Why authors should speak their minds: fiction, self-censorship, parrhesia

{A version of this piece in Greek will appear in a collection of essays entitled Silence in the Field of Culture, edited by Katerina Vourlioti and Despina Catapoti. I am grateful to the editors for the invitation to contribute as well as to the anonymous reviewer for the helpful comments.}

The, admittedly dense, thoughts in this text are a first attempt at an argument primarily from the perspective of the fiction writer than that of a philosophy professional.

There are many reasons, for which a fiction writer might self-censor, that is, limit or adjust what or how he writes contrary to his will or judgement.

Perhaps his freedom or his physical integrity, or that of his loved ones, are under threat. Perhaps, for example, Annie Wilkes, his “number one fan” holds him captive and tortures him until he writes the book she demands, the book that will resurrect her beloved heroine Misery Chastain from his earlier work. Perhaps writing is his only livelihood and he will secure a decent income publishing a romantic novel, a genre he detests, rather than the psychoanalytic allegory he longs to write. Perhaps, if he reasonably criticises the genocidal practices of the State in which he lives, the damage will be such that he risks having his past writings censored, let alone his future ones.

There are also many reasons, for which one ought to resist self-censorship. Perhaps the reward for one’s honesty outweighs the harm one is threatened with. Perhaps one has made a promise to write exactly as one sees fit without making any concessions. Perhaps one is threatened by someone, such as one’s publisher, that one will suffer even more painful consequences if one censors oneself.

The question I want to probe, however, is whether any such objective reason arises from the practice of fictional writing itself.

Self-censorship is a kind of dishonesty. The self-censor conceals or distorts his or her belief about what is true. This in itself establishes the in principle demerit of certain forms of self-censorship. Journalists, for example, have a moral, and often contractual, duty to convey information that they believe to be true in good faith.

It is not at all obvious, however, that the same applies to fiction.

To be honest means to believe that what one expresses is true. This subjective element also presupposes something objective, namely that the utterance can be true. The truth value of the utterance depends on its correspondence with something external and objectively verifiable, whether this is an extralinguistic reality or some conventional criteria and so on (no need to take a stance here on what is the case). It follows that whether someone is honest depends on whether what they are expressing can be true.

The content of the literary work, however, does not correspond to anything outside itself. This can be easily understood in relation to literary genres such as fantasy but is equally true across the spectrum of fiction. Let us take the least obvious example, the stricto sensu historical novel, which we can define as the novel set in a historical period that precedes in time the author’s or readers’ consciousness. The factual framework of the historical novel refers to historical events. However, it is not true because and to the extent that it corresponds to those facts. Its genesis is contemporary with its description. This is why invented historical conditions, whether central or peripheral, have exactly the same force and belong among those based on real events.

Since, therefore, fictional speech cannot have a truth value, then the question of the duty of authorial honesty cannot even arise.

But let us approach fiction as a form of communication and ask whether the writer has any duty of honesty in order to communicate correctly to the reader.

J.L. Austin (1962) taught us that when speaking we do not describe the world but perform some linguistic acts. These are divided into three levels: the locutionary (what is said), the illocutionary (what action is performed), and the perlocutionary (what are the effects of the utterance?). Successful communication depends on the presence of certain conditions. For example, when someone says “I promise to cook for you tonight”, in order to perform the act of the promise, apart from the fact that the sentence must be satisfactorily formulated, the speaker must also know how to cook, there must be a kitchen, which he will be able to use and so on. And according to the development of the theory of linguistic acts by John Searle (1969), a further condition for the felicitousness of the promise is also the sincerity of the speaker, that he actually intends to cook.

However, the fictional discourse seems to lack illocutionary force altogether. When, for example, a fictional judge pronounces “I sentence you to ten years in prison” this has no sentencing effect, since even the minimal conditions for the success of the relevant speech act are not met.

J.L. Austin himself noted the particularity of literary speech from the beginning: “a performative utterance will be {…} hollow or void if is said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy.” (Austin, 1962: 22) He adds, rather ungenerously, that “language, in such circumstances is in special ways – intelligibly – used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use – ways which fall under the doctrine of etiolations of language.” (ibid.)

