from “take and eat,” chapter 1.

There is something hidden in our food—beyond microplastics and unpronounceable additives. Every meal carries within it the trace of something uncanny. The act of eating—so mundane, so routine—conceals within it an ancient terror. In it, there hovers a quiet recollection of a time when the kill was for survival. At its most primal, eating was a simple law: eat or be eaten. In this feasting continuum, the only distinction between eater and eaten was sheer might. But at some point, eating broke out of this cycle and became something else, prescribing entire ways of understanding the world. No longer just life or death, it turned into discernment. It moved from subsistence to knowledge, from hunger to the ordering of things.

The mouth knows more than we think. Whereas sight and hearing are senses of distance, the mouth is engulfing and intimate. It does not contemplate or listens to from afar; it perceives by taking in. Not only does it distinguish bitter from sweet, soft from rough, fresh from foul—it understands proximity, presence, warmth, breath, care, love. Before we speak, before we name, we taste. We taste it all.

 Both in On the Soul and in History of Animals, Aristotle reminds us that, unlike the other senses, touch is not confined to a single organ. It extends from the outermost edge to the innermost core, mediating every encounter between self and world. As Alex Purves notes, touch “ranges beyond a single sense organ, encompassing not only the skin but also the interior of the body. It mediates almost every aspect of interpersonal relations in antiquity, from the everyday to the erotic, just as it also provides a primary point of contact between the individual and the outside world.”[1] The mouth, uniquely positioned at the threshold of inside and outside, is perhaps the most heightened organ of contact—and still, Aristotle has very little, almost nothing to say about it. His discussion of taste in On the Soul barely covers a few pages, and the word itself, stoma (“mouth,”) is nowhere to be found in the treatise.

 Indeed, rather than being accepted as an instrument of knowledge, the mouth has more often than not been cast as an organ of defilement. In Rome, to possess an os impurum—an “unclean mouth”—was to bear the mark of contamination. A polluted mouth was believed to be the result of transgressive sexual acts—particularly oral contact with bodily orifices. In such cases, “a strong indicator that a person was thought to have engaged in ‘impure’ sexual acts was that their kisses became contaminating, shunned and described as unclean.”[2] The mouth, capable of speech and even wisdom, was also a locus of excess, feared for its contact with what should not be touched—much less kissed or eaten. It is no wonder that, throughout classic and Hellenistic philosophy and literature, the mouth regularly falters. In Plato’s Meno, for instance, the mouth of the one struck by the sting of questioning is numbed into silence—paralyzed at the very moment of intellectual struggle. Meno compares Socrates’ inquiring to the touch of a torpedo fish (narkē), leaving his mind and mouth numb, rendering him incapable of responding. The mouth here is not so much a site of perception but one of impotence, where thought itself is suspended in confusion, and not (as when in theophagic rapture) in illumination or ecstasy.[3]

[1] Alex Purves, Touch and the Ancient Senses, p. 1.

[2] Jack Lennon, Contaminating Touch in the Roman World, in Purves, Touch and the Ancient Senses, p. 130.

[3] Rebecca Fleming, Losing Touch, in Purves, Touch and the Ancient Senses, p. 24.