meals down. The early Christian Church persecuted Epicureans. Capitalism subordinates life to profit.

To re-ground health, welfare and happiness, we need meal therapy, society-wide!

Cooking therapy for all!

Illustration: AI

What are we doing with a King?

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Our forthcoming Republic demands more than banishing a foreign monarch

OUR RECENT PUBLIC holiday to celebrate the King’s birthday reminded yet again that Australia needs to move to a democratic Commonwealth with a grown-up Constitution. The existing arrangements merely sign up Australian colonies under the Crown, rather than make a careful social contract between citizens.

AS a suggestion, a preamble might begin: Finding ourselves in an industrial civilisation, imposed violently on Indigenous nations, we each agree to cooperate in this Commonwealth. Obedient to ourselves, we remain wary of rule from above, whether by kings, ideologies, autocrats or big money. We, the People, organise ourselves. The Constitution inspires, while it sets out formal principles.

As citizens of the Commonwealth, we submit to the rule of law, democratically established by an informed citizenship, and managed by the state (government and bureaucracy), overlooked by a mindful judiciary. And there’s more.

But, before getting too far, a quick note that our King’s Birthday weekend is being followed immediately by the U.S. “No Kings” day. And this leads to an admission that conservatives make a reasonable point about a king or queen possibly providing stability, unlike what’s happening in a famous republic.

Neither a poet, nor a honed legal mind, but a meal-centred scholar, let me propose some essentials for our forthcoming Constitution.

As individuals and social beings, we respect the laws of nature, notably the ecological requirements of generation and preservation. We also obey laws, democratically achieved. That more or less paraphrases seventeenth-century English political philosopher John Locke’s arguments against paternalism, particularly monarchical, and for democracy.

Thinkers in his day understood a Commonwealth as a political economy, with, traditionally, a monarch organising food-centred infrastructure and services, such as irrigation, roads, art, science and welfare.

Replacing kings and queens, Locke envisaged a Commonwealth enhancing citizens’ “natural rights”, which were to life, liberty and property. We achieve well-being through access to food and water, gardens and seashores, to housing and livable towns, to health through good medical care, knowledge gained through schools and research, and all embellished and reinforced through the arts.

The world has changed since Locke, and not only because powerful forces have abstracted “Bills of Rights” from natural realities.

The big problem now – worse than being subject to a king and queen – is Corporations. They rule more intricately, and more ideologically, than ever any monarch.

As explained in Meals Matter (2020), for-profit corporations essentially emerged after the modern republican pattern had been set. Lacking Constitutional legitimacy, corporations nonetheless gained legal support through such devices as “limited liability” and “corporate personhood”. They then appropriated rights, especially “liberty”, which supported “laissez-faire”, “free enterprise”, “neoliberalism” and lately “disruption”.

Corporate capitalist theory reassigned sovereignty to money. The system has now remodeled all in the corporate image, turning universities into businesses, and people into buying-and-selling machines.

Corporations supply our cars, and build the roads. Their advertising funds news dissemination. Their factories supply food, and armaments. This means having to engage closely with government through lobbying, consultation, outsourcing, and two-way personnel exchange. Who “understands” war better than military suppliers?

Invidiously, I mention just one of numerous experts now running the place: former SA Senator and Cabinet Minister, Christopher Pyne. To quote Wikipedia:

Since late 2020, Pyne has taken on roles in the Australian defence industry. He is chairman of the advisory board of Australia’s largest Australian owned small arms and munitions company Nioa, and chairman of the advisory board of the Australian Missile Corporation. He also sits on the board of ASX Listed, Xtek Ltd, a Canberra-based body armour and unmanned Vehicle manufacturer and supplier globally.

Lacking Constitutional status, corporations have captured government. They push politicians to the fringes, where they take photo opportunities. The frustrated electorate are expected to blame … “the government”!

In our serious Constitution, corporations lose “rights” and gain licences or something of the kind.

The loss of the Voice Referendum in Australia a year ago pointed to an uninspiring, irrelevant-seeming Constitution. Additionally, the perceived need for a consultative body highlighted the lack of power of actual citizens, in this case Indigenous people.

