Food & Academia – An excerpt of my masters thesis:

Contrary to common belief the study of food emerges to be of high importance throughout human history. Contemplations about production, consumption of food, as well as the overall theme of eating and drinking is subject to the studies of a number of famous Philosophers. Unfortunately, much of it remains disguised behind drawn curtains. In ancient Greece, Plato evolved his dietary ideas of Pythagoras in Book II of Republic (Williams, 1883) and Epicurus acknowledged the desires of good food and fine wine as natural, although defining them as unnecessary for human happiness. Further remains to the unexpected are the manuscript of the wine enthusiast John Locke (Locke & Sandby, 1766), or the fact that the only goods Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754) recognized in the universe are food, a female, and sleep, while the only evils he feared were pain and hunger. Likewise Karl Marx offered the view that »by producing food, man indirectly produces his material life itself« in his early work on The German Ideology.