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Getting Stoic About Food (Episode 77)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
What does a Stoic eat?
How does a Stoic think about food?
That's what Caleb and Michael discuss in this episode.
Citing all 4 of the Roman Stoics, they cover how ancient Stoics thought about food and how that can shape our behavior today.
(01:56) Intro
(05:06) Musonius Rufus on Food
(14:05) The Social Role of Food
(19:09) Seneca on Food
(24:53) Mythbusting
(28:00) What Should Other People Eat?
(33:00) Context Context
(35:29) Implications
***
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Transcript
Epictetus' Banquet Metaphor
00:00:00
Speaker
Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around, it comes to you. Stretch out your hand. Take a portion of it politely. It passes on. Do not detain it. Or it has not yet come to you. Do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act towards children. So toward a wife. So toward office. So toward well.
00:00:23
Speaker
And Evictetus there is making an analogy between the person who can basically navigate a dinner party, well, and someone who lives life well.
Podcast Introduction: Stoicism & Food
00:00:31
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of Stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
00:00:47
Speaker
This episode is all about food. What does the stoic eat? More generally, how do they think about issues of diet? Zooming into a particular issue like this is a useful way to crystallize how stoics think about practical issues. That's exactly what Michael and I do in this conversation.
00:01:08
Speaker
We don't have any specific meal recommendations or meal plans, at least not yet. But we talk about the sort of considerations Stoics argued we should keep in mind.
Stoic Approach to Diet
00:01:20
Speaker
Here is our conversation. Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. And I'm Michael Trombley. And what did you eat today, Michael?
00:01:36
Speaker
I had rice, peppers, and salmon. That's what I had today. What about you, Kale? I had a spinach pasta for lunch and then had a small dessert with that lunch, which was vanilla ice cream and a chocolate chip cookie. Dessert for lunch. That's nice. That's controversial.
00:01:56
Speaker
It is controversial. So today we're going to be talking about stoicism and food. And, you know, maybe we'll have a better sense of whether that was too decadent of a early decision earlier today.
Food's Role: Nourishment & Community
00:02:09
Speaker
But I think the discussion about stoicism and food is interesting and important first, just because
00:02:17
Speaker
food, diet itself is clearly an important aspect of human lives. You know, what we eat is a matter, what the Stoics would call is largely indifferent. What you consume isn't going to make or break your life. It's not going to determine what's happy or not, but rather, you know, how you use indifference is what contributes to happiness, whether that's health, wealth,
00:02:46
Speaker
customs or food so and food is what we're going to be talking about today that's the relevant indifference we're talking about the proper uses of food so there's that aspect to it and then eating also just such a personal
Debunking Stoic Myths on Food
00:03:01
Speaker
and communal matter
00:03:05
Speaker
And as such, I think warrants attention, warrants an amount of philosophical thought. And then one other note I have here on why it's important to discuss is that I think several myths about stoicism emerge when you think about things like stoicism and diet. Stoic views on the importance of norms, whether stoics, you know, are
00:03:33
Speaker
statue-like creatures who don't enjoy foods, this sort of thing. And I think it's an opportunity to rebut some of those stoke myths while also exploring an important matter of living, which is, you know, what are we going to eat?
00:03:49
Speaker
Yes. I like your point about deeply personal, something that everybody does, you know, besides maybe we think about mental more or the importance of thinking about death. Well, food is going to also going to be that thing. That's one of those things that's consistent in everyone's life and very personal in your relationship with it.
Musonius Rufus & Seneca on Diet
00:04:06
Speaker
But then also that communal aspect you mentioned is that there's the cultural family friendship component to it too. So yeah, food's important. Who knew foods and food is important. I'll say it here.
00:04:18
Speaker
Right. So for the purposes of this conversation, we'll touch on a number of quotes, number of passages from the ancient Stoics, some lines that they have on food. They got some lines from Musonius, Rufus, and Seneca in particular here. And use those sort of as a springboard for
00:04:40
Speaker
we can think of as the stoic conclusions. What are the stoic upshots for us today about thinking about food?
00:04:51
Speaker
So we'll start with Musonius Rufus. And one reason Musonius Rufus is so great is that he's always concerned about these very specific practical matters. What's the right vocation for a philosopher? Should philosophers have beards or not? And of course, one of those matters is food. So here's a line from some notes on Musonius Rufus.