In the new Republic, I reckon the democratically-elected parliament might elect a President, who forms a Cabinet and outer Ministry from both elected members and from representatives of registered consultative bodies.

As recognised economic tools with government oversight, corporations might provide recommendations this way. All lobbying would be public through recorded debates and publications of registered representative assemblies.

Likewise, a wide collection of interests make their case. Trade unions make useful representations. And so on, through various advocacy groups, all overseen by a commission.

This commission is appointed by the parliament with reference to the bodies themselves. As well as collating submissions, the commission would support consultative bodies. The commission provides financial and logistical support, where appropriate.

Think of it as like a royal court of old, whose lively gossip, intelligence, opinion, and learning advised the ruler. In ridding ourselves of kings and queens in favour of parliaments, we need to replace not only monarchs, but also their clever courtiers.

The missing analysis: How money trumps people

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STEALING FREEDOM, CAPITALISM trounces liberals.

In the recent U.S. Presidential election, whichever side you voted for, money won.

One party was aligned to neoliberal rationality and the other, the victors, represented maverick disruption. Either way, corporations won.

For more than two centuries, money stole liberty from the people. Corporate apologists eroded individual integrity in favour of laissez-faire, free enterprise, and neoliberal capitalism.

After the Cold War, promoting “liberty” for money world-wide, corporations gained neoliberal outsourcing, de-regulation and tax reduction. As a quid pro quo, newly-educated worker/consumers sought various forms of social and cultural liberation.

However, with states captured, rule by supposed rational “elites” has been giving way to rampant oligarchy.

The Democrats and similar parties need to “get back to the grassroots”. More than that, left- and social-liberals must rediscover the Enlightenment understanding of liberty belonging not to corporations but to the “preservation” of all individuals through meal-sharing.

Let the global banquet begin!

For more, read Meals Matter: A radical economics (Columbia University Press, 2020).

The wondrous materiality of French movie, The Taste of Things

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FOR TWO HOURS AND 14 MINUTES, the French movie The Taste of Things observes the preparation and eating of something like nine dishes.

The setting is a provincial chateau in the year 1885, and the focus is gourmet Dodin Bouffant and his cook, Eugenie – played by two considerable actors (and former partners), Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche.

Negative reviewers react against privilege and indulgence. The first kitchen scene of 40 minutes introduces an “extremely boring movie showing pots and pans and cooking complicated French recipes” (online comment). Some of the audience walk out.

It’s not perfect – I was mildly irritated by characters informing the audience by telling each other things they would surely already know. Some occurrences seem random – why introduce “electroculture” garden antennae?

Yet the movie is far more than foodie excess or cooking show. The great majority of reviewers are positive. What’s going on?

Musical clue

A clue comes from the absence of music – only used over the credits. Mind you, the Boston Globe reviewer was so seduced, he heard “a romantic score”, though conceding “everything you need to know is conveyed in actors’ eyes.”

The soundtrack relies on clink, clunk, chop, bubble, sizzle, footsteps, birds out the door and window, and occasional words, sometimes among Eugenie, Dodin and helper, as they move between garden, stoves and benches, and among Dodin’s select group of male gourmets, who love the cooking, and the host’s cellar.

“I never before had to direct a film with as much substantiality,” writer/director Trần Anh Hùng answered an interviewer.* “All that material reality is so compellingly expressive, it firmly anchors our characters in daily life. Music would have undermined that.”

Hùng normally likes music, he said, but here it would “bring something that is a little bit fabricated… I wanted it to be very real.”

(Please note, all you restaurateurs who think loud music and noise denote a good time.)

Materialist film-making

Instead of music instructing viewers how to feel, they form their own interpretations. Similarly, Hùng chose long takes, he said, as a way to slow down the pace and give the audience the chance to be a kind of writer, gaining “time to formulate several things” in their mind.

I describe the approach as materialistic, in that the movie carefully shows what’s actually happening at the physical level, among intimates. Emotions arise from mundane cooperation.

