240 The Culture of Food

Bibliography
Benjamin, W. Illuminations. Edited by H. Arendt. New York: Schocken
Books, 1969.
Bower, A., L. (ed.). Reel Food: Essays in Food and Film. London: Routledge,
2004.
Burnett, R. How Images Think. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2005.
Branigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Fibn. London and New 011i-Pekka Moisio
York: Routledge, 1992.
Braudy, L. The World in a Frame: What We See in Films. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Human Beings Do not Eat in Order
Everett, W. (ed.). European Identity and Cinema. Exeter: Intellect Books, 1996,
Forbes, J. & Street, S. European Cinema: An Introduction. London: Palgrave,
to Live, but because they Live
2000. Ernst Bloch on Wishful Imagination,
Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton—
Mifflin, 1979. Hope and Hunger
Le Grice, M. Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age. London: BFI, 2001.
Higson, A. "The Concept of National Cinema". Screen 3 (30), (1989): pp. "So hardly any of the ills of the body are removed when it is seen in
38-42 isolation. That is why all improvers of our situation who merely
the raw fruit
Sharff, S. The Elements of Cinema: Toward a Theory of Cinesthetic Impact. New concentrate on health are so petit-bourgeois and odd,
York: Columbia University Press, 1982 and vegetable brigade, the passionate herbivores, or even those who
Valkola, J. Interpretation of the Images. A Cognitive and Media Cultura practise specialbreathing techniques. All this is a mockery compared
Perspective on the Theory and Aesthetics of Audiovisual Narration. with sohd misery, compared with diseases which are produced not
Jyväskylä Polytechnic Institute, 2003. by weak flesh but by powerful htmger, not by faulty breathing but
Valkola, J. Towards a Philosophy of the Image. jyväskylä: Jyväskylä Univers by dust, smoke, and lead. Of course there are people who breathe
of Applied Sciences, 2006. correctly, who combine a pleasant self-assurance with well-venti-
lated lungs and an upright torso which is flexible to a ripe old age.
But it remains a pretequisite that these people have money; which
is more beneficial for a stooped posture than the art of breathing."
- Ernst Bloch

"Capitalism is unhealthy - even for the capitalist."

- Emst Bloch
"Any cook should be able to run the country."
- V. I. Lenin
"Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words
to fill their bellies."
- Theodor W. Adorno
242 The Culture of Food
We all have dreams. Dreams are the fabric that keeps our world
together; ties the past, the now and the future into a meaningful
whole. Without them there would be no reason to go any further .
Without them we would settle for what we have. But we have
two kinds of dreams, as Ernst Bloch has pointed out. We dream
during daytime as we dream at night. Nighttime dreams dawn
towards history. They show us what we have experienced, what
we have dreamt, in a past tense. This was the main idea
Sigmund Freud in his work The Interpretation of Dreams, w
he wrote in 1900. As Ernst Bloch (2000, p. 189) writes,
sleeping dream itself, then, usually derives in every sense fro
the past, decomposes what was just present into a past, holdin
on to the past in its lifeless fragments, its stereotypy, in iner
'nature's' tendency to repetition". But this past, as it lies before
us in the dream worlds, has a tendency to live in the now. It
articulated as a longing towards something that has long since
been gone but yet is vividly present to us as something conterrt-
porary.
Now we have in front of us the three dimensions of o
temporal being. In a fundamental sense, the intertwining of
past, the now and the future forms the fundamental question
all theoretical thinking for Bloch. The past contains the sufferin
tragedies and failures of humanity but also its unrealized hope
and potentialities. In Bloch's philosophy, history is a containe
full of real options and possibilities for actions that can be carried
out in the future. That is why Bloch speaks about the tenden
latency of the now. All the unrealized potentialities that ar
sedimentary and latent in the present, as well as the signs and
predictions that indicate the tendency of the direction an
movement of the present into the future, must be grasped and
activated by an anticipatory consciousness that at once perceives
the unrealized emancipatory potential in the past, the latencies
and tendencies of the present, and the realizable hopes of the
future. In a sense, as Jiirgen Habermas (1983, p. 63) argues, "i ii
contrast to the unhistorical procedure of Feuerbach's criticis
of ideology, which deprived Hegel's 'sublation' (Aufhebung)
The Culture of Food 243
half of its meaning (forgetting elevare and being satisfied with
töllere), Bloch presses the ideologies to yield their ideas to him;
he wants to save that which is true in false consciousness".