00:05:16
Speaker
He often talked in a very forceful manner about food, on the grounds that food was not an insignificant topic and that what one eats has significant consequences. In particular, he thought that mastering one's appetites for food and drink was the beginning of the basis for self-control.
00:05:37
Speaker
On one occasion, he dispensed with his other customary topics, and he had the following to say about
Food, Pleasure, & Self-Control
00:05:43
Speaker
food. Instead of reading out that longer passage, Russ, I'll just stop there. Any thoughts on that passage from Musonius Michael? Yeah, well, I mean, the part that draws my mind is that mastering one's appetite for food and drink was the beginning of the basis of self-control. And what that makes me think of is this idea of, look, if we think of self-control or moderation, in a lot of cases, for people,
00:06:07
Speaker
We can think about moderation in terms of these broader virtues, like being the correct amount of courageous and not foolhardy, but not also cowardly. You can think of moderation as finding that kind of Aristotelian mean in these situations. But for most people, if you talk to a normal person, a non-philosopher of moderation,
00:06:28
Speaker
they're going to think in terms of pleasure. They're going to think in terms of that base relationship with things like food, drink, drugs, gambling, these kind of vices, I guess, and the kind of associated pleasures that come with those. And so I think food has this really interesting relationship where
00:06:50
Speaker
It's necessary. It has like necessary biological functions, but then it also has this relationship with pleasure, right? And so the way I'm understanding that part is this idea of like, look, this is a kind of pleasure you have to confront. It's not something you can just abstain from. And so you have to figure out while engaging in it.
00:07:10
Speaker
how to engage with it the right way. While eating every day, how to eat the right amount, an appropriate amount, a temperate amount. If you can do that, that's that first real exposure, I would say, to self-control. It's a pretty robust type of self-control. That's my thought is that immediate relationship between food and pleasure and what that says about your capacity to moderate yourself and how that's important for stoicism. It's almost this view of eating as a training ground where
00:07:40
Speaker
food is obviously something that can be so pleasurable and that brings forth opportunity to use food, use pleasure, or I should say rather relate to pleasure in a moderate and virtuous way. It's the sort of thing that anyone can do since we all need to eat in order to be nourished, which I think just brings up the
00:08:09
Speaker
other issue of like, what's the general purpose of food to begin with? Because that's a consideration that you can use to answer questions like, okay, moderation is in a virtue. Moderation involves finding the right amount of things.
Debating Minimalism in Diet
00:08:25
Speaker
One way to find the right amount of things is to have an account of the purpose or the goal of a given thing.
00:08:34
Speaker
So on that front, we have some more lines from Busonius Rufus. To summarize the whole subject of food, I say that the goal of eating is to bring about both health and strength. Consequently, one should eat only inexpensive foods and should be concerned with decency and appropriate moderation, and most of all, with restrained and studious behavior.
00:09:01
Speaker
So in our episode on Musonius Rufus, one way to think about Musonius Rufus is almost as a Spartan minimalist. He's not an ascetic. He doesn't think, oh, you should.
00:09:17
Speaker
fast and reject all the worldly goods in order to become more virtuous.
Balancing Perspectives on Food
00:09:26
Speaker
But he does have this serious minimalist streak. He does explicitly admire different stories of the Spartans who are either rejecting pleasures or submitting themselves to pain and by doing so becoming or displaying their strength, their courage, what have you.
00:09:46
Speaker
So I think that's what this passage brings to mind. It's very focused. What's the purpose of food? It's to bring about health and strength. As such, you should eat with those goals in mind, which means to have really a pretty minimalistic focus on food. Yeah, I like that. I mean, because one way you can read this, I mean, I'm not a psychologist by any means.
00:10:10
Speaker
I'm not trained in psychology. But I think about sometimes with people's relationship with food, sometimes it's made worse by kind of hyperobsession or focus on food. Sometimes people's relationship with food is made worse by stressing about it. And so sometimes when I think this, the best moderation
Seneca vs. Indulgence
00:10:30
Speaker
is to just not stress about it and just try to not
00:10:35
Speaker
I guess not overly structure or systematize your diet and what you eat. And I think there's something to be said for that. I think there's this question saying, what does this Roman have to tell me about my diet and how I eat? But stoicism isn't, as you pointed out, it's not even, some of these rubus here isn't even as extreme as other people in that time. The stoics aren't, as far as I know, advocating for fasts.