“Everything that you see on the screen is real, and everything that we cook for the film, we ate it. Absolutely everything,” Hùng said. He was advised by Parisian chef, Pierre Gagnaire, and the actors were assisted on-set by Gagnaire’s retired colleague, Michel Nave.

“For the crew, it was unusual, because they have done some movies with food. Most of the time it’s fake. To make it very beautiful, you add some different things in it to make it have different texture, color, everything. But here, for this movie, I didn’t want that. Because it’s not about the beauty of the food. But it’s more about showing man and woman at work in that kind of harmony.”

He told the crew the long opening cooking sequence was “my car chase scene”.

Hùng’s wife, Trần Nữ Yên Khê, an actor and this movie’s art director and costume designer, explained the need to just get the setting “right”, and leave the beauty to emerge. “Try to do something beautiful, and it comes across as decorative.”

Happiness

The movie sounds and looks beautiful, allows time for reflection, and so what is it “about”? The Taste of Things gets to the core of cooking and enjoying meals. Hùng extolls Brillat-Savarin, as does my chapter, “Brillat-Savarin’s quest for table-pleasure” in Meals Matter (2020).

Homeliness was suggested by the working title, Pot au Feu (changed in the French to Le Passion de Dodin Bouffant, after the Marcel Rouff novel on which the film is loosely based). Domestic bliss in some present-day kitchen might well have become boring, but French protagonists at the time of Escoffier could believably be immersed in good cooking.

Hùng wanted to “explore something rare in the cinema: conjugality. And even rarer when it works.” With kitchen movements choreographed like a ballet, he sought to show “harmony”.

The 20-year relationship of well-to-do gourmet and cook has confused some movie-goers, particularly since it really doesn’t develop. But the pair are contented with their lives, and Dodin is presumably not surprised when Eugenie refuses proposals of marriage. She only leaves her bedroom door unlocked when she chooses. She gains them the perfect daughter through other means.

The Taste of Things does move steadily towards inevitable sadness, but never with the forced highs and lows of an action movie or even romantic comedy, let alone “reality” tv.

Harmony without drama marks this movie out as beautifully unconventional. Nonetheless, it has a strong motive to show “merely” cooking, eating and companionship, even if that passes. It’s about happiness.

—

*Interview quotes from Santa Barbara International Film Festival, https://youtu.be/YN5Vy_3a5Ds, and from Gaumont publicity, https://www.perthfestival.com.au/media/h3kd4qcm/the-taste-of-things-press-kit.pdf.)

Doomed to disruption

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Capitalism has abandoned neoliberalism and gone disruptive

FOLLOWING perestroika and glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, capitalism’s boosters trumpeted “liberty” worldwide. Demanding liberation for all, a new Pax Americana would make everywhere safe for corporations.

Under big money’s global message of freedom, such left-liberal political leaders as David Lange, Paul Keating, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Helen Clark, Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama pushed progressive cultural reforms with particular support for racial, women’s, gay and other rights.

The trap was that the “rights revolution” in such areas as feminism and multiculturalism provided cover for the corporate capture of government. Under the banner of neoliberalism, the same leaders pushed through deregulation, fiscal “rectitude”, lower corporate taxes, “flexible” job markets, outsourcing, lower trade “barriers”, individual responsibility, etc.

In the flurry of freedom, cultural liberation was outmatched by the bolstering of corporate power.

With governments now firmly in its grip, capitalism moved from neoliberalism to “disruption”. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg instructed: “Move fast and break things”. Powerful corporate leaders from Zuckerberg, Musk and down asserted their sacred right to do what they wanted – AI, rockets to Mars, armaments, opioids, drill, baby, drill…

Writing about the “disruption machine” in the New Yorker in 2014, Jill Lepore observed that innovation had become “the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics”.

Long-time Silicon Valley reporter Kara Swisher (Washington Post, 15/02/24) had “watched founders transform from young, idealistic strivers in a scrappy upstart industry into leaders of some of America’s largest and most influential businesses.” With few exceptions, “the richer and more powerful people grew, the more compromised they became.”