' Above all, it is a well-known fact that Bloch develops a
1til0s0phy of hope and the future, a dream towards the future,
projection of a vision of a future kingdom of freedom in which
human beings can finally fulfill their lives without postponement
d distance. He formulated this fundamental idea as early as
917 and never gave it up. As Martin Jay (1984, p. 178) writes,
'thonly minor variations [...1Bloch's first work Spirit of Utopia,
written in 1918, was of a piece with his last, Experimentum Mundi
of 1975". There is an extraordinary assertive attitude in Bloch's
work that made it possible for the themes to be developed over
the years, the terms to be clarified in different contexts, and
examples to be given in excess, but the basic ideas remained
• always the same.
ln this article, I am trying to make sense of our present time
by using some of Bloch's ideas. Why has the culture of food been
aised into such a central issue in our lives? We ali know about
the famous chefs that have their own TV shows, books, pans,
and kitchenware. Food has become an erotic, political, artistic,
social, and individual issue and project. We all know how much
ime many of us put into planning and making enormous meals
or our friends and family or how much time we wish to
dedicate to this. But at the same time fast food chains live their
olden age. People are consuming fast food because there is no
irrie for a decent lunch or dinner during a normal day. It is as if
there are non-synchronous elements in our temporal experience
our culture; people seem to be living in different timesin their
commonly shared life-world.
In what follows, I will discuss Bloch's idea about the
mtertwining of hunger and hope in connection with this probiem
of our time. My main point is to raise the question how we can
interpret food culture as a way to criticize contemporary culture
and not fall into a discussion that eventually promotes the culture
that we are supposed to be critical of. This can be made by
244 The Culture of Food
articulating the wishful intentions that are invested into the
culture of food as an actualization of hunger and hope for the
time and the opportunity to be with and to cherish our loved
ones and friends — i.e. the meaningful whole.
In a sense, the culture of food is of a two dimensional nature.
On the other hand, all these pictures of overflowing tables o
food, wine, butter, salads, meat, and bread are like secular images
of the messianic time. All these tapestries of peaceful meals with
family and friends articulate a wishful hope that goes beyond
the cultural ethos of the given time. In fact, it might go even
beyond time itself. But at the same time, it seems to be a perfect
solution to the question how human beings could be integrated
into the capitalistic mode of being of having, for which time is
all that matters. Time is that which is consumed, as a pur
abstraction of concrete material being. The cultural industry
produces ever more powerful devices for the act of consumption
as submission. These dreamlike pictures of release are the forums
for simulating being better than we actually are.
Bloch points out that the sheer tempo of life and the structura
anxiety that permeates life in capitalist society produces
tendencies toward escape and regression, especially among the
middle and lower petite-bourgeois strata. We can argue that
global capitalism submits the underlying population to th
vagaries and uncertainties of the market. In this situation, ther
has always been a tendency of human culture to produce picture
and places of hope, but the problem has always been how to
connect these pictures of wishful imagination to progressive
tendencies in general and not to the service of stagnation and
regression.
What drives us?
Bloch writes about the radical subjective dimension of hum
experience. But he describes this dimension highly different
than, for example, Freud did. Bloch understood this, and he wro
The Culture of Food 245
an extensive critique of psychoanalytic theories in his Principle
of Hope. Bloch starts his critique by rooting psychological
tendencies in the body and in hurnan needs. He is not primarily
interested in the instincts and the unconscious, like Freud was,
but in hunger. Bloch (1995, p. 65) argues that 'the stomach is the
first lamp into which oil must be poured. Its longing is precise;
its drive is so unavoidable that it cannot even be repressed for
ong".
