A philosopher-chef’s moving meditation on the pleasures of our shared humanity and how it can be most fully experienced in making and sharing food.
Our daily rhythms and most meaningful relationships center on the dining table, and so nothing is more essential to a good life than satisfying meals with friends and family. In To Taste, philosopher and sous-chef Scott Samuelson invites us into his kitchen, where he blends moving personal stories with insights from some of the world’s greatest thinkers into a rich but simple argument: our daily labor, in making food or otherwise, should connect us with other people.
For Samuelson, the pleasures of excellent cooking illuminate this value in particularly compelling ways. When we embrace the work required to prepare and share a good meal, we learn to honor tradition, practice hospitality, respect nature, cherish festivity, and nurture skill—all ethics that resist our increasingly dehumanized world. Ultimately, Samuelson argues that cooking, especially the elusive decision to season a dish “to taste,” contains the full mystery of human life.
Whether you’re a professional chef or your best culinary feat involves a can opener, To Taste can help you cook up a life that elicits a glorious mmm.
Table of Contents:
Preface: Come on in My Kitchen
1. Potato Soup Blues
2. The Art of Hurrying Slowly
3. Thank You, Bunny
Intermezzo: The Kitchen as Paradise
4. Table Setting for Angels
5. The Teeth of Love
6. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
Intermezzo: A Tasty Way of Knowing
7. The Spirits of All Three
8. Lovable Demon, Hateful Buddha
9. The Bottom of the Dish
Conclusion: Sex, Bacon, and Sundays
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author :
Scott Samuelson holds a joint position at Iowa State University in Philosophy and Religious Studies and Extension and Outreach. His books include Rome as a Guide to the Good Life: A Philosophical Grand Tour, also published by the University of Chicago Press. For many years, he worked as a sous-chef at a farm-to-table French restaurant.
Review :
“Part memoir, part philosophy, part love letter to cooking, To Taste is the rare book that is as delightful to read as the meals it celebrates: witty, generous, and rich with captivating stories. In approachable prose, Samuelson reveals how cooking, eating, and conviviality illuminate the deepest questions of human existence and invite us to rediscover our place in the living world.”
“Can our relationship with food elevate our consciousness and state of being, playing the starring role in the good life to which all humanity aspires? In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Samuelson answers in the affirmative with a beautifully intertwined series of stories relating food to the nature of relationships, ethics, philosophy, family, friendship, community, reconciliation, sex, and death. Both memoir and philosophy, the writing is so engaging it will serve as a guiding light to gourmands for years to come.”
“Taste and cooking have for too long been at the margins of philosophical concern. To Taste brings them to the center with clarity, ambition, and argumentative care. Some may find its central claim—that cooking and eating generate practices that constitute a good life—provocative, but it is argued with enough nuance to invite serious debate. To Taste is ethically insightful and an inspiration to all who cook or eat.”