Upon Trump’s election as President, digital CEOs rushed for an audience, Swisher reported:

“There was a heap of money at stake, and they wanted to avoid a lot of damage the incoming Trump administration could do to the tech sector. … they also wanted contracts with the new government, especially the military. … More than anything, they wanted to be shielded from regulation, which they had neatly and completely avoided.”

The “invisible hand” of money unleashed disruption (and corruption), and broke pay parity, democracy and civility (not forgetting nature). Along with that, fewer and fewer billionaires supported left-liberal causes, preferring to boost their own fortunes by backing think-tanks and increasingly authoritarian ideologies.

Right-wing populists blamed the “politically correct”, the “woke”, university-educated “elites”, and mysterious liberals who controlled the “deep state”. Raising the “cloud of confusion”, Murdoch opinion-leaders baited their opponents until seeming actually to believe environmental degradation was an esoteric belief, and supporting women of colour impoverished white men.

Historian Ellen Schrecker has charted how the unprecedented invigoration of American universities during the Sixties eventually rebounded, when the right both attacked universities’ “liberalism” and corporatised them (in her studies of universities’ Lost Promise (2021) and Lost Soul (2010)).

Those endeavouring to save the welfare state, worker rights, universities, democracy and the environment have been tempted to display militancy. Israel’s brutality has now prompted campus protests in the Sixties manner.

Caution is warranted, nonetheless. Given how abusive politics suits aspiring demagogues, supporters of left/progressive/Green politics should prefer exposing the sin of over-commitment over indulging in it. Rather than shout back, the liberal left could usefully resort to honesty and openness, and appreciate complexity.

Arguing the benefits of civilised society also means understanding politics more deeply than as just warfare (“class struggle” already proved insufficient).

Contesting the authoritarian appeal of “the strong always win” means re-discovering lost principles. Countering disruption requires a return to something more like Enlightenment political philosophy, seized and shattered by capitalism.

The pre-capitalist basis of radicalism is described in Meals Matter: A radical economics through gastronomy (Columbia UP, 2020). The book also shows how money’s polemicists borrowed selectively from liberal-democratic arguments, and trampled on them.

Grassroots change comes from care and conversation at and about meals (at their different levels)

Australian Blak activist Natalie Cromb has just advocated, with “violence all around us”, for “reimagining our communities to be as they should be – caring, nurturing, healthy, happy and with enough”.

The sin of over-commitment

~ Meals Matter ~ 1 Comment

So much rancour of recent times has been hardened by over-simplification – and examples are to be found on all sides

IN RECENT YEARS, numerous governments and institutions accepted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. While its opening statement is widely regarded as reasonable, the definition then gives examples that suggest that criticism of the state of Israel is antisemitic.

Antisemitism is exhibited by, for example, denying “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”.

Leaving aside the trickiness of whether Jews comprise a people, race, religion, cultural tradition or nation, the stricture nevertheless comes close to shutting down debate about Zionism.

This is despite many Jews themselves being anti-Zionist, sometimes on firmly religious grounds. “Jewish is defined by what Torah commands. Making our own state, or oppressing other people, is forbidden by Judaism and cannot be considered ‘Jewish,’” said Rabbi Yisroel Meir Hirsch (quoted in The Times of Israel, 23 May 2020).

Another example of antisemitism was: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

Reference to National Socialism might be painfully pointed, but that of itself would not invalidate such a denunciation.

The so-called “settlements” in the West Bank, throwing Palestinians off their land at gunpoint, certainly head in that direction. Likewise, many Jews worldwide decry the Netanyahu government’s campaign “to flatten” Gaza (President Macron’s description) or “genocide” (South Africa’s case in the World Court).

A definition of “antisemitism” overly protective of Israel and its policies risks rebounding, and many people now oppose Israel’s assaults without feeling particularly anti-Jewish, and resist campaigns to insist otherwise.

I have asked around about the name of a spurious argument of the type “anti-Israel = anti-Semitic”. My friend David suggested “false syllogism”, in that necessary are not always sufficient conditions. Any thoughts?