But still Bloch conceptualizes "man as a quite extensive
complex of drives" (ibid., 47). Throughout his writings, he
mentions cravings, wishing, desiring, and hoping for a better
life that have been articulated in history and that are all the time
articulated in the present of the humanity. This is what distances
his thought from the Freudian emphases on castration, re-
pression, and the conservative political economy of the instincts.
Freudian concepts are more characterized by repetition,
excitation-release dynamism, and ultimately entropy of all living
beings. Freud's theoretical ideas are quite far from the ideas about
the development of new drives, impulses, and tendencies and
possibilities for change and transformation that are most vividly
present in Bloch's oeuvre.
By closely reading the psychoanalytical discussion, Bloch is
able to conclude that 'we realize that man is an equally
changeable and extensive complex of drives, a heap of changing,
and mostly badly ordered wishes. And a permanent motivating
orce, a single basic drive, in so far as it does not become
independent and thus hang in the air, is hardly conceivable." It
s obvious that this argument is directed against for example
reud's idea of the basic sexual instinct that is the kernel of all
the others drives that emerge in human activity. Bloch (ibid., 50)
sees that there are several basic drives which emerge as primary
t different times in social and individual life depending on the
conditions prevailing at the time. This idea is of course rooted
on Karl Marx's insight that "the whole of what is called world history
nothing but the creation of man by human labor, and the
mergence of nature for man."

246 The Culture of Food
"The unconscious of psychoanalysis is therefore, as we can see, never
a Not-Yet-Conscious, an element of progressions; it consists rathe
of regressions. Accordingly, even the process of making th"
unconscious conscious only clarifies What Has Been; i.e. there i
nothing new in the Freudian unconscious. This became even dear
when C.G. Jung, the psychoanalytic fascist reduced the libido and
its unconscious contents entirely to the primevaL According to him,
exclusively phylogenetic primeval memories or primeval fantasies
exist in the unconsdous, falsely designated 'archetypes'; and a
wishful irnages also go back into this night, only suggest prehistory
Jung even considers the night to be so colorful that consciousness
pales beside it; as a spurner of the light, he devalues consciousness
In contrast, Freud does of course unhold illuminating consdousneSs
but one which is itself surrounded by the ring of the id, by the fixed
unconsciousness of a fixed libido. Even highly productive artistic
creations do not lead out of this Fixum; they are simply sublimationä
of the self-enclosed libido." (Ibid., 56.)
In the quote above we can read how Bloch carries outhis critique
of Freud's notion of the primacy of the sexual drive and
notions of the ego drive and repression, repression and t
unconscious, and sublimation. As Bloch goes on, he is able to
make a distinction between Freud's rationalism and C. G. Jun
irrationalism. They both paved way for Alfred Adler's complete
psychoanalytical concept of the "will to power" where t
"biological factor is subjugated to the capitalistically interested
goal which is geared to the safeguarding of the personality,
raising the feeling of personality". Bloch (ibid., 58) argues
"Freud"s concept of libido borders on the 'will to life' in Schope
hauer's philosophy; Schopenhauer in fact described the sexu
organs as 'the focal points of the will.' Adler's `Will to Power
conversely coincides verbally, and partly also in terms of conten
with Nietzsche's definition of the basic drive from his last period
in this respect, Nietzsche has triumphed over Schopenhauer here,
that is to say, the imperialist elbow has triumphed over t
gentlemanly pleasure-displeasure body in psychoanalysis. T
competitive struggle which hardly leaves any time for sexual
worries stressed industriousness rather than randiness; the hectic
The Culture of Food 247
day of the businessman thus eclipses the hectic night of the rake
and his libido."
The disciples of Freud and the man himself were more
terested in the universal, non-historically varying basic
motivations of human behavior. Bloch tried to give them a wake
up call and pointed out the historically and economically varying
needs and drives of human beings. He argued that if these basic
drives are to be distinguished at all, "they will vary widely in
material terms in men according to individual classes and epochs
and consequently in terms of intention or as chive-direction"
(ibid., 64). One drive that does not vary in a fundamental sense
with history is the drive for self-preservation that manifests itself
as hunger. This drive is usually left out from psychoanalytical
theories, but it is the one that "set all the other drives in motion
in the first place" (ibid.).