00:11:01
Speaker
We're not advocating for kind of extreme situations. Missonius is just pointing out, look, in anything you do, especially something that's an indifferent, right? The only thing that's good all the time is virtue. So any indifferent is good conditionally, which means that it's good to try to bring about something or for some sort of ends. So what's the ends that you're trying to bring about? Well, it's appropriate natural action.
00:11:24
Speaker
Behavior and in this case to nourish your body to make your body strong as a as a rational animal That's also partly an animal. That's a that's a long way of going about saying look though The masonic is basically saying the function of food is the is the strength in your body So if you eat like that You're golden and all these other problems come up when you start using food for some other function start using it for some other purpose whether that's pleasure as we talked about whether that's I don't know maybe something like stress relief whether that's something like
00:11:55
Speaker
I guess, I guess maybe indulgence or kind of a showing off kind of thing. But if you're just like, look, I mean, I think of this inexpensive food thing. I think of kind of rice and chicken, you know, this kind of just get your basic that you need. Get those kind of macro nutrients that you require and that's, that's be done with it, right? That's, that's kind of the end of the function of that and beyond to something else.
00:12:15
Speaker
I think there's something compelling to that. I think that's a, that's a, it's a very miscellaneous Rufus take, as you would say, with this kind of not, not extreme, but very minimalist. Let's not add things we don't need to add. So in this case, let's get, let's get the nutrients we need and that's it. And we're done with.
00:12:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of Musonius' first lectures, usually in the collections of lectures and fragments we'll put together, the first entry is typically titled something like, why you do not need many arguments to make a point. And Musonius does have this.
00:12:52
Speaker
insight that having a kind of focus, not being simple to the point where you blur together important details, but focus being simple in the sense of having a clear understanding of things and being able to pick out what's most important is an idea that he promotes and then also an idea you see in his philosophy. So I think stating this as
00:13:19
Speaker
Having that focus of thinking about the purpose of food, purpose of food is just to build health and strength. One advantage of that picture is, as you say, that many ways people might cause themselves suffering or engage in vicious behavior with food is adding something on top of that picture, right? Whether it is pleasure or concern about reputation, what other people eat.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's where we were putting it. It's not very exciting. It's not very, but that's, that's, that's my Sony is for you. Or it's not very, I mean, it's just, it's just the kind of no nonsense, just, just the no nonsense approach. Just get what you need from it and get out of there and don't be spending, don't spend any more time swimming around in that. Cause it's not gonna, it's not going to help you.
Social Norms & Stoic Food Practices
00:14:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I think I was going to bring up this point issue later, but I think it may fit in well here. But one can push back on this picture of Musonius and say that it is in fact too narrow. It's too minimalist.
00:14:22
Speaker
It is true that, you know, the main purpose of food is it's nourishing abilities and then, you know, it promotes health and that's going to be, you know, you can think of health in terms of performance, maybe performance as an athlete or it's in your career with relationships and so on. So that's that, but that base level of food. But it's also true that we're social creatures and what we eat is a social and communal matter, I should say.
00:14:54
Speaker
And it's important not to overlook that. And I think sometimes the Stoics, perhaps not purposely, but in their
00:15:03
Speaker
maxims effectively do that. You have that one line from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius where he says,
Contextual Importance in Stoic Food Philosophy
00:15:11
Speaker
the notes, if you just, notes of some music, if you just focus them on them specifically, there's nothing to them. They're just sounds. If you break it down, melody is nothing more than cacophonous sound. But there is something important in the fact that it's a melody and you're overlooking an important
00:15:32
Speaker
fact by just narrowing too far too into this single feature of the thing another example might be his line on Sex is just the eruption of some mucus and there's something to that of of course, but it's also has It's also a very intimate matter at its best and is much more than that. So Okay. Yeah, my view of this is some amount of pushback. What's what's your take? I
00:16:01
Speaker
Well, no, I love that. I think that a lot, one thing, so to phrase that differently, one thing stoics like to do is they like to play with perspective, right? And that's what something like, so when we're, when we're doing kind of stoic mindfulness, we're doing stoic training, we're often varying between different types of perspectives. So sometimes we're taking the view from above and we're expanding that perspective out.