Let’s settle for the moment on saying it’s a classic case of over-commitment, in which powerful assertions foreclose qualifications and ambiguities. And over-commitment is a widespread sin.

While the authoritarian right specialises in zealotry, including provocative sneering, abuse, and inventive conspiracy theories, the liberal-left itself provides many examples.

Loss of “Voice” Referendum

An Australian instance of the sin of over-commitment has been a widespread claim that the loss of the Referendum on a Constitutional “Voice” for Indigenous people revealed the nation’s “embarrassing” racism, and set back the Indigenous cause.

Indigenous lawyer and “Yes” campaigner Noel Pearson had warned the voters: “There’s one choice that’s morally correct, and the other one will bring shame upon us, and we will have to wear that shame and dishonour for a long time to come” (The Guardian, 10 October, 2023).

Afterwards, campaign director for Yes23 Dean Parkin suggested that “the Australian people voted against recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the first peoples of our nation” (Guardian, 26 January 2024).

The history of Australian government Indigenous policy is not happy, to say the least. But overly committed proponents simplified the Referendum to “Yes”/”No” on Indigenous recognition and support, over-riding complications concerning the approach and the Constitution itself.

One Indigenous Senator (Jacinta Nampijinpa Price) had described the proposed advisory assembly as patently unnecessary, while another (Lidia Thorpe) saw it as grossly insufficient. That’s a span of views.

The Referendum debate revealed widespread ignorance of the Australian Constitution, it was said. That’s not surprising for an uninspiring foundation narrative of colonial governments wrangling a federation.

Rather than resemble an intergovernmental memorandum, a Constitution would desirably set out a persuasive social contract, to which each member assents.

Even Constitutional experts stuck with narrow legalism rather than promote the need for a Constitution that actually sets out why and how we, the People, run this place for our own well-being.

As much as Anthony Albanese might have expected to emerge as a great, visionary Prime Minister, he mishandled a weak cop-out, a non-Treaty and non-Truth-telling way of slipping Indigenous recognition into an inadequate Constitution. Embarrassingly, the former “Rudd government’s street fighter” (Tony Wright, SMH, 23/02/10) failed to transcend narrow party sniping.

Out of the muddle, claims about a single “morally correct” vote arguably became over-commitment to the point of being self-defeating (in that, for instance, Albanese went quiet on the Indigenous cause).

Blame for housing unaffordability

In another Australian example, more than 40 housing, homelessness and community service organisations wrote to the Prime Minister and Opposition leader expressing concern that immigrants were being blamed for the prohibitive price and scarcity of housing.

“Migrant communities are being scapegoated for Australia’s housing crisis,” said Everybody’s Home spokesperson, Maiy Azize (19 December, 2023). “Governments have given handouts to investors, allowed unlimited rent increases, and stopped building homes for the people who need them. It’s a distraction to suggest that migrants are to blame.”

The letter acknowledged elsewhere that “migrant communities are being scapegoated as the primary reason for the housing crisis” (added italics). But why should migrants accept any responsibility whatsoever for the housing crisis?

Population pressures affect housing availability, but that’s not the migrants’ fault. Rather, the pressure results from immigration programs.

Selling immigration as “boosting the economy”, business lobbyists have pushed for cheaper workers, bigger markets, more construction projects, and other sources of “growth”.

Business lobbyists are happy to see migrants take the blame, just as they are not overly concerned that young people get locked out of the slow-motion housing bubble.

Just as alarm at Israeli policy about Palestine is not necessarily anti-Jewish, and disconnect with Albanese’s uninspiring Referendum can be far from racist, querying immigration policy is not querying migrants themselves.

The sins of over-committed simplification, hyperbole, sloganising, indignation, and disparagement have multiple causes.

Newspapers have long resorted to often ingenious, attention-grabbing headlines, with qualifications buried beneath. More and more, advertisers and influencers use half-truths to compete for “likes” and “going viral”. On top of that, competing political factions get shoutier.

