Book Review of To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life by Scott Samuelson

Originally posted at Three Quarks Daily It’s not intimate, it’s philosophy. That sounds like something ChatGPT would say but there is truth in it. Philosophical writing is seldom intimate. When philosophical writing styles are discussed, Nietzsche is usually trotted out as the example that avoids the calculated, dispassionate, heavily qualified tone of philosophy. But intimate? No. Nietzsche was too busy shouting at the reader to achieve intimacy. One achievement of Scott Samuelson’s To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life is a level of intimacy rarely attained in philosophy. To say the book is well written is an understatement. He squeezes philosophical insight from engaging accounts of relationships fostered through cooking and eating. The tragic irony of his daughter’s struggle with bulimia is genuinely moving. And his facility with anecdote is considerable. Near the end of the book he summarizes his moral ideal which he borrows from Anne Lamott: “Don’t be an asshole and make sure…