Eating has always carried a spiritual dimension and has continually been endowed with further spiritual meaning, leaving spiritualized eating and the spirituality of eating deeply intertwined. Photo: IC PHOTO

As a fundamental activity of human survival, eating is embedded within cultural systems and carries distinct spiritual significance across different traditions. In Confucian thought, for example, li (ritual) governs dietary practices. In The Analects, a classic collection of Confucius’ sayings and conversations, the chapter “Xiangdang” records Confucius’ dietary habits, including that “he did not dislike to have his rice finely cleaned, nor to have his mince meat cut quite small,” “he did not eat meat which was not cut properly,” and “when eating, he did not converse.” Taken together, these habits—whatever practical considerations they may also reflect—show how thoroughly dietary practice was expected to conform to the principles of li.

In Daoism, eating is guided by the great Dao (way or path). Food is appreciated for its intrinsic qualities rather than as an object of pursuit through the five worldly flavors—sour, bitter, sweet, pungent, and salty—expressing the Daoist ideal of existence. Buddhism generally prescribes abstinence from alcohol, meat, and pungent vegetables, despite cases in which alcohol is used as a means of spiritual practice. Whether or not abstinence is observed, its significance is intelligible only within the broader framework of Buddhist culture.

Unlike Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, which regard eating as a form of spiritual practice, medicine approaches diet primarily through the pursuit of health. Traditional Chinese medicine, in particular, has a long-standing tradition of using food as medicine and medicine as food—namely dietary therapy and medicinal cuisine. This approach not only distills accumulated empirical knowledge, but also reflects the Chinese cultural understanding of the properties of substances and the human body.

Food is endowed with different spiritual meanings across cultural systems, while social strata, historical periods, and regions each give those meanings their own distinctive inflection. In this sense, a person’s dietary habits often make it possible to infer the cultural system to which that person belongs.

Moreover, eating—or food itself—is generally believed to be connected to a person’s abilities, temperament, virtue, and even the overall condition of the soul. People seek not only to discern the soul through food, but also to regulate the soul through dietary practices. Analyses of personality based on preferences for meat or vegetarian diets, as well as dietary ideas such as the doctrine of signatures, which holds that foods resembling a body part can nourish or heal that part, remain common.

Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, claimed that the German spirit originated in “melancholy viscera,” while Filippo Tommaso Marinetti advocated banning pasta in Italy on the grounds that it rendered people clumsy, suspicious, sluggish, and pessimistic. Such ideas, to varying degrees, exemplify what might be called “dietary determinism.”

Dietary determinism appears to emphasize the influence of food on the human spirit. Fundamentally, however, it involves projecting human mental states onto food through association and analogy, and then linking the two. Apart from occasional empirical coincidences, this kind of integration is largely devoid of rational grounding.

Across actual historical development, eating has never been merely material: It has always carried a spiritual dimension even as human cultures have continually invested it with further spiritual meaning, leaving spiritualized eating and the spirituality of eating deeply intertwined. Nevertheless, in theoretical terms, a relatively clear boundary can still be drawn between them. Spiritualized eating refers to the human act of endowing food with spiritual significance, which falls within the scope of historical and cultural studies. The spirituality of eating, by contrast, denotes the fundamental significance that eating’s own mode of existence holds for the human spirit, which belongs to the domain of philosophical inquiry.

Existing philosophical research has tended to neglect eating, and this neglect is closely bound up with eating’s distinctive mode of existence. In brief, eating is characterized by breaking through the external, formal constraints of substances in order to reach their interiority, with the aim of achieving an inner, substantial accord between humans and things. In the process of eating, chewing holds particularly prominent symbolic significance: It marks the beginning of eating; all preceding acts are oriented toward chewing, and only through chewing do they acquire meaning.

Traditional philosophy, constrained by its own perspective, has long delayed serious reflection on eating, yet eating has continuously exerted its spiritual effect. In this regard, the study of the spirituality of eating is not merely one ordinary inquiry among many studies of human spiritual activity, nor is food philosophy simply another subfield of philosophy. Rather, food philosophy seeks to reveal a mode of engagement with things different from the one that originated in ancient Greece and came to dominate modern society, while illuminating the existential conditions—or realities of existence—that belong to us yet remain obscured.

Wang Jinqin is an associate professor from the Yuelu Academy at Hunan University.