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sexual feelings. Just as lovers know the time for intimacy is
approaching from the closeness and scent of their beloved, or from
the caresses exchanged in foreplay, so Pedro knew from those
sounds and smells, especially the aroma of browning sesame seeds,
that there was a real culinary pleasure to come.1
Tita, the heroine of Laura Esquivel s novel Like Water for Chocolate,
has a unique gift: knowledge and wisdom in matters of food. Tita s
knowledge is embodied and deeply sensual, and becomes a powerful
linguistic medium of communication, particularly with Pedro, the love
of her life. The lovers in this narrative grow in knowledge of each other s
love by seeing, smelling, touching, and savoring the culinary pleasures
that Tita prepares. Food is the means of their erotic cognition of the
beloved, and knowledge is intimately related to cuisine:
Tita knew through her own flesh how fire transforms the ele-
ments, how a lump of cornflour is changed into a tortilla, how a
Some aspects of this chapter were developed earlier in my essay Nahrung für das Denken.
Gott: Banquete de los sentidos Festmahl für die Sinne, Wort und Antwort (Apr./June
2002), 64 9.
1
Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with
Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies, trans. Carol Christensen and Thomas
Christensen (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 62.
Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist Angel F. Méndez Montoya
© 2009 Angel F. Méndez Montoya ISBN: 978-1-405-18967-5
46 TASTE AND THE EROS OF COGNITION
soul that hasn t been warmed by the fire of love is lifeless, like a
useless ball of cornflour.2
Tita s gifts evoke the relationship between knowing and savoring, or
knowing as a form of savoring. I will thus look at various ways in which
Esquivel s novel evokes this relationship between knowing and savoring
(in Spanish, saber and sabor) which is intimately connected with the
body in general and the senses in particular, and is a relationship that is
paradigmatic of (although not exclusive to) eating and drinking. This
will also point to the Eucharist as a paradigm of a culinary epistemology
and ontology.
The etymology of both saber and sabor is rooted in the Latin sapio or
sapere, meaning to taste, to have a flavor, as well as to understand.
Sapientia, later translated into English as wisdom, means to have knowl-
edge or wisdom of the world, but also to taste things in the world. Likewise,
the word sapiens means being wise, and it is also derived from sapere, to
taste and/or to know.3 While eating and drinking implicate other senses
such as smell, touch, vision, and even sound, it is the sense of taste that
predominates. Eating and drinking thus provide a culinary medium for a
cognition that is connected with the body and constructions of the world.
Thus, by reflecting on Esquivel s novel, I will attempt to demonstrate that
to know something is precisely to have a taste of the known, and likewise,
to taste is to grow in knowledge and wisdom. To know something
(saber) is also to taste it (sabor), and cognition of an object is intensely
erotic: an intimate and sensory participation in the known object.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz did not find philosophy and cooking incom-
patible.4 Cuisine could complement philosophy as she wrote, had
Aristotle cooked, he would have written a good deal more. Sor Juana s
reflection may also sound as a lament for the philosopher s lack of inter-
est in food, the senses, and the body. However, looking at the course
philosophy has taken over the past 20 years, perhaps a lament for this
apparent lack is no longer necessary.5 After the rise of phenomenology
2
Ibid., 63.
3
See Cassell s Latin English, English Latin Dictionary, 26th edn. (London, 1952),
501.
4
For a brief reflection on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, see chapter 1 above.
5
The bibliography on the subject of the body is extensive. For an important anthology
that also includes a large bibliography on the body see Ramona Michel, Nadia Naddaff,
and Feher Tazi (eds.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 3 vols. (New York:
Zone Books, 1989). For a more recent anthology of current thinkers, see Juliet Flower
MacCannell and Laura Zakarin (eds.), Thinking Bodies (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1994).
TASTE AND THE EROS OF COGNITION 47
and its influence on thinkers from a variety of disciplines sociology,
anthropology, cultural theory, and theology one can see a greater atten-
tion to bodily perception and somatic means of cognition and meaning
construction. And yet, while current thinkers seem more inclined to
include the body, and food, in their investigations, there are also philoso-
phers and theologians who do not consider this to be serious philosophy
or theology.6 In this chapter I echo Sor Juana s vision and attempt to dem-
onstrate that there is much to explore and learn from the relationship
between food and body, and its impact on cognition, hermeneutics, the
experience of being in the world, and God s interaction with creation.
In exploring against a view of cognition as purely disembodied and
disinterested the relationship between saber and sabor, the main goal
of this chapter will be to show how cognition is a powerfully sensual
medium of communication. In addition to this, it is also a paradigm of
knowledge as participation. This will lead to a discussion of the Christian
divine banquet: the Eucharist. From a eucharistic perspective, one could
make a more emphatic claim, that to know does not merely mean to cast
an aloof gaze from outside that which one knows, but rather to par-
ticipate through intimate savoring of the known. Thus, a notion of
participation will lead, in the final section of this chapter, to a reflection
on the Eucharist. I will argue that, from a eucharistic account, taste
reigns supreme among the senses, and takes primacy over the intellect,
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