Hunger, Hope, and the Not Yet
loch is interested in the subjective and objective dimensions of
ope, which receives its content from the subjective dimension
f human experience as it is articulated in human culture in
eneral. He tries to decipher and articulate the hidden texture of
the human drive and hunger for abetter future. This drive keeps
the humanity alive; it gives reason for its existence, and it also
contains the possibilities for improvement of life in general. This
orientation forward can be seen in the individual as the
intentionality of a subjective consciousness, as it relentlessly and
ontinuously reaches out for an adequate object. The object that
t seeks is not yet given in the present, and it has not been present
future. This
in the past, but it gives breath for tomorrow, for the
subject-object relationship is a dynamic that strives ultimately
owards its final goal, towards what is hoped for.
But before the distinction between subject and object there
Bloch (1995,
exists the basic and fundamental human drive that
45) names "hunger". This hunger lives off that which is "Not-
248 The Culture of Food
Yet". Its form is searching, a desire for something, through a goal-
directed drive. Bloch argues that hunger gives rise to dre
daydreams, wishes, planning, and a longing for somethingbette
for something that is different than the given, for the new,
defining human nature with one fundamental drive and on
fundamental attitude, Bloch is able to explain human beings as
being open towards the future and, what is even more, that
human beings are driven towards this unseen future by a forc
within them (ibid., 13). This is how hunger and hope intervene
as a motivational force behind humanity.
Human beings are able to actively generate images of
which they hunger and hope for. In this sense, Bloch (ibid., 85)
in agreement with Freud when he writes that "every dream is
wish fulfilment". He goes on and writes that "the daydream is
not a stepping-stone to the night-dream and is not disposed o
by the latter. Not even with respect to its clinical content, let alone
it artistic, pre-appearing [...] anticipatory content. For night-
dreams mostly cannibalize the former life of the drives, they fee
on the past if not archaic image-material, and nothing ne
happens under their bare moon" (ibid., 87). In this quote, Blo
gives weight to daydreams over night-dreams as a vehicle
wishes. As fantasies, daydreams are a fundamental key to
understanding how human beings align their imaginationwi
their needs. In the daydream "the ego starts a journey into
blue, but ends it whenever it wants" (ibid., 88). The daydream
remains under the conscious control of the will because the ego
of the daydream is active in the context of its waking life.
We cannot escape a daydream when it occurs, while we ai
able to, for example, pause the high tempo life that we are leadin
In this stillness of the now there opens a way to articulate t
"Not-Yet-Conscious" as a mode of consciousness of what
coming to be, "the psychological birthplace of the new"
116). If this dreaming while awake starts being critical towar s
the given, it becomes more authentic. This is inevitable, because
the daydream recognizes that everything in reality is pre gnan
with possibilities waiting to burst into wide-open spaces. In
The Culture of Food 249
sense, the human desire that finds its expression in daydreams
eads to hoping for a new and always possible future.
, This utopian imagination is touched by what is actually real.
This "real tendency forward" is an objectively real possibility
that is present in time. While fantasizing results in an abstract,
theoretical and in a sense remote vision of the future, the utopian
consciousness is completely attuned to the concrete and its real
and actual possibilities. This is why imaginative ideas or wishful
images are anticipatory; they extend reality beyond its definite
limits. They always try to reach "into the future possibilities of
ts being different and better" (ibid., 144). Bloch (ibid.) goes on
and writes that "Not-Yet Conscious itself must become conscious
in its act known in its content".
Our present world is not static; it is not fully determined. What
s real is practically and actually being transformed into the
"Possible". This is why it is a concrete aspect of utopia as a
"process-realzty" which has a corresponding element "of the
mediated Novum" (ibid., 197). The real is actually and always
in a process of becoming. As Bloch (1991, p. 132) writes in his
Heritage of Our Times, "everything flows, but the river comes from
a source every time. It takes matter with it from the regions
through which it has run, this colour its waters for a long time".
