Science no match for angels at our tables

As a creator and lover of fine food saddled with a kitchen klutz for a husband, it was almost too much for my wife when my mate started regaling her with descriptions of the salted caramel macarons he'd made for his sister's wedding. When talk turned to why he uses Swiss meringue butter cream - "the egg whites make the icing more stable" - it was clear he'd stepped over the line. "Hold it right there, Dave," she said. "You're talking dirty to me now. This has to stop."

Master chefs are all around us. These days gourmet is the norm. We love not only eating, but talking about eating, reading about eating, and as the number of cooking shows indicates, we like to watch.

What does this tell us about ourselves? Is this the self-indulgent West lacking sources of deeper satisfaction? Or could it represent a growing appreciation for the aesthetic dimension of life to which eating can introduce us?

It turns out that an investigation of eating can tell us much about what it is to be human. Philosopher Leon Kass writes in The Hungry Soul that eating reveals something about our innermost desires, shedding light on what is "universally, permanently and profoundly true about the human animal and its deepest hungerings".

Kass argues that humans certainly feed as animals do. But through customs and social interaction, we also eat in a manner that's different from other species. The progression towards something more sophisticated means we can dine and even feast, activities that at their best involve beauty, art, knowledge, wit, conversation and community.

Kass notes we are alone among all living creatures in that we can speak, plan and create, while reflecting on the whole and marvelling at the splendour of life and existence. When eating progresses past feeding into higher realms it suggests something of the transcendent, that we are more than animals.

Imagine for a moment a dinner party of old friends. There's a scientific way of analysing all that transpires at this dinner - plenty that the biochemists, anatomists, physiologists and neuroscientists could describe - regarding chemical processes of the body and brain that are astonishing in their complexity and intricacy.

But such a description wouldn't even come close to telling us what's going on. One guest can't quite manage to lose the acidic feeling in his stomach as he tries and fails to forget the precarious state of his business. Another diner, perennially proud of her successes, feels an even warmer glow of satisfaction than those drinking the bottle of Grange she came armed with. The host, enlivened by the wine, smiles at his wife across the table and thinks how much he still loves her after all these years. Another, at the first mouthful of her favourite dessert, is lost in thought as she nostalgically recalls her childhood family kitchen.

Is this interaction of memory and emotion to be thought of as singularly physical and material in nature? The president of the Council of Australian Humanist Societies, Rosslyn Ives, would have us believe so. Writing in The Australian Book of Atheism, she states "science has determined that living bodies are animated by nothing more than all the complex living processes working within them". But science has of course done nothing of the sort, and most of us resist being spoken of in such reductionist terms.