But what if Austin was not imaginative enough and he had in mind too narrow a range of speech acts? Richard Ohmann (1972) claims that literary discourse has a peculiar illocutionary force, which does not fall into familiar categories such as baptising or sentencing or promising. The illocutionary act of literary speech is cosmogonic, it creates anew a totality that did not exist before its utterance-performance. Thus, a court sentence is valid as such, that is, as an act, and not merely as an utterance of locutionary force, within the context of the novel. As not all the constitutive conditions of illocutionary acts are met, Ohmann adds that it is up to the reader to fill them in based on the implicit knowledge of what makes these acts felicitous. The construction of an imaginary world from works of fiction, Ohmann tells us, is precisely this give-and-take between author and reader through preverbal acts.

If Ohmann is right, then we may be provided with at least the beginning of an answer to the question at hand, that is whether the practice of literary writing provides any reason for the writer to resist self-censorship. If writing establishes such a direct relationship between author and reader, and indeed a relationship not only of communication but of collaboration, of participation in the fictional cosmogony, then the author, like the reader, is under a general duty of honesty.

However, at least two obstacles are raised. First of all, the platitude that the writer “communicates” with the reader is nothing more than a figure of speech. When Charlotte Brontë, in the voice of Jane Eyre, addresses herself directly “to the ‘reader,'” how is she addressing you reading her book in 2026, if for no other reason than at least because she wrote the invocation in 1846, perhaps even earlier, and died in 1855? That aside, what kind of communication is this, when the author has little choice over who reads her book, let alone any veto power?

But it is not only scale, spatial or temporal, that inevitably separates the author from the readership. The literary text per se is never addressed to anyone. Writers often say that when they write they have a model reader in mind. That is but a phantom of their own invention. The literary text is abandoned to the randomness of whether someone will read it, who will read it and how they will read it. This is why it makes no sense to dedicate a book to someone, because it eliminates this contingency. (You can, of course, write a book about someone thereby fulfilling a vow or declaring that you have reduced them to inspiration, that you have harvested their lives for the needs of your book). Letters and wills have an addressee. Because the author is no longer a performer but a creator and has now acquired an identity and because, at the same time, we have re-evaluated death as a definitive end and not as a transition to another field, we have come to believe that the work of fiction is also a letter or a testament. We are mistaken. One will say, what else are the books piled on the bookstore tables but an invitation to readers, to each and every one of them? Indeed, this is an offer not of the novel itself but of its reproduction. And to confuse the book as an object, which can be multiplied, with the novel itself, which is unique, non-repeatable, ends up objectifying the latter as something fungible.

Defending committed literature, Jean Paul Sartre (1948) argues that writing is always an appeal to the reader to transmute the author’s attempted revelation through language, an appeal to the reader’s freedom to contribute to the production of the literary work. However, if this is genuine creative freedom, then it is also unlimited, that is, the original text sets no barriers whatever. Otherwise, the reader acts unfreely, because he is either guided by the text or co-creates something that he rejects, perhaps even abhors. Consequently, being absolutely free, the reader replaces the author, obliterates him, abolishes him. Sartre believes that the dialectical relationship between writer and reader leads to an objectivity, even a radical, revolutionary one. But he has already rendered intersubjectivity unnecessary, he considers the text to be the only channel linking the two parties. When the author converses with the reader, for example at a book launch, then we have already jumped into the realm of literary criticism or, more often, commercial transaction. Sartre ends up, therefore, deifying the independent and self-sufficient subject. It follows that literature itself is abolished, as the text has no limiting power, its content is now determined solely by the imagination of each reader.

Let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that author and reader actually communicate and that the reader participates in the fictional cosmogony. Since the possibility of direct collaboration has been excluded or, when it happens, that is, when author and reader sit at the same desk and complete the myth, then they write together ex nihilo, an objective basis is required, from which the necessary implicit knowledge will be drawn and which guarantees the coherence of the novel. This basis is necessarily found within the novel. Even if something from the world outside of fiction is introduced, if, for example, one creatively reads a real historical or social condition, which is not already implied by the plot, in order for that to find its place, it must cohere with the rest of the elements of the text, both those that reflect real events and those that are completely invented. The myth absorbs and sets the conditions for the validity of any new information.

