Meals Matter: A Radical Economics Through Gastronomy (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)

In __Meals Matter__, Michael Symons returns economics to its roots in the distribution of food and the labor required. Setting the table with vivid descriptions of conviviality, he offers a gastronomic rebuttal to the narrow worldview of mainstream economics. Until the early nineteenth century, political philosophy and economics were dining companions. Both took up fundamental questions of how we should feed one another. But with the rise of corporate capitalism, modern economics lost sight of its primary task and turned away from the complexities of real people's sustenance in favor of the single-minded pursuit of money. In Meals Matter , Michael Symons returns economics to its roots in the distribution of food and the labor required. Setting the table with vivid descriptions of conviviality, he offers a gastronomic rebuttal to the narrow worldview of mainstream economics. Engaging with a wide variety of thinkers—including Epicurus, Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the gastronomer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and economic theorists from François Quesnay and Adam Smith through the neoliberals—Symons traces how we went astray and how we can find our way back to a more caring, sustainable way of life. He finds hope for shared "table pleasure" in institutions like community gardens, street markets, and banquets and in eating fresh, local, and "slow" food. An innovative, historically based argument at the intersection of food history and social thought, Meals Matter challenges us to reject the economics of greed in favor of a community-based economics of sharing and gastronomic enjoyment. "In Gastronomics, Michael Symons provides an innovative history of the intersection of food history, philosophy and economics. Modern economic thought, Symons argues, is driven by a money-centric focus that benefits the interests of the 'corporate individual'-entities without finite appetites, motivated by an endless quest for financial growth-to the detriment of actual, corporeal individuals. Symons understands this shift as a modern devaluation of community and loss of a way of life that values food sharing, enjoyment and satiety. Covering a wide variety of thinkers-Jean Brillat-Savarin and Epicurus, Enlightenment philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, economic theorists Jean-Baptiste Say and Stanley Jevons, and neoliberals-Symons reads and critiques both popular and lesser-understood intellectuals to shed light into the 'economics of appetite' and the opposing 'economics of greed.' He calls for individuals to reject the self-interest of money pleasure and, through renewed attention to communal values of family, meal-sharing, food activism, and the defense of liberalism, advocates a return to a community-based philosophy of 'table pleasure.'"-- Provided by publisher