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How can we live an Epicurean life in today’s world?
Of course, “today’s world” is many different places — the life of a Greek fisherman will not offer the same opportunities and challenges as that of a single mother software developer in Silicon Valley, a philosophy professor in Hong Kong, or a bus driver in rural Alaska. Still, as long as we are talking about the Western (or West-influenced), capitalist world, there are some common tropes that we can identify as typical for a life roughly “like ours.”
The Queen’s cook
Here is the thing: A few days ago, Youtube recommended me the channel of someone who had once been the cook of the Queen of England (Youtube link). One would think that the Queen and her royal household must eat all the crazy, expensive, exquisite food that we normal people cannot afford. But watching this channel, one is confronted with Prince Harry’s love of macaroni and cheese, the Queen’s fondness for a small slice of chocolate cake on her birthday, and Princess Diana’s favourite bread and butter pudding. After watching a few of those videos, the kids made me bake them the Queen’s afternoon tea scones, and then we had our afternoon milk with the exact same scones the monarch would probably have just a few hours later in her GMT time zone.
I thought that this was a powerful demonstration of how egalitarian Western capitalism is — and how it isn’t.
Yes, the Queen eats the same dishes that we do and Prince Harry liked mac and cheese just as much as my kids do. But when we look closer, the differences become apparent: the Queen’s food is cooked almost exclusively from organic veggies that they grow in the Queen’s gardens, meat from the royal deer, and presumably fish from the royal rivers. We get our meat from the supermarket freezer and, if we’re lucky, we find some that’s imported from New Zealand. We refuse to buy strawberries out of season, and we’d never pay for those obscenely huge ones chemically grown and shipped from California. The highlight of our desserts calendar are the few weeks in winter (yes, at our place December is the strawberry season!) when we can go and pick our own strawberries at a local farm. And we are the privileged ones. If we were poorer, we couldn’t afford to pick our own fruit, which, perversely, costs more than the stuff flown halfway around the world. We would have to get it from the supermarket like most people do: sprayed, hormon-stuffed, packaged, canned, plastic-wrapped and whisked across the Pacific in a fossil-fuel guzzling airplane.
Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)