00:16:20
Speaker
to see patterns, similarities, macro movements, or sometimes we're constricting it to the micro, right? I'm in an incredibly stressful situation and I'm focusing only on what I can do in that moment. I'm focusing on the dichotomies control. So there's this kind of shifting of perspective. And what I hear your, what I was hearing you to be saying Caleb is like, look,
00:16:39
Speaker
You can take that
Food's Role in Society & Identity
00:16:40
Speaker
micro perspective and you could say, look, this is a collection of cells that provides nourishment to my body and I shouldn't treat it like anything else than that. I'm not as poetic as Marcus Aurelius' lines. And you say, yeah, sure, in one sense, yeah, rice and chicken and some broccoli, and you're good to go. But in another sense, you're missing the macro, which is your connection with your culture, your connection with other people, your connection within healthy limits to pleasure, you having dessert for lunch.
00:17:09
Speaker
or at lunch, not for lunch, but a little dessert at lunch. Right. So this, that would be too much. No, no dessert for lunch. That's going to draw the line somewhere. There's these kinds of, there's these other factors that Masoni's Rufus is missing when we pull it out to the macro. And I think that's, I think that's right. I think he's right in the micro.
00:17:26
Speaker
And maybe that's what you would say if you were a bodybuilder or you were a professional athlete and you had some sort of great goal, you'd kind of constrict and you say, look, this is just nutrients for my body. Don't think of anything else. Don't try to get anything else from this. But in the breadth of human life, I don't know if that's the only, that's certainly not the only healthy way to relate to food.
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I think that's right. You could sort of break it into two separate concerns. One sort of this meta point, if you will. The Stoics are always playing with perspective. Marcus Aurelius decomposes things to see their true nature. He also expands to get this larger perspective. And both of those
00:18:05
Speaker
Taking both of those views is important, but when you do that, you need to ensure that when you zoom in, you're not erasing something that's curably visible at some level. And likewise, when you zoom out, you're not blurring things together too much. So there's that sort of meta point, if you will. And then specifically, I think, when it comes to food,
00:18:26
Speaker
When you ask, you know, what's the purpose of food? You do have that base function of health and strength, but arguably also this other matter, which is just a social purpose. And so that's sort of a specific point I'd want to make there. You know, you have the fact that it relates to your culture, to your family.
00:18:47
Speaker
memories about my grandmother's bread and how delicious that was. The smell brings home features of the house and different experiences, memories that I can continue to bond over with her while I can.
Food, Identity, & Philosophy
00:19:01
Speaker
So I think that's the point I want to make there. Yeah, great. Persuasive. Cool. Well, we also have some lines from Seneca. And Seneca is interesting because
00:19:18
Speaker
He talks about food in a number of places. He does advocates persisting on the cheapest fare, fasting sort of as a premeditatio practice. But something that sticks out to me is how he describes one of his tutors.
00:19:35
Speaker
And he says the following, whenever he, and he here is Atlas, whenever he castigated our pleasure-seeking lives and extolled personal purity, moderation in diets in a mind free from unnecessary, not to speak of unlawful pleasures, the desire came upon me to limit my food and drink. And that is why some of these habits have stayed with me with Silias.
00:20:04
Speaker
And he continues and then specifically notes, that is why I forsaken oysters and mushrooms forever, since they're not really food, but are relishes to bully the sated stomach into further eating, as is the fancy of gourmands and those who stuff themselves beyond their powers of digestion. Down with it quickly and up with it quickly. What's your take on that?
00:20:30
Speaker
I mean, to add to that, my understanding of it is there's a specific Roman practice of kind of overeating and actually bingeing and purging, right? Like actually vomiting up. And so he's explicitly referring to this, right? This kind of thing of where, and I think you're seeing something, you're seeing something interesting there, right? Between this relationship between nature, you know, actively eating more than your body could eat.
00:20:53
Speaker
to the point that you end up vomiting it up, not even accidentally, sometimes just intentionally to just continue to eat. There you see this kind of perversion. You've kind of gone outside nature at that point, right?
00:21:07
Speaker
or what the body is really meant to do in pursuit of pleasure. And then I think what you're seeing here is you're actually seeing the pattern. And even though Seneca, so for Masonicius Rufus, it's maybe rice and chicken or whatever it was in ancient Rome. And for Seneca, it's just not mushrooms and not the fancy stuff, oysters, right?