Beyond increasing political rancour lies a major shift in capitalism, which is the topic of my next Meals Matter post, Doomed to disruption. We’ve farewelled the neoliberal era. Welcome to the age of disruption!

Suggested reading for AI

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THOSE NOW fearful of AI would seem to assume that human intelligence has built a civilisation equipped with philosophy, art, and labour saving, which AI will now destroy.

The embarrassment here is that human intelligence is already killing things. Tied to the profit motive, we’re disrupting ourselves to death.

With an original degree in maths and physics, then as a science journalist in the late 1960s, I came to fear where scientists naively led. Nervousness with computing power back then was captured in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

But as I left science behind, I learned not to over-rate rationality, and also to accept that some research is genuinely useful, such as warnings of environmental collapse. And just maybe computers will opt for a more fact-based civilisation. They might even understand intelligence better than we seem to do.

Intelligence is over-rated, for one thing (nothing that carries society off a cliff seems smart).

Referring back to Douglas Hofstadter’s essay, “The shallowness of Google Translate” (The Atlantic, January, 2018), New York Times columnist David Brooks expressed alarm that Hofstadter had recently changed his mind, and expected “human beings are soon going to be eclipsed.”

Brooks admitted to being shaken, yet remained an “AI limitationist”, believing that:

while A.I. will be an amazing tool for, say, tutoring children all around the world, or summarizing meetings, it is no match for human intelligence. It doesn’t possess understanding, self-awareness, concepts, emotions, desires, a body or biology.

The key point for me is the lack of “desires, a body or biology”. AI is a machine relatively detached from the world, whereas human intelligence is enmeshed in physiologies and ecologies. I go further and say that human intelligence is essentially directed at eating better.

But that’s before the powerful proclaim their ideologies, which have for two centuries been money-making.

If they are truly super-intelligent, big computers might even read my Meals Matter: A radical economics through gastronomy (2020), and wind back capitalism.

When AI reaches page 6, it will learn that Intelligence (as rationality) belongs to the human “second brain”, with the gut microbiota being the “first brain”. We are directed by our appetites, and other interoception, with the second brain helping find and organise meals.

Thinking has to remain thoroughly embedded in nature, and not destroyed by “superior” powers. If it knows what it’s doing, Intelligence will support thoughtful, pleasurable, healthy, well-resourced and sustainable meals.

Dining with aphantasia

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“TO THINK I reached the age of 30 without knowing this.” I was considerably older than that incredulous online author when I learned about “aphantasia”, just a few days ago.

Aphantasia is the experience of “reduced or absent voluntary imagery”, that is, we aphantasics are not bothered by a “mind’s eye”, nor its equivalents for the other senses.

We are amazed to learn that, when “counting sheep”, many people actually watch imaginary sheep!

It’s a surprisingly late discovery for us aphantasics, and also for science. Psychologists wrote about it more than a century ago, including Fechner (1860), Galton (1880), Bentley (1899) and John Watson (1913). But then the topic disappeared.

Watson himself might have to take some blame by launching behaviourism’s avoidance of subjective experience in favour of external psychological observation, which would be ironic given how he was a non-imaginer.

This last is suggested by Bill Faw (2009), who arguably led the return to studies of “non-imagers”, the name he prefers for himself and others. In 2015, a neurologist came up with the seemingly catchier, “aphantasia”. Under whatever the name, the research remains rudimentary, especially in relation to the phenomenon’s fascination. For instance, published estimates of the proportion of aphantasics in the population range from 0.7% to 2 – 5%.

Many have discovered the condition when a therapist asks them to visualise. They remain puzzled when asked to, perhaps, put an intrusive thought on a floating leaf and watch it drift away. We recognise the condition immediately it’s described.

If I am asked: “Imagine the sun rising,” I get a glimpse, vanishing instantly, like keying in a password. An imagined apple might have some details, and at least seem red, but then I’ve seen standard depictions of apples since learning “A is for Apple”.

Given imagery’s presumed role in memory, non-imagers generally don’t have such strong recall of even recent events, people’s faces or the narrative of their own lives.