Utopia is already and always a synthesis that tries to articulate
ow the subjective is translated into the objective, how a dream
tries to picture a concrete relation to the future, and how hope is
e source of the history that human beings individually or
collectively create.
Hope is not given but it is learnt. In this sense, the ontology of
ope is the ontology of a real possibility We learn and silently
become aware of the dimension of the possible. In this process,
wishful thinking is transformed into a wish-full and effective
action. This why hope connects and forms an alliance between
theory and practice, whichbecome a world-changing energy that
is based on a primary hunger for what is not yet present. (Bloch
1995, p. 73.) Bloch (1970, p. 92) writes that "action will release
available transitional tendencies into active freedom only if the
250 The Culture of Food
utopian goal is clearly visible, unadulterated and unrenounced
Even though the utopias have at best promised their still so
palpable optima, but have promised them as objectively and really
possible". In this sense, utopia is a blue horizon in which eve ry
reality is grasped with its hidden possibilities.
Bloch argues that future is the mode of time which provides
the needed space for the realization of the possibilities of histo
or more accurately, in history. What is already and what is not-
yet belong to human activity that is actualized in world histmy.
This is why Bloch sees that as hurnan yearning and venturin
beyond appear in a variety of forms, it follows that utopia wi
be conceived in various different ways. But only concrete utopias
can generate hope and action that will open the passage to
new future. That is why hope is connected to that which is no
yet realized, i.e. to hunger.
Something's missing
All that we have been arguing until now can be seen from th
viewpoint of empty spaces. When we see that something is vacan
we usually feel as if there is something missing. We have an
urgent need to fill up the vacant places until there is no empt
space left. Bloch once said that this something, which the
primitive hunger is directed to, is best articulated by Bertol
Brecht with the expression "something's missing". He continues.
"this sentence, which is inMahagonny, is one of the most profound
sentences that Brecht ever wrote, and it is in two words" (Bloch
1988, p. 15). Theodor Adorno interrupts Bloch's argument at this
point and adds: "May I add a word? [...[We have come strangel
close to the ontological proof of God, Ernst [Bloch interjects, "That
surprises me!". Adorno continues:[All of this cornes from wha
you said when you used the phrase borrowed from Brecht -
Something's Missing - a phrase that we actually cannot have if
seeds or ferment of what this phrase denotes were not possible.
(Ibid., 16.)
The Culture of Food 251
The idea that something is missing can be articulated from
our immediate experience of ourselves. As Bloch (1970, p. 1)
famously writes "I am. But without possessing myself. So we
first come to be". He goes on and says that "I move, that I speak:
is not there. Only inunediately afterward can,I hold it up in front
of me" (Bloch 2000, p. 7). We live in our given moment in the
"darkness of the lived moment" (Bloch 1995, p. 292). In this kind
of situation there is no what, no content, and no answers. But
what is quite paradoxical is that from here, in fact only from this
darkness, can experience of hope arise in the first place. It is as is
we were in a "zone of silence in the very place where the music
s being played" (ibid., 295). This is why "often the same cause
which produces negative astonishment is capable of producing
happiness as the Positivum of astonishment" (ibid., 302).
For Bloch, the hope of philosophy that is "open to the
extraordinary" (Bloch 2000, p. 268) remains the essential and total
reality "including the other side which is not yet" (ibid., 276).
Bloch (ibid., 267) continues that "there will still come the
inevitable ernancipation of humanity by technology, and its now
irresistible consecration of life, namely the potential abolition of
overty and the emancipation, compelled by the revolutionary
proletariat, from all questions of economics". Bloch argues that
"certainly everything, and above all human life, is a kind of
transcendere, a venturing beyond the given, but this trans-
cendere, as concreteutopian, also certainly does not involve any
transcendence" (1995, p. 1373).