00:21:31
Speaker
so but but in both we're getting a picture we're just getting kind of in different extremes i think both are saying look only what's natural not what's unnatural and for
Questioning Food Narratives
00:21:40
Speaker
masonius that's unnatural is anything that's not for nourishment of the body and for for sanica it's the things that literally have no nourishing value or those things consume to such an extent that they actually become physically harmful but i think in both pictures we're actually yeah we're actually getting a pattern here which is
00:21:59
Speaker
you know, don't forget the natural function of food and don't move too far from that because then you've gotten too focused on something else. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the point about the
00:22:14
Speaker
practice of sampling dish after dish until you need to expurge whatever you've eaten so that you can sample some more. It brings to light that the circumstances you're in really do matter and perhaps one reason Musonius Rufus
00:22:38
Speaker
has that really minimalist focus is by and large he's speaking to Roman aristocrats who perhaps they're not as wealthy as Seneca nonetheless
Conclusion & Further Exploration
00:22:51
Speaker
are the kind of Roman who likely have at their disposal the ability to engage in fine eating that the typical Roman of the day could not and then when you come to Seneca it's
00:23:06
Speaker
He's at the top of the top, essentially, at the height of his powers, where he's spending his days with people like Nero, who could do whatever they like with all sorts of things that bring pleasure, whether it's food or different social events.
00:23:26
Speaker
Yeah, you're always going to remind me of that killer, but I do lose track of that. Cause I always imagine Miss Sonia is talking to myself or the stock. I read talking to myself, but it's it that that context is really important. But so nice isn't like going around smacking the single Barry out of the poor children's hands and being like,
00:23:44
Speaker
Is that the most nutritious thing you could be eating right now? Or is there something else you could eat instead that has slightly more protein? He's not doing this. As you said, he's spending time with the wealthy. And if you're trying to move the needle and the needle's already way too far, not just the wealthy, but the Roman aristocrats, if the needle's already too far in that pleasure direction, well, then you're going to pull it the other way and you're going to offset it. I think that's always really important context. I lose that sometimes when I read.
00:24:14
Speaker
Oh yeah, it's an important thing to keep in mind. I suppose you also see it in Marcus Aurelius too somewhere. It's always important to remember that he is writing to himself and the notes we make to ourselves are going to be somewhat of a tripe point, but of course, personal matters vary by our personal context. So perhaps he makes that point about music because people are
00:24:38
Speaker
literally writing songs about him to praise him in court or what have you. It's just another reminder that you shouldn't let that sort of thing get to his head.
00:24:53
Speaker
excellent so all this talk about food I think you know we're just sort of trying to bring to light what are the considerations that the Stoics discuss when they think about what to eat what not to eat and I think one sort of myth or I would argue is a myth that sometimes
00:25:13
Speaker
is promoted in modern discussions of these matters is that stoics should only care what they eat and not say anything else about what others are discussing. But I think here you see that the stoics are constantly arguing and debating about what social norms they should have, whether it's
00:25:38
Speaker
Musonius, Rufus, accosting his students, or there's reports of Attalus, the tutor to Seneca. And if you think about this, Stoics argue about norms much more widely than just food, of course. So I think that one upshot, one sort of mistake Stoics sometimes make is that
00:26:04
Speaker
you should really just care about your own behavior and not have opinions or make statements about what, in your view, others ought to eat or at least bring to mind considerations that others should take into account. Of course, that doesn't mean you go completely to the other end, perhaps, and start preaching the Stoic Diet TM, but
00:26:32
Speaker
You know, I do think whenever people enter into these debates, there's usually at least one person who says stoic shouldn't care about what others or that has to do with restricting your diets being vegetarian or vegan or what have you. Yeah. So at the end of this episode, stick around for the stoic diet, TM, the book that we'll be putting out after this one. It's going to be pretty simple. It'll be pretty simple. It seems so far.
00:26:58
Speaker
Yeah, so there's the comment about food, but this is a comment that I think, when we're talking about diet, it kind of goes into this sphere of indifference more generally, where there's this tendency for intermediates to be like, well, I'm just focusing on myself. There's this real, I think, a misunderstanding of the economy of control. I only care about what I do. What do you care about that other person for? And so on and so forth. And there, again, it's that middle ground, right?
00:27:26
Speaker
you can go too far and be too obsessed about other people and allow this to really upset you and ruin your happiness. But there's also
00:27:36
Speaker
There's also, it's okay as a Stoic, and Stoics do do this, care about social norms, which means care about the behavior of yourself and the people you surround yourself with and the people in your community, and have opinions about those norms. I know one thing we wanted to do is keep vegetarianism outside of this conversation, but something like that, even though that's a behavior in others, Stoicism is not a philosophy of
00:28:00
Speaker
Whether you're pro-vegetarianism or not, so is in those not a philosophy of just, you just do what's right in your individual action and you don't care at all about the actions of people within your community.