Recent research also shows, for example, that we non-imagers might draw a simpler version of a room from memory, but often with more spatial accuracy. Spatial memory follows separate brain pathways from object memory, and aphantasics would generally seem better at it.

No question but that human minds are varied.

My wife Marion and I discovered complementary experiences early in our relationship, but never pinpointed the underlying explanation. From the start, we knew that she’s much better with people’s names, and recall of events.

Whereas I could scarcely remember one line of poetry, she can recite not 10,000 lines, but 10,000 poems (only a slight exaggeration).

She enjoys novels, whereas I can’t arouse much enthusiasm (although maybe for Pride and Prejudice, which she supposes comes from Austen’s relative disregard for description).

We both enjoy movies – they don’t rely on visualisation. Mind you, I often get greater enjoyment than she does from movies based on her favourite novels – they are rarely quite as she imagined.

On the instruction “think of the colour red”, I get a fleeting impression, and move on. When I try to recall the smell of nutmeg, say, nothing happens. Marion has no such trouble.

Researchers referring to “visualisation, “imagination” and the “mind’s eye” betray a cultural priority for vision. Those with a vivid “mind’s eye” usually also have a strong “mind’s nose”, “mind’s ear”, “mind’s touch”, etc.

Reporting in 1880, the early researcher Francis Galton asked respondents to imagine “your breakfast-table as you sat down to it this morning – and consider carefully the picture that rises before your mind’s eye”. Some respondents saw the breakfast table “as well in all particulars as I can do if the reality is before me”. At the other end of the scale: “I recollect the breakfast table, but do not see it.” Galton did not report on other sensory recall, nor pleasures.

Delving into the absence of visual, auditory and other impressions raises questions about meals.

I’ve long been puzzled by the deluge of cookery pages. Why do we need yet another pavlova recipe? It turns out that where I might think “that’s a long list of ingredients”, Marion puts the ingredients together in her head, and decides if she’d enjoy eating the result.

Seemingly following my lack of olfactory recall, I have relative difficulty naming flavours, so that with wine, for instance, I struggle to find “vanilla notes”, “cedar” and “violets”. Instead of identifying particulars, I become immersed in compound sensations, starting with the wine’s “structure”.

That’s like meals as a whole. They are immediate. At a good meal, I am absorbed – engaged with the here-and-now of dishes, places, conversations and their connections. A good meal is complex, and hums. Existential.

Without intricate recall, I enjoy talking (yet again) about past stand-outs, and also look forward to the next experience. I always like to know something is planned.

I am now wondering about the act of writing. Just as some visual artists turn out not to visualise, but set images out in front of them, I love words on paper.

My books on cooking and economies contain numerous details, but these are meant to point to bigger concepts. Some readers might become preoccupied by descriptions, just as so-called “economists” might promote the simple mathematics of price, rather than absorb the full wonder of sharing the world.

Footnote: Research and writing on aphantasia has often been expressed in the negative – it is a “lack” or “disorder”. To quote a recent scientific paper, “visual imagery is absent or markedly impaired.” Even when protesting it’s not a disease, and citing examples of highly successful non-imagers, these same writers still focus on deficits. The very name aphantasia is pathologising.

That’s surprisingly easily turned around, so that one might say, for example, that many people – known as “phantasics” – suffer an overload of imagined sights, sounds, bodily states, and more.

George Herbert Betts reported on visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory and other imagery in his 1909 study, and declared: “Very much of memory is accomplished without the use of imagery, and much of the imagery which accompanies memory is of no advantage to it.”

Questioning imagination’s importance for reading literature, he worried: “if a flood of profuse imagery should accompany the words as we read, interpretation and appreciation would be seriously interfered with.”

Without impediment, non-imagers engage with the factual and here-and-now, and think clearly.

Furthermore, aphantasia might be somewhat protective against PTSD, major depressive disorder, social phobia, and bipolar disorder (e.g., Cavedon-Taylor, 2022), given how these can be reinforced by visualising – flashbacks, or too vividly imagined dangers.

And yet, without leaping sheep, floating leaves or the sweet scent of vanilla, aphantasics might be exposed to other anxieties.