So far, it seems that the practice of literature does not force anyone not to self-censor. The author is free to suppress or falsify his beliefs because they are always outside the text. The only important correspondence, which must be maintained, is of the literary work to itself and its explicit as well as implicit aspects.

All this, however, under the condition, which until now I have implicitly accepted, that reading is a condition for giving meaning to the literary work. Or, according to Sartre (1948), even an ontological condition: without the act of reading, the literary object remains invisible, black marks on paper.

Yet, our instincts tell us that a work that was never read, a work whose pages the author might have smoked because he had run out of cigarette paper, like Bakhtin in the slightly distorted version of the real event, which Paul Auster used repeatedly in his work, did indeed have meaning not only as symbols or words but as a work of literature. A reasonable objection is that this is never possible, because the author is already, inescapably, the first reader of his work, even if he is also destined to be the last. The writing activity, however, is distinct from the reading activity. Reading presupposes a separation, even momentary, that writing lacks. The author and his work are identified at every stage of creation. If this is true, then our sense that a work of literature is still a work of literature, even if it remains forever unread, is well founded. And I would argue that this happens, because we realize, even subconsciously, that the condition of publicity of the literary work is not its reading but its historicity, that is, that it occupies a place in the totality of literary production, a place of interdependence and interaction. This becomes necessary not because the work is read, let alone because of the way in which it is read, but from the fact that it consists in a specific use of language, which is entirely and exclusively practical, that is, it does not expose but creates.

If it is inevitable that a work will be mutually determined by its literary environment, exactly how this will happen remains constantly uncertain, because, firstly, this environment cannot be completely known in advance (some works are hidden, others have been destroyed, the majority of them have not yet been written) and, secondly, it is never static. The fictional universe shapes itself, it is not determined by some external act of reading or criticism. Equally indifferent is the author’s intention. His subjectivity is not introduced into the fiction and does not affect its development.

We saw earlier that the work of fiction is exposed to the possibilities of either being forgotten or being read. We now find that it is also exposed to the randomness of its relationship with the rest of the fictional universe.

In writing, the author is faced with a sea of possibilities, with something incalculable and unpredictable, with a chaos that can only be experienced as emptiness. The writing has no starting point, that is, it is not imprinted as something pre-existing, and it has no destination. In this isolation, the question of whether someone should be honest loses its meaning. Since an asymmetry between belief and truth is impossible, and in the absence of a dialogical community as the recipient of honest or insincere utterance, then one cannot help but be honest.

This also implies the opposite, that honesty is a necessary condition of fictional writing. Here, then, arises the duty of the author not to censor himself. Except that it is not, as one might expect, a moral duty, as it might be a general duty of honesty, nor a condition of successful communication. It comes from the very nature of the practice of literature.

But what exactly does this duty amount to? What exactly does it mean to be honest as a writer? Nothing at present has reversed our earlier observation that fiction has no reflection on the world outside itself; on the contrary, this observation has been reinforced. Sincerity cannot, therefore, refer to the verifiable. And, since the literary environment always remains necessarily uncertain and dynamic, sincerity equally cannot refer to the coherence of the work with the fictional universe.

So the author’s claimed honesty can refer to himself and himself alone. The usually unbearable platitudes “be yourself” or “write what you know” find application here. To make fiction on its own terms, the writer must write what he believes he believes. In the bubble, in which he finds himself and creates, he must present himself, as he perceives himself and his work, rejecting external reasons, which could affect his writing consciously by imposing dilemmas on him.

