The Virtues of the Table | Granta

  • Published: 02/01/2014
  • ISBN: 9781847087164
  • Granta Books
  • 320 pages

The Virtues of the Table

Julian Baggini

How we eat, farm and shop for food is not only a matter of taste. Our choices regarding what we eat involve every essential aspect of our human nature: the animal, the sensuous, the social, the cultural, the creative, the emotional and the intellectual. Thinking seriously about food requires us to consider our relationship to nature, to our fellow animals, to each other and to ourselves. So can thinking about food teach us about being virtuous, and can what we eat help us to decide how to live?

From the author of The Ego Trick and The Pig that Wants to be Eaten comes a thought-provoking exploration of our values and vices. What can fasting teach us about autonomy? Should we, like Kant, ‘dare to know’ cheese? Should we take media advice on salt with a pinch of salt? And can food be more virtuous, more inherently good, than art?

Julian Baggini has that rare but wonderful gift of being able to be at once profound and highly entertaining. This remarkable book combines the pleasures of the table with those of philosophy, and once again this most engaging of philosophers has achieved a perfect balance. Marvellous

Alexander McCall Smith

Excellent. By examining the virtues of all aspects of food, a very broad approach, the author cuts through all the myths, confusion and lazy thinking with a precision and humour that enables the reader to think and eat better. If you care about what you eat then you need to buy this book

Charlie Hicks, presenter of Radio 4’s Veg Talk

[Baggini is] a serious thinker and a fluent writer... This book might cause you to look again at some of the choices you make about what to eat, and how you go about eating it

Erica Wagner, Financial Times

The Author

JULIAN BAGGINI‘s books include the Sunday Times bestselling How the World Thinks; How to Think Like a Philosopher; The Virtues of the Table; and the bestselling The Pig That Wants to be Eaten, all published by Granta Books. He has served as the Academic Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and is a member of the Food Ethics Council. He has written for the Guardian, the TLS, the Financial Times and Prospect, among others, and for magazines, academic journals and think tanks. His website is microphilosophy.net.

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