"Dear Food Thoughtz:" Potato Metaphysics

Welcome to a very special edition of Dear Food Thoughtz.  This question was submitted by a valued reader over a month ago, but because the question demanded a more rigorous examination than I am capable of, I enlisted the help of my personal metaphysician, Midge Deak (pronounced deek).  Midge is a graduate student in philosophy, specializing in Stoic metaphysics.  She has recently solved the problem of identity and is very fond of buns.  As always, please direct all future inquiries to food.thoughtz@gmail.com.  If you require Midge's profound philosophical insights, please put "Philosophy Alert" or "Philosopher Needed" in the subject line. 

Dear Food Thoughtz,

These potatoes were baked, but are they really "baked potatoes"?

Dear Avid Reader, 

First of all, thank you for writing us and for showing an unprecedented interest in the metaphysics of (baked) potatoes. A wise (post-)hellenistic philosopher once said: "Man cannot live by bread alone." And it seems that you, dear reader, cannot live by the substance of potatoes alone; you are hungry for the Baked Potato, or in all probability, pure and unmixed Bakedness.

In order to establish whether a potato that has been baked is a "baked potato", the entity's potatohood and bakedness both ought to be thoroughly investigated. However, putting my own metaphysical interests aside, I will try to focus on your question instead. Namely, what makes a potato a baked potato? Whether any potato that has been baked is a "baked potato" or does "baked potato"-ness consist in something else than going through a structural transformation in an oven.

The question is especially interesting because we actually know of potato dishes that are prepared with the method of baking, but which are not called a (or several) baked potatoes. Examples of such a kind of a dish are "potato squashers", oven-fried potatoes, stuffed potatoes and potato casseroles such as the delicious Hungarian "rakott krumpli" or the less delicious French "tartiflette". 

In my opinion there are two factors that are crucial in a potato-dish naming process (or dish-naming processes in general). First, the different sources that a potato-dish can acquire its name from: (A) non-potato ingredients, e.g. cheesy potatoes (B) other processes of preparation, e.g. stuffed potatoes, (C) some random fantasy name, e.g. tartiflette. And second, the preferences of the potato-dish-baptist. The Baptist could choose a name based on either A, B or C depending on which characteristic of the potato dish she thinks to be the most relevant. If she thinks that the most essential part of a potato dish is that the dish in question has been stuffed, then she will name it a stuffed potato. She may have made this choice because she thinks that the ingredients constituting the stuffing are either made mostly of potato, or that they are not very interesting, at least not more interesting than the gracious act of stuffing. However, if the Baptist feels that the ancillary ingredients have a more crucial importance in defining the essence of the potato-dish in question than the method of preparation, she will name the potato dish with reference to the process involved in preparation. 

It has to be noted that the name-giving preparatory process also has to be chosen from all the different processes involved in the preparation. Baked potatoes are also often washed and scrubbed beforehand, nevertheless they are not called "washed potatoes" or "scrubbed potatoes" or "washed and scrubbed potatoes", or " washed and scrubbed then baked potatoes" even though this last one would be the most accurate description of the potato dish in question. A similar case can be made for naming based on ingredients. Prima facie, these characteristics of potato-dish-naming processes seem to suggest that the christening of a steaming plateful of solanum tuberosum is governed by the whimsical fancies of fallible humans, who just choose whatever name comes to their mind upon the consideration of the material components of the potato dish and its history. This suspicion is also confirmed by the existence of random fantasy names like tartiflette. 

Personally, I find this account of potato-dish naming highly unsatisfactory. Although most humans are stupid and easily influenced, with the attention span of a tired mosquito, I find it unbelievable that all human actions are dictated by the music of chance. I would like to believe that humans are the most evolved among all animals, and as such have a keen insight into the true nature of things. They see the very essence of things and conceives of them accordingly. Names given to entities reflect this acumen humans have into the nature of things. They aim to grasp the most essential feature of the entities they apply to. To give an example, oranges are called "oranges", because their most essential feature is their colour, which is orange, and tables are called "tables", because their most essential function is to function as a table. If we apply this reasoning to dish naming, we can see that the names of dishes also aim to reflect their true essence. A cheeseburger is essentially cheesy, a Caesar salad is essentially a salad, and a carrot cake is essentially constituted by carrots. In all cases the name reflects the true inner nature.

Based on these considerations, we can conclude that if a potato dish is called "baked potato" it must be a potato dish to which the process of preparation, i.e. baking, is essential. Thus, dear reader, if you ever find yourself asking whether a potato that you have eaten was a "baked potato" close your outer eyes, and focus the eye of your very soul (i.e. your intellect) on the true essential nature of the tuber you have just ingested. Soon you will find an answer.

More tuber musings can be found here.

Cartoon Food

The first time that I can remember experiencing an insatiable desire for an item of cartoon food was watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when I was probably 4 or 5. I felt it again every time I read an Archie comic and saw Jughead wolfing down a platter of (thankfully plain) burgers. Is this what Plato meant by Forms? Ugh! If only I had cultivated an intimate relationship with an Ancient Philosophy scholar! Otherwise my knowledge of Plato’s notion of Forms is limited to the veritable onslaught of vague references that undergraduate English students are bound to make whenever the words “shadow,” “cave,” or “dark” pop up in a text. (If there’s anyone out there interested in getting a BA, but they don’t know what in, I suggest English literature. It is always enough to say that something reminds you of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and go no further.) Regardless of my limited understanding of the term, I will nevertheless go forth and claim that cartoon food functions as an ideal Form of food, and that no doubt Plato had the Ninja Turtles in mind when he developed his theory.