00:28:10
Speaker
I mean, certainly Seneca here, I mean, Seneca's example is like Seneca cares that the people he hangs out with intentionally kind of overeat on these incredibly expensive foods in their luxurious houses to the point that they're purging and then eating again. Seneca has an opinion on that. He doesn't agree with it. Can you think of anything, anything else? Any kind of other examples of times when Stoics would have opinions about what people eat? Like I agree it's not off the table, but when would we, in today's time, when should we care?
00:28:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think, well, one important matter is when does what we eat concern matters of justice? And so I think, you know, we will have a discussion on vegetarianism, veganism. Today we'll focus on some of the, I think that's sort of a specific discussion. So today we'll focus on some of these broader considerations. But the justice is a good one. Some people, you know, they might have the view that you shouldn't
00:29:04
Speaker
drink Diet Coke or something like that because of the way it's produced. Very similar. Another kind of justice related concern. But I think it also extends to
00:29:17
Speaker
the other virtues, if you will. You sometimes see the thought that you shouldn't spend that much money on fine foods because doing so is immoderate.
00:29:35
Speaker
Maybe there's some defense for norms around eating, around healthy eating generally. There are different ways that can look, of course, but I don't think that's off the table by any means.
00:29:49
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, going through the virtues, you have justice moderation, as you mentioned, I don't know. I always think almost courage, like this thing of like you travel and you don't eat somebody else's food because it scares you too much or something. It's like, come on, try that. That's a great example. I think actually, and it's like the good, a good person would be the kind of person that, you know, eats the, eats the dish of somebody else's country, even though, you know, you're not sure if you're going to like it or not. And.
00:30:18
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess when we grounded in food, this comes back to kind of contemplation of the sage, right? I mean, grounded in food, it doesn't really get me that excited. It doesn't really make me think, just for those justice considerations, that there's not much important going on.
00:30:33
Speaker
Uh, when you're, as long as you're not being, I said, as you ingest or immoderate, but then there's this kind of view of like, you know, well, how would the sage engage with it? And I think then you, you bring a lot of other things in about this kind of communal aspect, obviously moderately, obviously in a just way, but then obvious, but also in a way that is.
00:30:50
Speaker
I don't know, courageous, explorative, pleasure seeking to the correct amounts, social communal. So there's that kind of, I guess that kind of, again, putting it on a pedestal with that ideal relationship with food look like, and that's something that I, that stoicism asks us to think about because it asks us to think about that in relation to all indifference. So that's kind of a fun question.
00:31:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. Another way it might crop up is there are some cultures that are focused on optimizing what food they consume. And whether that's for performance-related reasons or it might be for something like longevity, I want to eat a specific diet in order to live as long as possible. And I think that
00:31:36
Speaker
Stoics can say things both in support and also critiquing those kinds of projects. Of course, they'll point out that the context matters, but if you take the optimizing for longevity, in some senses it might not
00:31:53
Speaker
be worth optimizing for long activity if by doing so, you know, you're doing some extreme calorie restriction diet that leaves you so lightheaded you can't tend to your relationships a hundred percent. So I think that's the sort of thing that they can push back against or at least bring some of these broader considerations into play.
00:32:19
Speaker
Don't you feel like that goes against Missoni's point? Like it is not Missoni's point. What if maximization? Yeah. So I don't think he's talking about optimizing health and strength. So I guess I was thinking of, you know, like what's the diet that really pushes the needle and giving me that extra year or what have you.
00:32:45
Speaker
Whereas I think he said, you know, of course you should promote health and strength, but you also shouldn't do so at the, at the expense of other projects. Yep. Yep. So.
00:33:05
Speaker
I think that just highlights a point we made a number of ways already, but it is that fact that context does matter. Eating is one thing among many. People often turn to diets to fix problems with health, meaning identity, what have you. That's a tendency we should be wary of.
00:33:33
Speaker
Of course, many people see food as sacred. There are taboo foods and that has both positive and negative expressions. There is a worry that sometimes people spend too much trying to optimize what food they eat and they would be better.