The time has come, however, for me to admit something that may already be obvious to the reader, namely that I am misusing the word “honesty”, since it does not describe what we are trying to capture. As I have already mentioned but not emphasized enough, writing is an entirely practical activity. The author does not ascertain, does not announce, does not expose but acts. On the one hand, he creates the world of his own myth. On the other hand, he co-creates the fictional universe. What is required of him, then, is not epistemological honesty, that is, to reproduce and convey the truth of the thing outside of fiction. At the same time, he is not required to submit to ethical principles or rules, since his act does not have the necessary interpersonal impact nor can it bring about the consequences that ground such normative constraints.

The author gives a universal dimension to his overall experience, the way he perceives the natural world around him, his moral judgments, his views on the literary language. He imagines the world as consisting of all aspects of himself combined in various versions. To draw a parallel, the Kantian practice of universalising action-guiding maxims aims at the discovery of the moral law. Thus, the Kantian subject submits itself to the law that applies to everyone, it is identified with all other moral subjects. And if it is doubtful whether this is indeed a process of universalisation or if it is inescapably and excessively monological, there can be no doubt that the authorial subject presents itself as universal and imposes it as a natural and moral law, that is, it exists in a condition of absolute freedom.

This freedom, however, is accompanied by uncertainty, caused by the double contingency of the activity of fiction. We tend to deal with this kind of uncertainty and concomitant risks with a combination of epistemological and normative experiments, and settle for a transitory and precarious certainty based on intersubjectivity. Here, however, that path is not open. The only way out, then, is to turn to virtue. The author is asked to replace certainty with courage, to show the bravery to project himself onto a universal field.

The courage to present oneself exactly as one believes is the meaning of the classical concept of parrhesia. There is, however, a big difference. In its classical conception, parrhesia was owed to the community or to the parrhesia writer himself as a member of the community (Foucault 2016). If, as I have argued, the modern practice of fictional writing is unilateral, that is, the literary work has no recipient, and the duty of parrhesia stems from the very nature of fiction and if the central characteristic of the latter is its autonomy, then the writer does not owe this particular attitude to others because he is part of a community, he owes it to the mode of expression he undertakes, precisely because he isolates himself from the community.

The duty of parrhesia in fiction is incomplete. First, it is not activated until after someone starts writing fiction. In other words, it does not force anyone to write. Writers often say that they owe it to their art to write their next work, and that it would be a betrayal if they did not. Such dramatic statements only reveal an unbearable narcissism. Fiction writing itself does not engender any such obligation. Nor does the duty of frankness override the duty of other reasons. Each individual case requires weighing. If, for example, Annie Wilkes is swinging her axe over your leg, then you are probably justified in continuing the series of books starring Misery Chastain, even if what you produce is an aberration. But if you seek enrichment, then you are contributing unduly to the possibility of building a body of literary production that is not only autonomous but also completely alien to those who created it.

Austin, John Langshaw (1962). How To Do Things With Words. Clarendon Press

Foucault, Michel (2016). Discours et vérité précédé de la Parrêsia. Vrin

Ohmann, Richard (1972). “Speech, Literature, and the Space Between”. New Literary History, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 47–63.

Sartre, Jean Paul (1948). Qu’est-ce que la littérature?. Gallimard.

John R. Searle (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press.

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Mango season in Cyprus

Although not endemic to Cyprus, mangoes have been grown here for the best part of five decades, ostensibly introduced by a Cypriot living in Darwin, Australia. The Paphos area climate provides optimal cultivation conditions. Mangoes require plenty of sunshine, mild winters, and well-drained soil rich in organic matter. The downside is that they also require a lot of water, around 700 cubic meters per 1000 square meters per year, especially after fruit setting. In tropical and subtropical areas irrigation happens naturally but, there not being a rainy season in Cyprus, it has to be artificial. This has to be taken into account when considering the sustainability of local mango growing alongside factors such as the environmental impact of importing the fruit, the strain that excessive demand may put on mango-producing communities elsewhere in the world (consider the damage caused by avocado overproduction), but also the impact that growing demand and subsequent intensification may have on other local crops.

Mainly four varieties are grown in Cyprus: Kensington, Zebdah, Payri and Owais. They are fleshy, soft, sweet and largely fibreless. Apart from being quite delightful, they also have a high nutritional value. A source of nutrients like fiber and rich in a range of vitamins (165gr of fresh mango provides an impressive 67% of the daily value of Vitamin C), the health benefits of mangoes are substantial. Find out more details here and here. 

