Edibility: An Inquiry

The Question Before The Meal

Before the first hunger, before the first seed split in sunlight, before the first hand reached toward flame, there was a question, silent, invisible, yet foundational: “What is food?”

It is one of those questions that hides inside ordinary life, like air, too infinite to notice, too essential to escape.

We think we understand it. We reach for a fruit, a grain, a cup of milk. But beneath that simple gesture lies a philosophical abyss.

What is it that turns matter into nourishment? What arbitrary decision makes a thing edible and another forbidden?

The answer is not practical. It is not about calories or cuisine. To ask “what is food?” is to ask “what kind of world do we inhabit?” and “how do we remain in it?”

For food is not only something we take in, it is means by which we participate in existence. Through food, the world enters us, and we become the world again.

Annam Brahma — “food is the divine”

Long before humans invented language, agriculture, or prayer, hunger existed. The single-cell organism reaching for a molecule, the plant turning towards the sun, the early creature gnawing at fallen fruit: were all primitive hungers.

Hunger is the first awareness, the body’s way of saying, “I want to live, to continue.”
In that wish, life discovered its own vulnerability.
In hunger is to recognize dependence.
No creature can feed on itself; existence is built on exchange.

When the first human stood upright and began to hunt, gather, and cook, something extraordinary happened: food ceased to be just fuel. It became a symbol.

The act of eating transformed from survival into ritual, from necessity into meaning.

Cooking, that humble fire and patience, was the first great turning point in human consciousness.
It was not just about softening meat or boiling grain; it was the moment when we learned that transformation could be deliberate.

That nature could be altered, that matter could be shaped by intuition.
To cook was to declare, “we are not merely creatures of instinct, we are participating of creation.”

Every civilization, in its own way, has answered the question “what is food?” differently.
These answers are not mutually exclusive, they overlap like an onion, each layer revealing something deeper about human psyche.

1. Food as Sustenance

matter, metabolism, & quiet violence of survival

At its most basic, food is matter sustains life: a combination of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats that fuels our cells and rebuilds our tissues.
From this view, food is the body’s way of participating in Chemistry.

We are literally what we eat.
The carbon in our muscles was once sunlight trapped by a leaf and stored in the fruit. The calcium in our bones was once part of ancient coral beds.

Every meal a biological reincarnation, the Earth turning into consciousness.

Biologically, food is the dialogue between life and decay. One form of life must die for another to continue. Whether it is fruit plucked, grain harvested, or meat cooked, every act of nourishment carries within it a quiet violence, an ancient sacrifice that underwrites survival.

Yet even as we recognize this truth, something remains unsatisfied. For we all have felt it, the hollowness of eating without joy.
The way the stomach fills but the heart stays empty.

Nutrition alone cannot account for the experience of eating. To feel nourished, we need not just sustenance, we need meaning.

2. Food as Nature

ecological dance between soil, sun and seed

The second face of food reveals itself through the rhythms of Earth.
Food is not manufactured, it is born. It is rain and soil and sunlight, performing their slow choreography.

Every grain of rice, every droplet of honey, every pulse of fruit is a condensed history of seasons, migrations, pollinations, and death.

To eat then, is to participate in the grand ecology of transformation, the unending cycle of consumption and renewal.

When the farmer bends to sow, when the cow grazes, when the bird carries a seed to another field, each is part of a choreography older than language.

This recognition gives rise to reverence.
A fruit plucked too early feels like theft. A meal wasted feels like betrayal.

Yet nature alone does not define what we eat. The forest is full of berries we will never taste. The sea is filled with creatures we will never touch.

The natural world gives, but the human decides. We filter nature through selection, intention, and taboo, we interpret it. That act of interpretation of choosing what becomes food is culture.

3. Food as Culture

how recipes, rituals and taboos shape identity

In every society, food is a mirror of its myth. It reveals how we see ourselves, what we value, and what we fear.

To cook is to participate in civilization. Fire is our oldest technology, but recipes are our oldest stories. Every dish carries memory, not of ingredients, but of hands.

Through food, we remember belonging. The smell of one’s childhood meal can undo years of distance.

The ritual of festivals, making snacks, fasting at dawn, sharing sweets, create invisible bonds stronger than language.

But culture also divides. What one community calls delicacy another calls blasphemy. The line between edible and inedible is drawn by belief.
The sacred cow, the forbidden pig, the untouchable insect, each boundary marks an identity.