00:33:51
Speaker
not minding what they consume or spending less time on what they and others around them consume. So in a way, it's not an especially exciting point, but it is an important one just always to keep in mind is these factors of context, details, looking at the specific situations. Yeah. In many ways, stoicism is this philosophy I think that tries to get the best of both worlds in a sense, because virtue,
00:34:20
Speaker
in a sense is very un-contextual virtue and vice. Non-contextual virtue is always good, vice is always bad. So when we reduce ourselves down to that dichotomy of control, there in one way is always this North Star. But then it also invites and recognizes that there is a lot of context and a lot of ambiguity and a lot of
00:34:42
Speaker
particular nuance when it comes to indifference and comes to the way that we navigate that world. So in Epictetus, you have that division between the discipline of desire and then the discipline of action. So desire being about virtue and advice, action being about navigating these indifference.
00:35:00
Speaker
If we get too much thinking about virtual advice, that's the kind of thing that causes people to be like, why do you care what that person eats? Why do you care about what somebody else says? You know, just focus on yourself a hundred percent, encapsulate, put yourself inside that inner Citadel. But the stomachs also want to get outside of that Citadel. They want to be secure there, but also act outside of it. And food is a, food is a funny one to talk about because it is so contextually specific and it's a fun one to kind of pull out the implications of.
00:35:29
Speaker
All right, so by way of wrapping up, maybe we can just touch on some of these broader heuristics, perhaps not considerations that determine how you should act in a specific situation, but I think things to keep in mind that I think are useful from the Stoics.
00:35:50
Speaker
The first one to keep in mind is just, I think, this point about moderation. Busoni's Rifas has another line.
00:36:10
Speaker
Part of this point about moderation is knowing the right amount of things, and the right amount isn't determined by how pleasant a given experience is, but rather by more important considerations. The Stoics are not Epicureans. Epicureans were a rival Stoic school that essentially held that the best life is the one that feels the best, that's the most pleasant.
00:36:39
Speaker
For the Stoics, the best life is the virtuous one. It's where you properly manage indifference, where you make excellent choices, where you are an excellent person. And that's the sort of thing to keep in mind when thinking about moderation. And food is just one of those things to be moderate about. Totally.
00:37:02
Speaker
Cool. Yeah. What do you have for one of these heuristics or thoughts that you want to add on? Another heuristic, I think, is that one of the other things that I came to was this idea that we can learn from good eating the same way we can learn from other skills. I don't know, good eating, but there's this idea that even though we care about virtue and vice and they're
00:37:29
Speaker
You know, eating itself, it's about navigating an indifference. There's a kind of a craft or a skill to having that good relationship with food. And if you can apply that back to the way you live your life in other domains, you can also have excellence in those other domains. And I wanted to bring in a quote by Epictetus here because, you know, we had the Masonicius, we had Seneca, Marcus, I had to bring him back to Epictetus. And he says, quote, remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet.
00:37:58
Speaker
As something is being passed around, it comes to you. Stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on, do not detain it. Or it has not yet come to you. Do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act towards children, so toward a wife, so toward office, so toward well.
00:38:18
Speaker
And navigators there is making an analogy between the person who can basically navigate a dinner party well, and someone who lives life well. The person who navigates a dinner party well or a banquet is this one that says, oh, you brought the hors d'oeuvres in front of me. Yeah, that looks nice. I'll take some. I'll take the right amount. Oh, the plate ran out. That's OK. Or it's not yet here. I'm not going to run over and push other people out of the way to get it. And so there's this lesson about life of if the opportunity strikes, take it.
00:38:44
Speaker
But don't, don't have this inappropriate desire outside of that. And it's funny, Epictetus is making an analogy to somebody who's, you know, out of banquet, somebody who's navigating a dinner party well. And I just think that's a, that's kind of fun things that we can, we can learn from everything and we can apply those lessons from the, any kind of domain of indifference back to our own life. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great point. I think this line about.
00:39:08
Speaker
Moderation goes back to the first quote from Musonius Rufus, where you're thinking about self-control generally and how you eat. It is a matter of self-control, but also, of course, when you see self-control in eating done very well, you can learn from that and bring that into other domains.
00:39:34
Speaker
One useful heuristic that we have, so we have Musonius on the purpose of food. It's about promoting health and strength. I think if you add to that as promoting social relationships, you do come to a solid philosophy of the purpose of food, which is it's about promoting human health. It's also, because of that, a way to bond with other
00:40:03
Speaker
humans either by enjoying meals together, creating meals for others, or what have you. So I think that that stab at the telos of food is a good heuristic. And when you, as you made the point earlier, when you go beyond that, try to maximize pleasure too much, try to
00:40:28
Speaker
think about a reputation for its own sake instead of promoting good relationships that might be where people end up in less than ideal situations with food. Yeah. So when you were thinking that, I was thinking, well, so you're saying is that you can be a stoic and have a drink with your friends, which I think is true. And it's true even though drinks aren't good for you because you're fulfilling that social relationship.
