Eat to Live or Live to Eat: Metaphor and Truth

Does the act of eating literally precede the birth of language as metaphor for knowing the truth? Can we think of a language that talks about food without thinking of food as the basis of human languages? Is there a truth to eating outside the discourse of language as the idealized representation of the human condition? Are we ever thinking of anything apart from food? Or, are we thinking at all when we are not thinking of eating? If the structure of our thinking is about food, to think of something other than food is to turn language into a shibboleth without a material basis to it. To think of eating in opposition to thinking where you do not have to talk about eating is to privilege the mind over the body. Food is the substructure to the superstructure of thought; to eat is to take arms against a sea of ideals; more importantly, it is to root our understanding of metaphor within a politics of eating; it is to look for truth in whether someone has eaten or not eaten playing a determining role in the formation of ideas about the world. Writing and popular culture have one thing in common which is that they must balance the demands that eating will make in the assertion of one's humanity with the ideas about humanity that perhaps have little to do with the activity of eating. This paper argues that in the acknowledgment of eating as central to any notion of the truth, we make food interchangeable with how we ingest a metaphor so much so that we are left wondering why there are people who go to sleep on empty stomachs!