Leon Kass’ The Hungry Soul is a profound meditation on eating and food. Kass believes, as Rod does, that eating raises the most important questions of nature and ethics. He also explains why we give so little attention to it and similar subjects:
“Modern thought has come to teach the uselessness of natural knowledge for ethics. . . . Yes, we still quite naturally wonder what it means to be a human being, but our science is not interested in either being or meaning. Many of us still argue about whether something is good or beautiful; but the sophisticated ones, following the direction taken by science, know that such arguments are pointless because these ‘values’, being of purely human construction, have only subjective and relative meaning.”
