«One evening, after the opera, I went alone for supper at «The Bignon. No sooner had I tasted some oysters and started reading a few lines of the daily chronicle in the «Temps» than I saw, surging behind the paper leaning against the bottle, a large figure, a vest, a ruff, a tie, a face, all of an unsurpassable whiteness.» Eça de Queiroz, «The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes»–Eça de Queiroz, A Correspondência de Fradique Mendes, Livros do Brasil, 2017, p.54. (quoted in my informal translation)
Of course, different ethics in various cultures see this relationship distintively, and some even deny or repress any correlation beyween food and pleasure. The Protestant ethic for example would not, I believe, enphasise the idea of eating for pleasure. So it is with sex and pleasure. Think of the number os societies that still practice body (and mental) mutilations in men and women. I suspect that a faily large portion of our history, with its political and economic conflicts, and numberless wars, may be better understood on the basis of the identity between hunger, welfare and the common good on the one side, and the control of societies, on the other. In other words, on the basis of the identity between the polis versus ideologies. This is the stuff of political theory, a well known universe that has been expanding endlessly since Homer and Thucydides, Aquinas, Saint Augustin, Locke, Hobbes, Montequieu, Rousseau, Marx, and, closer to our times, Arendt, Wittgenstein, Popper, Saussure, the Vienna and the Frankfurt Schools, and so on. There is, however, in this quite a comprehensive domain pertaining to food and its connection to society, that is, encompassing survival and pleasure, a distinct area, marked by blurred images, prejudices and misconceptions. Barely studied so far, this area holds a special light of its own, beaming with intense energy, that has been kept hidden from most of us in our common sense apathy.
I refer, as you might have guessed, to sole eating, a condition generally little appreciated. Stats in the internet acknowlege, however, that 40% to 50% of total world population will eat their main daily meal away from home, if they can.The least socially favoured people weigh the most in that equation, apparently. Of those numbers, stats also reveal that 15% on average are sole eaters in restaurants or at home. Let us face it, is a big bunch of people, whose standing amogst us needs to be better understood and, why not, appreciated. Does one feel marginalized by the condition of eating alone, at restaurants, or in a public park or on a bench at the corner of the street? Does he or she feel uncomfortable or respected, rejected or looked down on, for the sake of eating alone? Admired? Or is he or she just ignored, or watched, perhaps?
Well, let us watch this (large) group of people over. Better, let us scrutinize how this happens. Is it for pleasure or out of necessity that one eats alone ? Maybe both. Maybe something intermediate. Of course, one might say, one would rather have company. For lunch or dinner. After all, we are gregarious people. Or, are we? Nothing is to be said about breakfast, because the morning meal is so entrenched in the family group from a cultural point of view (especially more so in the Anglo-saxon culture) that the question of sole eating breakfast becomes irrelevant. It may happen, sure, and naturally happens all the time in our business-leaned daily routine but it is irrelevant for the purposes here. I will come back to it though later on. But, to the point: you see, there are even books that teach you how NOT to get in the situation of eating alone. Goodness grief! Is it so terrible? Well, sites in the Web with tips for eating alone abound. They will help you feel better, if that is your case. Here, however, we want to plunge deeper into these questions.
One thing is loneliness, which is serious and a special effort will be required to help dissipate it with a lonely meal. It will still be there, no matter what. But for 90% or more of the cases, people will refuse to sit alone at a table for a number of frivolous motives, a few of them quite understandable. Let us also bear in mind that, be it a couple or a dozen of people sitting at a table, at informal or formal luncheons or dinners, there may be very unpleasant moments, not to speak of disturbing tensions and outright bickering and open conflicts. Drama. So, ok, have we said it all about sole eating?
Not quite so. Experience and intuition seem to suggest that sole eating brings freedom, that it makes the person free to think and to fly to different worlds, in particular to his or her inner world, in a both pleasant and instructive manner. All of a sudden, the mind feels free to explore new truths and sensations. The revelation of the self is there to be contemplated and aprehended. Something like na epiphany gets hold of the person, if he or her is sensitive enough, and willing.
What is sole eating? I will argue later on that one can have a sole meal even if sitting with others at the same table. I have most respectfully already referred to questioning whether Jesus Christ were not a Sole Eater at the Holy Last Supper. And already given a tip for my argument: was He, on that Holy Occasion, on the same mental level with His Disciples, or on another, infinitely higher mental plane?
No one can on occasion escape from being in the condition of eating alone. There are many of us who love it. In any case, we are in to realize that there may be virtues and pleasures in sole eating, beyond those intrinsic pleasures that relate to the act of feeding oneself. I, for myself, think there is a potential for those hidden, even transcendental, pleasures. Why? Let us go by parts.
I have been exposed to sole eating by the circunstances of diplomatic life, moving from place to place, as many other callings also require. Admittedly, my somewhat chronic shyness also played its part as I came to experience, with the practice of eating alone, different emotions and original thoughts, which were as if moulded in a quite original state of mind.
These were unknown pleasures, extraordinary by themselves, that had the subsidiary effect of my neglecting occasional inconveniences and the uncomfortable situation that the sole eater has sometimes to face and endure. This is the core issue in these essays.
My purpose here is to come to a better understanding of sole eating, as part of the human condition. In it, there is hunger and poverty. Absolute despair can be seen eye to eye. But let these issues rest for a while, since our immediate concern is how to conceptualize the idea of sole eating and from there to come to the eventual theorethical identification of its virtues and hidden pleasures.
No intent of reviving the introductory Fradique Mendes` scene described above, as he had supper at the Paris restaurant «Le Bignon» probably in the 1880s, a creation of the Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz. But as I was having the other day my lonely meal at a nice Lisbon restaurant, I got an e-mail from an old friend, a woman whom I was staging an innocent love with in our teens. Annexed to the e-mail was a text I had written her about a flower tree, we say it in French in Brazil, the «flamboyant». In English, I suppose, the term is mostly used to qualify extravagant, colourfull things or occasions. Never mind, my text spoke about this tree and its beautiful red flowers, its thin stems that can fly like toy helicopters–or drones if I were writing it today– but with boomerang properties. The tree was to be drawn on a paper, together with the flowers. My suggestion to her was that she kiss the drawn flowers and sticks, and send it to me in that toy chopter, as a message of love that could be renovated in every flamboyant tree that remained in our city. I was this much taken and troubled by the intense intimacy of the text, and could not help crying, inaudibly I hope, I would hate it if someone around me in the restaurant noticed.
All right, we all know how dangerous it is to play with words. But, there it was, the genius had escaped from the lamp, the whole emotional package liberated by the flamboyant (in both senses of the word) text was openly displayed over my lonely table. I was as if naked, looking at a blurred mirror I had been given by a magic, pipe-smoke-puffing elf coming from the backwoods of my region in Minas Gerais, Brazil. And I felt an extraordinary, out of this world pleasure, of a contemplative, mystical nature. Maybe similar to the one described by Eça de Queiroz in that scene, a moment in which he, as a character, could recognize his long-absented friend Fradique Mendes by his white clothes.
Yes, the good food was there, but it was the condition of sole eating that gave me the entrance ticket to a world of anew.