I am just beginning, and so is research generally.

For a sample:

Galton, Francis (1880), “Statistics of mental imagery”, Mind: A quarterly review, No. 19 (July 1880): 302-318

Betts, George Herbert (1909). Distribution and Functions of Mental Imagery (Columbia Univ. Contr. to Educ. No. 26.), New York: Teachers College, Columbia University

Cavedon-Taylor, Dan (2022), “Aphantasia and psychological disorder: Current connections, defining the imagery deficit and future directions,” Frontiers in Psychology, Published online 14 October 2022

Faw, Bill (2009), “Conflicting intuitions may be based on differing abilities: Evidence from
mental imaging research,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16(4), 45–68

Fox-Muraton, Mélissa (2021), “Aphantasia and the language of imagination: A Wittgensteinian exploration,” Analiza i Egzystencja 55 (2021)

Cavedon-Taylor, Dan (2022), “Aphantasia and psychological disorder: Current connections, defining the imagery deficit and future directions,” Frontiers in Psychology, Published online 14 October 2022

Bonkers billionaires

~ Meals Matter ~ Leave a comment

AMONG THEIR HAZARDS, billionaires get to believe that they are farsighted geniuses.

Take Elon Musk, who’s so clever that h­­e’s now not only planting his prodigious DNA (the number of Musk children is a question), but also preparing a Mars colony on the way to populating the Milky Way with mind-boggling numbers of artificial geniuses.

He’s is nothing if not inconsistent, and warns against Artificial Intelligence, while developing it, co-founding Neuralink in 2016 to merge brains with machines.

Adding Twitter to his portfolio through 2022, Musk is far from the only bonkers billionaire, whose fortunes back such right-wing troops as Trump Republicans, Christian gun-toters, mainstream economists, and rocketeers.

The common thread is a vision that takes eyes off everyday reality to promote money’s interests, whether through populist conspiracies, American myths, the price mechanism or some glorious science-driven future of digital rationality.

Musk is attracted to particularly arrogant beliefs about longtermism and transhumanism (with links to the get-rich Effective Altruism network).

Environmentalists, liberals and republicans care about future generations, but the longtermists ask us to care even more for a hypothetical future of computer-simulated “persons”, who will colonise the stars.

The director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Nick Bostrom, anticipates at least 1058 such digital brains, so that, on simplistic utilitarian logic, the claims of these posthumans vastly outweigh present worries.

Bostrom also introduced the prevalent idea of existential risk, referring to potential catastrophes that get in the way of enormous numbers of “people” radiating out into space. It’ll happen, if we just leave everything to our superiors, the tech billionaires.

Even a recent, semi-respectable airing of longtermism in the New York Times calls on our brainiacs to plan in some unspecified way on behalf of future generations of “sentient life”. The article is by William MacAskill to promote his book, What we Owe the Future.

The latest issue of the Guardian Weekly both reviews MacAskill’s “thrilling” book, and editorially backs the Artemis space project for no reasons other than Russia and China’s similar ambitions, and the admittedly significant “earthrise” photograph of 1968.

While we are wise to attend to the science, we need to shield ourselves from science fiction, especially when it so obviously serves massive investments. Besides, we should never forget that scientists have already brought eugenics, plastics and nuclear weapons.

The well-funded thinking-machine capitalists, blowing us out of the sky, are of particular gastronomic concern because their ideology is alienated from the metabolic universe. That’s our world of eating, drinking and cooperating on our apparently (for them) expendable little planet.

Their adulation of some detached “intelligence” is especially delusional because our cerebra are essentially tools for eating better – coordinating sensory inputs and movements, and reaching the sophistication of good restaurants. As suggested by (other) recent science, the mind is subservient through the “gut-brain axis” to the “first brain” or stomach.

Tech billionaires planning to populate space with incredible numbers of thinking machines leave behind nature, farms, kitchens and restaurants. Bonkers!

Promoting some supposedly superior race is a treason against humans radically grounded on Earth, thank you very much.

Elon Musk’s prototype space-populating rocket