Every meal then is a political act. It reaffirms history, hierarchy, and worldviews. We do not merely consume calories, we consume meaning.

4. Food as Spirituality

offering, prayer and meaning of life

When ancient humans began to understand death, they also began to understand food differently. To eat became an act of communion, a way of acknowledging our dependence on the invisible.

In many traditions, eating is preceded by prayer, not out of obligation, but remembrance.
The act of receiving food becomes an act of surrender, a small bow to the forces that make life possible.

In Hindu thought food is one of the 5 Great offerings through which the individual soul participates in the cosmic cycle.
Cooking is not merely domestic labor, it is wished alchemy.
The ingredients are offerings, the fire is sacred witness.

To eat is not just to satisfy hunger, it is to acknowledge the debt of existence.

The Upanishads say that food is the first form of Brahman, the divine made tangible. Because through food the invisible world becomes visible and the visible world becomes us.

This is why fasting too is sacred, not denial but dialogue. It reminds us that hunger, when endured consciously, connects us to the essential truth that sustains all life: the interdependence of everything that eats and is eaten.

Between Biology And Meaning

Food stands precisely at the threshold where biology meets philosophy. It begins in metabolism but ends in memory.
It is both physical and symbolic, a union of molecule & metaphor.

When a child bites into fruit, they are participating in both evolution and eternity.
The enzymes breaking down sugars are the same that operated in our ancestor’s bodies a million years ago.

But the joy, that sense of sweetness, of fulfillment, of safety is entirely human, entirely cultural, entirely now.

Food is how we experience time. Every taste carries history: the salt of the oceans, the spice routes, the patience of generations.
It’s not just what keeps us alive, it is what teaches us how to live.

Because when we eat consciously, when we truly taste, not just consume, we encounter something profound.
All life itself is a network of hungers feeding each other, and that to live is to continually accept and release, to take and to offer, to consume and to be consumed.

The Knowing Of Food

We imagine we know food through the senses, the taste, smell, texture, sight. But before taste comes trust. Before pleasure, recognition.

To call something “food” is to perform a kind of faith. It is to believe that what enters the mouth will not destroy you.
That the outside world is, at least for a moment, benevolent.

This recognition is ancient. The earliest humans learned what was edible watching, imitating, remembering.
Trial and error written blood and hunger.

Our knowledge of food is not only cognitive, it is biological memory. The tongue remembers what the ancestors survived.
The stomach recalls what the tribe endured.

Yet the same fruit that nourishes one body may poison another.
The same smell that evokes comfort for one culture may evoke disgust for another.

Food, then, is not objective. It is not discovered, but interpreted.
We do not just eat with our bodies, we eat with our stories.

And this raises a deeper question: “How do we know that something is food at all?”

Science tells us through analysis. Culture tells us through repetition. Family tells us through ritual.
But beneath them all lies a quieter teacher, instinct refined by meaning.

You do not need to name something to know it nourishes you. You only need to feel that it does.

That feeling of being fed, of being safe, of being momentarily whole, is perhaps the oldest form of knowledge we possess.

The Politics Of Taste

Taste pretends to be private, but it is public. It carries power, class, and identity.
When a person says, “I don’t like this,” what they often mean is, “this doesn’t belong to my world.”

The palate becomes a boundary. Spices, fats, grains are not just ingredients, they are markers of belonging.

Think of how cuisines migrate; what was once the poor man’s food becomes exotic luxury elsewhere. What was once sacred becomes commodity.
A crop taken, renamed, repackaged, its original context erased.

So when we ask, “what is food,” we are also asking, “who has the right to define it?”

Knowledge of food, like all knowledge, is political.
The grandmother’s intuition about fermentation, the farmer’s sense of soil, the monk’s dietary rhythms; all are dismissed when they cannot be quantified.

And so, we eat by numbers now, calories, macros, nutrients.
The body becomes a ledger of measurement, not a field of intuition.

To know food again, we must unlearn this overgrowth of certainty.
The mouth is wiser than the mind; it remembers the world in ways that science cannot articulate.

Food as Language

Every culture speaks through its food.
The spice rack is a dictionary. The menu is a map. The meal is a sentence, written in smell and salt.

To cook is to compose; balancing opposites, harmonizing contradictions. Sweet and sour, heat and coolness, texture and tenderness, the plate becomes philosophy in motion.

In every kitchen, you can glimpse the logic of a civilization. Some cook by patience, others by precision. Some worship abundance, others worship restraint. Some celebrate fire, others honour fermentation.

