Plato has a certain attitude toward food that infl uences Western
thought even in present times. Plato thought that things of this world, material objects, were less
real and important than things that exist in the world of ideal forms.
In other words, if you are thinking about chairs, a concrete object
is a chair, and so are all the others, and they’re all a little different,
so none can be the absolutely true chair—or the concept of “chair”
that’s equally applicable to all chairs at all times. However, you can
think of the ideal form of “chair,” of which these are only inferior
refl ections.
If ideas are purer than objects, then activities that involve thought
are more highly valued than physical and manual activities. In
Phaedo, Plato expressed the idea that being a philosopher or poet is
more noble and worthwhile than being a builder or chef. Pleasures
of the body are distracting and demeaning, and just as the soul is
more valuable and eternal than the body, intellectual pursuits are
more important than physical pleasures. This attitude, a kind of
secular food guilt, reverberates throughout Western civilization.
There is another dialogue by Plato, Gorgias, in which he compares
cooking, a menial task that only serves to stimulate the senses, with
medicine, which tells people what to eat and preserves health and
is, thus, the nobler of the two. There certainly were many Greeks
who were intensely interested in gastronomic pleasure, which is
probably why Plato denounced it so fi ercely.
The Greeks produced the very fi rst cookbook. Actually, there were
several, but only a fragment of one of them survives, and it was
written by Archestratus in about 330 B.C. Most of what survives
are the sections on fi sh. It’s written in verse, so it was probably
meant to be read aloud at a symposium.
Archestratus is a connoisseur. He knows where the best fi sh comes
from and has the ability to get it in the proper season. He knows
how to prepare food without disguising its natural fl avor and