Here Bloch is connecting his ideas deeply into the messianic
tradition, like Walter Benjamin (1978, pp. 312-313) already did
in his Theologico-Political Fragment. In fact, it was even more
connected to the theocratic movement, as he believed that the
messianic kingdom could be realized within the profane
has described
continuum of history. Michael Löwy (1980)
different groups of Jewish intellectuals inhis "Jewish Messianism
and Libertarian Utopia in Central Europe (1900-1933)". He
divides the "generations of 1914" into three groups: the anarchist
252 The Culture of Food
religious Jews, the religious Jewish anarchists, and the atheist-
religious, anarcho-Bolshevik Jews.
Löwy argues in his article that there is a difference whether
one, being a Jewish intellectual, chooses a more religious or
more political point. But we might argue that while Bloch
belonged to the latter group, he was in a sense also a figure that
acted as a link between the two different groups. In Anson
Rabinbach's words, the spirit of these groups was that of modern
Jewish Messianism, and Bloch's thought, together with Benja-
min's, expressed a "pure type' of this thinking" (Rabinbach 1997,
p. 29). These two were the only ones in this generation who
brought "a self-consciously Jewish and radical Messianism to
their political and intellectual concerns" (ibid., 30).
In the spirit of Jewish Messianism, Bloch seems to have
thought that man is only a part of a larger cosmic movement. In
his mind, this larger category was a cosmic process of fulfillment,
"a teleological drive embodied in creative matter" (Jay 1984, p.
191). Even though he wrote much about the possibility that in
some point of history man finally might become the master o
this process, he still stressed that before this concrete utopia was
reached, the process was self-moving. As Habermas (1973, pp,
240-241) writes, "Bloch's search for utopia not only confines itself
entirely to the sphere which Hegel reserves for absolute spirit;
even within this sphere he stops before he gets to the formation
of modern consciousness".
This is also a basis for the real problern in Bloch's philosoph
and it should not be overlooked when wTiting about his work.
Because of the large cosmic movement he was trying to articulate,
he eventually was forced by his own thought to pinpoint a certain
historical movement as a real articulation of hope and utopia
without which the historical fluctuations would have been too
much to bear. To his vexation, he connected his ideas - because
Fascism was obviously out of the question - to the real socialism
as it was being developed in the Soviet Union and later in East
Germany. As he wrote in Principle of Hope, "without factions in
The Culture of Food 253
love, with an equally concrete pole of hatred, there is no genuine
löve; without partiality of the revolutionary class standpoint there
only remains backward idealism instead of forward practice"
(Bloch 1995, p. 274). As Bloch believed, like most other Marxists,
that capitalism entailed Fascism, he was during most of his career
in a sense politically deluded, as his defense of Stalinism shows.
Only in the 1960's he was finally able to declare that he had made
a mistake. But most ironic was the fact that he never took the
fateful step of actually joining the party the step that proved to
have almost devastating effects for the counterpart of the
historical situation, i.e. Martin Heidegger.
Food and hope
Television, movies, books etc. are selling people anachronisms.
They promise a venture to times before ours - to a promised
land that existed before the fall. We consume these anachronisms
and fill our empty spaces with make-believe promises of
fulfillment of our needs. But at the same time these archaic
promises are in fact articulating a self-critical movement of our
own lifestyle.
We all are inclined to hope for an improvement in our
situation. It is obviously true that where there is life there is also
hope - hope that the new day would bring something we need,
that any minute the doorbell might ring and the packet would
finally arrive. Jakob Flach (1998) pictured a landscape of hope in
his Minestra, Dank ftir Rebhuhn, Schwein und SpargelAn the book
he writes down in a most detailed way the experiences of two
food-loving individual ramblers on the side roads of Italy. Love
of food and wine is depicted for the reader as the great credo of
culinary passion. Flach was able to make his voyage when the
times were different, when people would open their door to
hungry strangers and give nourishment for the poor. Those times
were pregnant with hope, when sitting around the table with
the family, friends and strangers was a simulation of eternity.
 254 The Culture of Food
In the story, this hope is articulated as overflowing tables filled
with meat, bread, salad, olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and wine.