And in that grammar, you read entire worldviews about gender, divinity, discipline and desire.
To eat raw is to trust nature; to cook is to claim mastery. To fast is to seek purity; to feast is to affirm life’s excess.

Food then, is not just expression; it is syntax.
Every cuisine has its unspoken rules: what may touch what, what must never mix, what sequence of flavours defines respect. To violate these rules is not simply bad taste, but heresy.

Through food, we construct meaning without words.
A mother offering the first morsel to her child; a guest being served before the host; a festival when strangers eat from the plate. These are not gestures of appetite, but of belonging.

Eating together is not about sustenance, but about seeing each other as part of the same world.

Food as Metaphor

The language of food extends beyond the table. It infiltrates thought. We digest knowledge, chew on ideas, swallow pride, bite the hand.

The mind borrows its metaphors from the mouth.

Food is the most immediate experience of transformation.
We witness it daily: solid becomes fluid, raw becomes tender, and flavor becoming memory.

Through food, we understand what it means for the world to change state, to become something new by surrendering what was.

That is also what a thought does. A new idea enters the mind, meets resistance, breaks down, integrates, and becomes part of the self.

To eat, to think, and to love, all are acts of digestion.
And just as not all foods nourish, not all thoughts do; some poison slowly, some sustain for life.
The wise eater, like the wise thinker, chooses carefully, not out of fear, but reverence.

Sprout and Rot

Food exists in time. It sprouts, ripens and rots.
Every meal is a performance against entropy. It’s a celebration of the moment before decay.

To cook is to engage time itself, to learn its rhythms; how long to boil, how long to rest, how to wait for dough to rise.
The kitchen is the laboratory where human patience was invented.

And in that patience, something miraculous happens. We find that transformation requires surrender. Nothing ripens by force. Nothing ferments without trust.

To watch bread rise or milk turn to curd is to witness the mystery of becoming, how stillness breeds life, how decay becomes flavour.

Food teaches us the most difficult truth about existence:
Impermanence is not an error in the system, but its essence.
What we call ripeness is simply a temporary victory over time.

The apple’s perfection is the beginning of its decay. To eat it is to accept that beauty is brief. And that its brevity is what makes it beautiful.

Fermentation, aging and cooking are not attempts to defeat decay but to collaborate with it.
Every meal, in its own way, is a small triumph of transience.

We take what is fleeting and make it beautiful.
We take what is perishable and make it sacred.
In this way food becomes our daily experiment with mortality.

The Memory of Meal

When the plate is empty, what remains?
The taste lingers, but not for long. The smell dissolves. The body digests, absorbs, forgets.

And yet some meals never leave us. Not because of their ingredients, but because of their timings.
Who was there, what was said, what silences were shared.

Food stores memory not in the mind, but in the senses.
Years later, a single aroma can reopen an entire season of childhood; the body remembers long after the mind forgets.

Perhaps that’s why so many sacred rituals use food as the medium; the offering, the communion, the prasad.

Eating becomes remembrance, not of a past event, but of the continuity of being itself.

Food as Wonder

After all this reflection, what remains is wonder.
That a seed becomes grain, grain becomes bread, bread becomes us; that the invisible chemistry of digestion becomes laughter, poetry, and prayer.

To eat is to allow the universe to reimagine itself through you. And if that does not move you, perhaps nothing will.

“Raso Vai Sah,” “Divine is the taste itself.”

From Upanishads, this captures what science cannot: That essence of reality is not physicality, but experience.

The next time you eat, pause before the first bite.
Feel the weight of the bite, the smell rising, the anticipation.
Remember how many forces had to cooperate for this to exist.
And then answer, at first like your first meal on Earth, then touch the miracle of creation. When you swallow, you are not just consuming matter, you consent to existence.

You are saying yes to life in all its complexity, violence, beauty, impermanence and grace.

The Unresolved Curiosity

So after all this wondering, what do we mean by food?

It is substance and symbol. Matter and metaphor. Hunger and holiness.
It is the meeting point of everything: biology, culture, emotion, ethics and awe.

It is the thread that binds flesh to cosmos, the ritual that repeats.
Every creature eats and is eaten. In that exchange lies the strange democracy of existence.

Perhaps food does not need a final definition.
Perhaps its mystery itself is its meaning.

To eat is to join the eternal experiment of becoming, to say again and again, with body and breath,
“The world offers itself and I accept.”