Perhaps it is a bit problematic that cartoon food necessarily followed the material objects of pizza and burgers, but because I came into consciousness after these cartoon forms had already been established, and because I have made no effort to actually understand what Plato’s theory of Forms actually entails, and because I care for no one’s relationship to food but my own, I am going to grant myself some wiggle room here. And if Plato is arguing that we only ever see the shadows on the wall and never the real thing, let me just point out that Plato (probably) did not have access to TV or Archie comics—despite my previous claim that Plato wrote The Republic during the commercial breaks of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

For me, the pizzas of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Jughead’s burgers are not simply representations of pre-existing food that we physically ingest. They are perhaps modeled on those physical foods, but in their production and through cultural dissemination, they have been transformed into the ideal (or idea) of that food, and it is precisely through their artificiality that they become an unattainable promise of reality that we must always strive towards and inevitably fall short of. It is for this reason that pizzas and burgers have never tasted as sweet on my tongue as they do in my head (or my “brain-tongue,” if you want to be scientific).

So you can imagine my delight when a Müller superstore opened up in downtown Budapest with at least a quarter of one floor devoted entirely to German candies, mostly Haribo and its cheaper cousin, Trolli. And what does Trolli make? GUMMY BURGERS THAT LOOK AS IF THEY WERE TAKEN STRAIGHT OUT OF A CARTOON. It was like stumbling out of a dark cave where I had been munching on tasteless chimeras and into a ray of light to become the Philosopher Queen I always knew myself to be.

Although either Hairbo or Trolli also makes gummy pizzas (and gummy eggs, which are somewhat appealing to me), they are too small to actually capture the form of a cartoon pizza. It’s difficult to say what exactly is so great about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ pizza beyond saying that it looks like pizza: it’s sloppy and droopy and looks delicious. The gummy pizzas, on the other hand, are little more than pink, globular, semi-triangles.

It is perhaps easier to explain what I mean through a collection of curated TMNT pictures taken from the original cartoon, the live-action movies, and a toy.

Here we have an image from the late-80s to mid-90s Turtle era.What is remarkable about this cartoon pizza is 1) its uniformity -- all pizzas in the animated series look more or less like this one; and 2) the lack of detail -- there is no effort to try and portray the different shades of cheese or pepperoni, which we all know to be part & parcel of a real pizza. The nondescript pizza allows enough blank space (this is especially true of the slightly yellow-ish cheese entirely free of shade) for us to project our own desires onto that pizza; the form is open enough to accommodate within itself our own ideal pizza. If this is pizza at its highest point of artificiality, it is also pizza at its highest point of desirability. It perhaps bears mentioning for any turtle fans that Donatello is kindly offering his slice of pizza to the viewer (or at the very least making a cheers gesture), while Michelangelo has already begun to scarf his down.

In this image we begin to see the transition from the cartoon pizza to one that retains its cartoon qualities, but is nevertheless tangible and touchable in real life. While we could no doubt hold this small plastic disc in our hands, we cannot actually eat it,* which is, of course, the main goal. Although these toy pizzas of the TMNT franchise serve as an interesting bridge of the gap between the real and the artificial, they nevertheless remain as elusive and as illusory as the pizzas on the tv screen. If anything, these pizzas might increase our frustration at the impossibility of ever actually reaching the ideal form.

Finally, here is a still from one of the live-action TMNT films and we can see how these ideal pizzas cannot be sustained in physical reality, and ultimately break down. The pizzas in these movies are no more desirable than any pizza we can acquire in real life, and ultimately probably less so since I assume that they had probably entirely cooled off during filming.

In closing, here is a series of images that was once a gif, but I don't know what gifs are, and I certainly don't know how to post them here. I think that a series of stills is actually more useful to our purposes here since we can walk through these images one by one.

In the first three panels, notice Michelangelo's infectious (to the viewer, obviously not to Donatello) joy at the anticipation of consuming this slice of pizza, which surely can only be amplified by the promise of many more (there are three pizzas in front of him).

In the fourth and fifth panels you can see him begin to unhinge his jaw like a snake so as to be able to fit the entire slice in his mouth at one time. His lower jaw juts outwards not only in a snake-like unhinging, but also somewhat like a bib to catch the dripping cheese. The liquid quality of the cheese, especially apparent in the second piece that he holds in his other hand, indicates both that the pizza is obviously still hot and fresh, but also that the cheese is appropriately greasy.

In the final panel we can see Michelangelo's total bliss at having just consumed that piece of pizza, and we are assured that it was just as delicious as he had anticipated it to be in the first panel. Given that he ate it in a single gulp, we can be sure that his ravenous appetite can more than account for the remaining pizza, and based on our knowledge of Michelangelo's character, we can be certain that he will enjoy the remaining slices with the same relish as the first. Unfortunately for the viewer, because we will never be able to eat of this pizza, we will never experience this bliss first hand. Our disappointment is only augmented by it being acted out in front of our very eyes.

* Choking hazard! 

Art, as we know, doesn't represent the real,

But illustrates instead the impossible ideal.

 And our attempts to mimic the Form found in cartoon

Inevitably ends in an embarrassing culinary lampoon.