It is as if the people were caught up in an eternal Sunday where
there is no need to go anywhere, where only the present matters
In the book there is a monk who tells how the perfect salad is
made of fresh green salad leaves with the right amount of salt,
oil and vinegar. The preparing of food receives a form of a ritual
in which time loses its meaning and the efforts are not counted.
The text is filled with stillness and the expectation of a perfect
meal.
How many times have we felt this feeling of an eternal Sunday
when we have been eating in a fast food restaurant? Bloch (1995,
p. 813) sees in Pieter Brueghel's painting Land of Cockaigne the
same travel to a better world that Flach articulates in his
magnificent book. In the painting there "is no sign of any
windmill, and nothing beyond what can be drunk, eaten boiled
or roasted [...] to be found". In the picture three men are lying
flat on their backs under an apple tree. A peasant, a knight, an
a scholar are enjoying their life under the same tree, in the same
soft evening sun. The peasant and the knight are fast asleep but
the scholar has his eyes and mouth open, as if he was waitin
for the food and the drink to be poured in. In fact, there is
something infantile about the eyes and the smile of the man.
Also Flach articulates this infantile longing for perfect
nourishment. In the book it materializes as the wandering of the
poet and the painter from house to house, from village to village.
In a sense, in Bloch's thought the whole process of venturing
beyond the given gets its force from the infantile wishful
imagination that does not leave us regardless of the fact that our
rational abilities gain much more room in our daily lives. As Bloch
(ibid., 838) writes, "there is no thinking for its own sake and never
has been. Thinking began with wanting to recognize a situation
in order to know one's way around in it. Behind this thinking
stood fears and above all wishing needs which are to be satisfied,
and moreover by means of a short cut, deliberately".
The Culture of Food 255
The most pressing need was, and still is, hunger. "The whip
of hunger 1...11 forces us to work, but this work wears us out in
itS own way exactly like hunger" (ibid., 886). As is widely known,
in the early 17th century Tornmaso Campanella restricted the
working day to four hours, and he saw this to be a condition for
the abolition of poverty. He wrote in his City of the Sun: "They
also say that great poverty makes men cowards, shrewd, thieves,
deceitful, lawless, liars, false witnesses; and wealth makes them
insolent, proud, ignorant, traitors, loveless, presuming to know
what they don't know. Yet, communai life makes them both rich
and poor: rich because they have and possess everything, poor
because they do not attach themselves to things, as if they were
their servants, but all things are of use to them:: (Campanella
1981, p. 51.) Campanella goes on and argues that "among them,
as everyone has a share of official tasks and artS and manual
labor, each one needs only to work four hours per day; whereas
the rest of the time is spent playing, debating, reading, teaching,
walking, and all these activities are always performed with joy".
This description is quite close to the utopia that Marx wrote in
his Paris manuscripts in 1844.
Around the lively table there concretized a kind of utopian
impulse free from the burden of work. People were discussing,
debating, eating together — a meal through which the community
renews its life. In the jewish tradition, the meals with family and
friends have always carried a special importance, because the
community is not formed by speaking but by the family eating
together. As Franz Rosenzweig (1971, p. 315) writes: "the common
meal with its silent community represents actual community
alive in the midst of life". In this sense, the meal has a critical
dimension in our society. In this culture, "eating alone and
especially reading one's paper while eating, are signs of a
civilization that is either unripe and sour, or overripe and touched
with rod, The sweet, fully ripened fruit of humanity craves the
community of man with man in the very act of renewing the life
of the body" (ibid., 316).
256 The Culture of Food
But nowadays the community of man with man is not usually
learned around the meaL It is learned as fast food that i
consumed alone and in haste. This was the situation that made
Carlo Petrini act. In Italy in 1986, he founded Slow Food, an
international association that promotes food and wine culture.
The association also defends food and agricultural biodiversity
worldwide. It is openly "against standardisation of taste, defends
the need for consumer information, protects cultural identities
tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguards foods and
cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition
and defends domestic and wild animal and vegetable species"
(http: / /www.slowfood.com / eng/ sf cose /sf cose.lasso).