I like to use mangoes, always local and always in season (late September – early October), both in savoury (I am particularly fond of the mango, avocado, chilli salsa that I often serve with fish ) and sweet dishes. Here’s a light and fluffy cheesecake recipe:

Mango and lime cheesecake

  • 250g digestive biscuits
  • 125g unsalted butter
  • 600g full fat cream cheese, at room temperature
  • 75g icing sugar (sieved)
  • 200ml cold double cream
  • 150ml mango purée (3-4 small, Cypriot mangoes)
  • 2 limes (zest and juice)
  • 4 small, Cypriot mangoes
  • 40g white sugar
  • 1tbsp cornflour
  • 1tbsp water

Finely grind the biscuits in a sealed bag with a rolling pin or in a food processor until they’re finely ground (you can either bash them in a bag or blitz them in a food processor but make sure they don’t turn to dust). Transfer to a bowl, melt the butter, pour it over the biscuit crumb and mix well until it all feels wet.

Line a 23cm springform cake tin with baking paper, pour the biscuit mix and press it down very firmly. Chill in the fridge for at least 30’.

Purée 3-4 mangoes in a blender until you have roughly 150ml. Mix this together with the cream cheese, the icing sugar, and lime zest. Whisk together until smooth.

In a separate mixing bowl, whisk the double cream to stiff peaks. The cream must be cold for this to work. To prevent a sudden temperature increase, you could freeze the bowl beforehand.

Fold the whipped cream into the cream cheese mix. Do not whisk it, you want the mix to be airy and fluffy.

Pour the mix over the buttery biscuit base and smooth. Chill it overnight.

For the mango topping, roughly chop the mangoes and add to a saucepan along with the juice of the limes and the sugar. Bring to a gentle simmer and allow to cook for around 10’ or until it looks set. In the meantime, dilute the cornflour in the water and then add it to the compote. Stir over low heat for a couple of minutes until thick. Let it cool down before pouring it over the cheesecake.

Any questions? Get in touch!

Enjoy!

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On the Mediterranean diet

This is older but, being in the process of updating and rationalising my sites and blogs, I’m reposting it here,

In February 2023 I ran a cooking workshop for the Goethe Institut Zypern as part of the Foodprint project. The title was Tangy: A celebration of citrus in Mediterranean cuisine. In preparation for the workshop, I jotted down the following preliminary thoughts. I hope someday to develop them into something more extensive, coherent and complete.

The dinner at the house of Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyricon is to us, modern readers, otherworldly and perhaps a little frightening, not least because of the menu on offer:

A double pannier of olives, green and black, a gridiron of sausages, damsons and dormice coated with poppy seeds and honey. Fig-peckers in egg yolk seasoned with pepper in egg-shaped pastry. Hors d’oeuvres arranged per zodiac sign: ram’s vetches, beef, kidneys and lamb’s fry, the womb of an unfarrowed sow, an African fig a tart and a cake on the two pans of Libra’s balance, a small sea fish, a bull’s eye, a sea lobster, a goose, two mullets. A piece of cut sod, on which rested a honeycomb with the grass arranged around it. Another tray with stuffed capons and sows’ bellies, a hare with fitted wings. Whole wild boar accompanied by pastry suckling piglets and filled with live thrushes. A hog stuffed with sausages and meat puddings. A boiled calf wearing a helmet. Saffron-squirting cakes and fruits. Boneless fattened chickens served with pastry-capped goose eggs. Thrushes made out of pastry, stuffed with nuts and raisins, accompanied by quinces. A dish of pork dressed up to look like a fattened goose garnished with birds and fish. Water jugs with oysters and scallops to the brim accompanied by a gridiron of snails.

It is perfectly debauched, the recipes, the volume of food, the serving of each dish, and perfectly playful, an all-around experience that leaves the diners amused, scared, surprised, at times flabbergasted.

