Sharon Mason, assistant professor of the department of physiology and religion, spoke about why and how food is essential to humans in a lecture Oct. 6 in Ferguson Chapel.
Mason started off the talk by questioning food’s importance and asked her audience if food is merely a way to provide nutrients for the human body.
Mason said, “We could do a little thought experiment. If someone gave you the opportunity to plug into an overnight IV to fuel your body, then you would get all your nutritional needs met for the day, would you do it?”
Mason said the IV thought experiment would still leave the human body craving specific foods, such as a person’s favorite food. This demonstrates that food is a way humans bond and show identity, rather than purely survive.
Mason also touched on the ethics of consumption.
“I want to talk about how food relates to the ethical treatment of all the different connections that we have with food systems. This includes animals, people who grow the food, transportation, who prepares, it includes the natural world.”
Mason questioned the sustainability of society’s current eating habits and raised the question of whether people will have access to the same food in the future.
Junior Jazz Brown said, “The ethics of food was my favorite topic. Producing and providing food for people and the sustainability of food. If everyone overindulged, how would that affect humans 100 years from now?”
Mason also touched on how food relates to the body through all five senses.
“Philosophy for science tends to really focus on vision, but I wonder what science would look like if dogs could do it. I am curious what kind of sciences dogs would produce,” Mason said. “Their main mode of sensory contact with the world is smell … Dogs would probably have a way more developed account of smell.”
Food is also a medium for humans to interact with the world and the surrounding people.
“Food is related to memory and subconscious, particularly through smell and taste,” Mason said. “This makes me think of ‘Ratatouille’ … in that moment when the food critic is sitting there about to eat the food Remy made for him and he eats it. What happens? He is instantly transported back to his childhood.”
Mason’s final argument was how food is associated with culture and identity.
What determines if something is food? Mason said, “People in different cultures eat really different things, and you can learn a lot about a culture by what they eat. Food is often related to the region. There are some cultures that think that fermented bovine mammary fluid is good. Did anyone eat cheese today?”
The lecture was part of the Keystone Conversations program presented by the college of arts, humanities and social sciences; with the goal of informing and shedding light on why food is more than meeting a daily recommended value.