As a movement, Slow Food tries to link pleasure and food
with awareness and responsibility. Thus, it contains the utopian
impulse that Bloch was trying to promote. Through its
understanding of gastronomy in relation to politics, agriculture
and the environment, Slow Food has become an active player in
the politics of agriculture and ecology. The association has three
major aims and projects: Defense of Biodiversity, Taste Education,
and Linking Producers and Consumers. It is obvious that in a
world where "the pleasures of taste are not always learned
through leisurely meals around a lively table, we must make
conscious effort to explore, question and experiment" (http:/ /
www.slowfood.com/ eng/sf cose/ sf cose mission.lasso). In the
effort to produce a more conscious taste, there is always a need
for critical diagnosis of the present times, and in a sense Slow
Food is a fine example how this can be carried out in a concrete
sense (see Moisio & Suoranta 2006).
Conclusion
In Bloch's philosophy, the basic experience is the primordial
hunger — hunger for something that would fill up the empty or
hollow Space. This hollow space is something that the social
The Culture of Food 257
power of imagination cannot keep up with. For Bloch, hollow
Space is not only a sign of alienated and anonymous relations
but also the stand-in for all sorts of promises of pleasure. In a
sense, the longing for a communal meal, as Rosenszweig pictured
it above, is a hollow space in our society. It is a utopia, the non-
place where human happiness occurs. This is also the reason
why Bloch develops a concept of concrete utopia to block out
the danger that is hidden in what he calls abstract utopian
thinking (see Bloch 1995, pp. 471-624).
Darkness, the open-endedness, the longing of the lived
moment is the knot of the world that drives towards resolution.
Where there is irresolution, there life is cast every moment back
to its beginning hunger stays unsatisfied. But what satisfies us
is something that is pleasant or agreeable, something that we
can enjoy. Bloch 1312) sees that "nothing is good in itself if
it is not desired. But nothing is desired unless it represents itself
as good". In this sense, the primordial hunger needs a goal,
because there is no drive towards something if this something
does not exist. But the goal is not definite, as something that is
good might be better. As Bloch (ibid., 1312) writes, "even a dish
the enjoyment of which is immediately followed by repletion
may be adequate, i.e. substantial and nourishing enough, but it
can scarcely not be prepared even more splendidly, or at least
more skillfully".
But there is a feeling that this cannot go on forever. As many
fairytales teach us, we go on in our lives, wanting this or that,
but when the time comes and someone asks us what we
absolutely want, we do not have the answer. h this sense, we
have to stop when we find something that is not renunciatory
but fulfilling. "No one has yet been satisfied by mere wishing"
(ibid., 1354).
"In a dream I saw myself in Goethe's study. It bore no resemblance
to the one in Weimar. Above all, it was very small and had only one
window. The side of the writing desk abutted on the wall opposite
the window. Sitting and writing at it was the poet, in extreme old
258 The Culture of Food

age. I was standing to one side when he broke off to give me a small
vase, an urn from antiquity, as a present. I turned it between m
hands. An immense heat filled the room. Goethe rose to his feet and
accompanied me to an adjoining chamber, where a table was set for
my relatives. It seemed prepared, however, for many more than
their number. Doubtless there were places for my ancestors, too. At
the end, on the right, I sat down beside Goethe. When the meal was
over, he rose with dffficulty, and by gesturing I sought leave to Matti Itkonen
support him. Touching his elbow, I began to weep with emotion.
(Benjamin 1978, p. 63.)
Estonia's Bane Revisited
Philosophico-Critical Recollections,
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bservations and Images
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Bloch, E. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. Cambridge: 1v111 1988. Prkis
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Bloch, E. The Principle of Hope. Vol 1, 2, 3. Cambridge: MIT, 1995.
Bloch, E. The Spirit of Utopia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. What is this present moment? What does it comprise? It is
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Löwy, M. 1980. "Jewish Messianism and Libertarian Utopia in Central The aesthetic sense comprehensio aesthetica — is imbued
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