The components of the meal, however, are all too familiar. They are what we associate with the Mediterranean diet. Sure enough, the menu is heavy on the meat and the Mediterranean diet is thought of as mainly plant-based but Trimalchio’s dinner was a special occasion (the practice of reserving meat for rituals persists, if fainter, to our days) and there are also nuts and fruit, fresh and dried, honey, seafood. It’s not that the host could not afford anything more exotic – so rich was that whatever he desired he had imported from abroad, whether it be bees from Attica or mushroom seeds from India – but those were the ingredients of a feast, like those found in the garden of Alkínoös, the King of the Phaeacians.

To left and right, outside, he saw an orchard closed by a pale – four spacious acres planted with trees in bloom or weighted down for picking:  pear trees, pomegranates, brilliant apples, luscious figs, and olives ripe and dark.  Fruit never failed upon these trees: winter and summer time they bore, for through the year the breathing Westwind ripened all in turn − so one pear came to prime, and then another, and so with apples, figs, and the vine’s fruit empurpled in the royal vineyard there. Currants were dried at one end, on a platform bare to the sun, beyond the vintage arbors and vats the vintners trod; while near at hand were new barely formed as the green bloom fell, or half-ripe clusters, faintly coloring. After the vines came rows of vegetables of all the kinds that flourish in every season, and through the garden plots and orchard ran channels from one clear fountain, while another gushed through a pipe under the courtyard entrance to serve the house and all those who came for water. These were the gifts of heaven to Alkínoös.

There is no one Mediterranean diet any more than there is one Mediterranean culture; to argue the opposite amounts to imperialist essentialism, to orientalism. But this does not do away with the aporia, arguably first articulated by the anthropologist Fernand Braudel, that although we have a sense, perhaps some rather confidently, of what counts as Mediterranean, we can never quite describe what Mediterranean is. The same applies to cooking and eating. The differences from East to West and North to South are vast. Lebanese cuisine, say, is radically different to Italian, yet we would not hesitate to consider them both Mediterranean.

At the same time, if we go back a little further, all Mediterranean cuisines bear the whole of the basin in them. They are the long history of connection, communication, import and export. Once originated elsewhere, produce is now ubiquitous across the basin and native to several regions. It is also a history of violence. Empires were perhaps the most significant driving force for the establishment and spread of cultures and techniques. Or think of the Moriscos, who, on their violent expulsion from Spain, changed the culinary ways of the Maghreb.

The Mediterranean diet was (re)conceptualised and medicalised by Ancel Keys and his ground-breaking Seven Countries Study, launched in 1958, not as a diet that is uniform in its minute details but rather as a general nutritional pattern. For medical purposes, the Mediterranean diet is generally low in saturated fat – olive oil is its principal component of fat –, it is high in cereal products, legumes, fruit and vegetables, moderate in fish and low in dairy and meat products. Pared down to its elements, this idea of the Mediterranean diet, the idea that most people are familiar with, has been displaced, exported, simulated, assimilated. It has travelled across the globe.

PORTO STYLE TRIPE

One day, in a restaurant beyond time and space,

They served me love as cold tripe.

With utmost delicacy, I told the delegate from the kitchen:

I’d rather have it hot.

I told him tripe (and it was Porto style) is never eaten cold.

They got impatient with me.

You’re never right, not even in a restaurant.

I didn’t eat, I didn’t ask for anything else, I paid the bill,

Went outside, and walked up and down the street.

Who knows what this means?

I don’t know, and it happened to me.

(I know very well there was a garden in everyone’s childhood,

Private or public, or the neighbor’s,

I know very well our playing was its custodian,

And sadness is today’s.)

I know this many times over,

But if I asked for love, why did they bring me

Cold Porto style tripe?

It’s not a dish you can eat cold,

But they brought it cold.

I didn’t complain, but it was cold.