00:40:58
Speaker
And then I was thinking, well, what happens there if you take away the friends and obviously everything in moderation, I'm not saying you can't have, you can't have a drink at the end of a long day or something like that, but there becomes something, something we even now we think about, you know, if you engage in like substantial drinking by yourself or you're kind of removing the food part from the social part, the kind of the dimension of it changes a little bit.
00:41:24
Speaker
So yeah, I agree. And to build on that with another heuristic is this idea that food is, it's something
00:41:33
Speaker
It's always part of a greater context in your own life. It's one part of many. So people often turn to diets to fix problems with health, with the meaning of their life, with their identity. So, you know, you want to feel a different way about yourself. You want to feel like a kind of person is in control. You want to feel like a kind of person who looks a certain way. There, there, there is when you're.
00:41:56
Speaker
It's so hard to talk about food in abstract in this conversation. I found it's been incredibly hard to talk about food just as food because often when you think of food, you always think of it as being intertied with one of these other things, right? With your self-identity, with your goals, with your aspirations, with stress, as you said, meaning, things like this. So just when you think about your own relationship with food,
00:42:21
Speaker
Recognize that it's it's it's it's one part of many recognize how those things interrelated Try for your own help in your own progress to kind of pull those apart because if there's something going wrong It's probably in relation to some sort of combination with those other things in the kind of the more complex meaning it's taken on I think Mm-hmm. Yep Yeah, I think related to that the the last heuristic I'll add is
00:42:46
Speaker
have some skepticism about the stories or narratives and associations we have with so many food stuff. So from Marcus, we have, how good is it when you have roast meat or such like foods before you to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish. This is the dead body of a bird or pig. And again, that the filarian wine is the mere juice of grapes.
00:43:14
Speaker
And what that shows is this decomposition technique breaking things down into their parts to question a specific narrative about how fancy regal what Marcus has to consume and how those meals could
00:43:36
Speaker
easily be the object of false beliefs where he overrates himself, overrates the value of the court or what have you. And that's I think a tendency that many of us perhaps we're not in the same position, we're not in some fancy Roman courts, but
00:43:57
Speaker
You know, people do have different stories about what's good to eat or not, and having some amount of skepticism about those stories. You know, if I eat this and I'll be that kind of person or what have you, or perhaps even the rejection of those stories. If I don't care about food at all, then that means I'm this kind of person. Having some skepticism about those stories is an important, important thing.
00:44:28
Speaker
I mean, that's a great point. I mean, the fact that you can go and there can be, you know, you can buy $1,000 gold ice cream. You know, this is a thing that exists. The fact that that exists in the real world shows that there's still some sort of connection between food and stories and status. But I thought your point the opposite way was a really good one too. Because it's very easy for us to sit here and judge, you know, people that eat $1,000 gold ice cream, which I assume was not the kind of ice cream you had at lunch today.
00:44:55
Speaker
I apologize if it was. But you go the other way too, right? It was like, well, if I don't eat this, if I abstain from this, then that means something about me. And just kind of, again, always come back to that decomposition, always be critical of the kind of stories you're telling. And food is just one way we tell those stories. I think that's a great point to end on.
00:45:18
Speaker
Excellent. Awesome. Well, those are some of our thoughts about stoicism and diet. I hope it's useful. Reach out to us if you think there's some heuristics you think we should have added to our list. And, you know, we'll be talking about this some more. There have been some good conversations, pieces on whether stoics ought to be vegetarian or vegan. So we're getting into that debate about justice specifically. And we'll probably have a conversation on that. And they're not too distant.
00:45:47
Speaker
future. But before doing that, we wanted to have this broader discussion first. So I hope you all found it useful. And as always, feel free to reach out with any questions, comments, or ideas for future episodes. Yeah, thanks, Caleb. A lot of fun.
00:46:07
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. And if you'd like to get two meditations from me on stoic theory and practice a week, just two short emails on whatever I've been thinking about, as well as some of the best resources we've found for practicing stoicism, check out stowletter.com. It's completely free. You can sign up for it and then unsubscribe at any time as you wish.
00:46:37
Speaker
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00:47:00
Speaker
And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.