Eating wasn’t Gilles Deleuze’s most favorite thing to do. As he confessed to Clair Parnet once in their eight hour long L’Abécédaire interview.  “If I tried to describe the quality of eating for me,” he said “it would be boredom. It is the most boring thing in the world.” (ABC M) “Drinking” on the other hand, he adds, “is something extraordinary interesting, but eating never interested me, it bores me to death.” (ABC M) And drinking was mostly interesting because it involves a certain evaluation of ones powers in order to find the penultimate glass, so that one is ready to start drinking again in the morning and the mornings that follow. (ABC B) But alas, after his severe medical condition at the end of the 1960’s Deleuze mostly had to forgo any drinks. And all he was left with was basically the boring act of eating. And although eating with someone might alleviate matters a bit to him, it doesn’t change much of the general state of food. In light of these remarks it is no surprise that reflections on drinking spring up occasionally in Deleuze’s work, while he’s utterly silent on the matter of eating or cooking. From an author who says all his work is in a sense vitalistic one would  however expect a little bit more attention to something as vital as food. (N 143) But Deleuze is, apart from these quotes in L’Abécédaire , remarkably quiet on the theme of food, at least on the face of it. From his talk to Parnet we do get a little insight in Deleuze’s dirty little gastronomical secrets. As he confesses that he is disgusted by cheese but yet he himself has a great taste for three things which are in general perceived as quite disgusting, namely: tongue, brains and marrow.

One could insert here a first consideration on the connection between food and philosophy. For Deleuze’s depiction of food as something utterly boring and his reluctance to deal with it in his work doesn’t at all mean that food isn’t philosophically interesting enough. It is rather the opposite. Food is philosophically interesting not in spite of but because it invokes boredom. For if we turn to Martin Heidegger’s second and virtual unknown masterpiece of the Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit we find one of the most profound analysis of boredom in the history of philosophy.[1] In a time when Heidegger’s thought was very much evolving just after publishing Sein und Zeit in 1927, he gives these lectures at the Freiburg University in the winter semester of 1929-1930, that make up the Grundbegriffe. In it he considers boredom, and not the Angst or anxiety, as the backdrop of Dasein’s Being-in-the-World. That is boredom and not being-toward-death is what drives Dasein in its existence. A possibility that has recently been taken up by some to frame our human condition as one infused with boredom, that is we have become indifferent to things themselves. (Prins 2009) The more frantic we engage in all kinds activities it all comes to show that we try to chase away boredom (and not death) more vigorously. That is we cover up that things themselves leave us indifferent, even the act of eating in the case of Deleuze. And is our current cultural obsession with food with endlessly multiplying plethora of TV shows, magazines, dietary fads and cookbooks not a sign that food in the end leaves us indifferent? It leaves us so indifferent that we either eat too much and turn obese or too little and get chased of the catwalk. Food leaves us indifferent that we hardly know what we eat anymore; nature is something that is packed in cellophane waiting for us in the supermarket. (Pollan 2006)

[1] Another reason why the Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik might be of interest to study in relation to the work of Gilles Deleuze, is Heidegger’s sustained engagement in it with the work of Jacob Uexküll.  (See also Buchanan 2008)