It should never be eaten cold, but it came cold.[1]

This is by Alvaro de Campos, one of the many aliases of Portuguese philosopher and poet Fernando Pessoa. Porto-style tripe[2] is meant to be served hot, having it offered to him cold leaves him disconnected with the world, it is like being denied the love that he craved and sought. The reason for this disconnect is not private or esoteric. How specific dishes are cooked and presented is a social practice and therefore subject to rules, it isn’t simply a matter of personal taste or preference, although it may of course be that in tandem. Being offered cold Porto-style tripe is an unjustifiable breach of the rule – variations are allowed, perhaps the cannellini beans can be substituted with butter beans, but only to a limit, with no one quite knowing where that limit lies until it is reached. The poet’s disconnect is social. The social practice, of which he wanted to be a part, is undermined and so is the community that generated it and sustains it. The restaurant is unembedded, it is “beyond time and space”.

The medical understanding of the Mediterranean diet cannot grasp its social nature, which necessarily resides in the context. In 2013, the Mediterranean diet was inscribed on the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of the humanity by UNESCO, on the joint application of Cyprus, Croatia, Spain, Greece, Italy, Morocco, and Portugal.[3]

The Mediterranean diet involves a set of skills, knowledge, rituals, symbols and traditions concerning crops, harvesting, fishing, animal husbandry, conservation, processing, cooking, and particularly the sharing and consumption of food. Eating together is the foundation of the cultural identity and continuity of communities throughout the Mediterranean basin. It is a moment of social exchange and communication, an affirmation and renewal of family, group or community identity. The Mediterranean diet emphasizes values of hospitality, neighbourliness, intercultural dialogue and creativity, and a way of life guided by respect for diversity. It plays a vital role in cultural spaces, festivals and celebrations, bringing together people of all ages, conditions and social classes. It includes the craftsmanship and production of traditional receptacles for the transport, preservation and consumption of food, including ceramic plates and glasses. Women play an important role in transmitting knowledge of the Mediterranean diet: they safeguard its techniques, respect seasonal rhythms and festive events, and transmit the values of the element to new generations. Markets also play a key role as spaces for cultivating and transmitting the Mediterranean diet during the daily practice of exchange, agreement and mutual respect.”

In its medicalised conception, the Mediterranean diet can conceivably be administered by pills, say, or by injection without any remainder, because the connection it draws between the person and her diet is selective and instrumental. Indeed, it is more of a separation than a link, similar to the alienation between the consumer and the product she consumes.

UNESCO’s conception is designed to capture people’s relations to nature, both in its raw state and transformed through labour and skill, but also to their relations to each other as these are mediated by the use of nature.

The Mediterranean diet is a celebration of nature as well as a celebration of each other. In the Homeric epics, the numerous feasts are ways of connecting with the gods but, even more so, they are ways of connecting with the community, a community which is not predetermined but is constituted by the feast itself, by hospitality. Odysseus comes as a stranger to feasts, which are organised in his honour. [4] (Let’s pause and consider how we treat those who drift to our shores in need these days). The one example that stands out as wrong, as a corruption of the practice is the feasting of Penelope’s suitors. Predatory, rude, theftuous, and cruel as they are, their feasts are abominable, they are destructive of community.

It is for the same reason that the Mediterranean diet is radically at odds with neoliberal capitalism. It is cyclical and slow-paced, capitalism flattens time. It is about craft, capitalism is about automation. It is about continuity and, at the same time, surprise, variety and innovation, capitalism necessitates radical standardisation. It is small-scale, cooperative, capitalism is about the concentration of production and ownership. It is about locality, capitalism thrives on global distribution networks. The Mediterranean diet resists its commodification.

We should take the UNESCO conception of the Mediterranean diet as a reminder of the value of our practices. But we should also be aware of some risks that the contradictions and tensions intrinsic to it cause.

Like all institutions, this too has performative force, it brings into being a version of what it tries to capture. In doing so, it prescribes its object. This is, after all, part of its aim: to record and preserve cultural heritage and this can only be performed by being prescriptive and setting the standards against which practices will be measured.

This is neither unjustified nor undesirable so long as it remains external to the practice. Once it is imported into it with full normative force, rather than just as information to be fed back into the collective awareness of participants, then we might become disconnected from the practice itself, which needs to develop organically, on the basis of general guiding principles communally upheld and internalised, and not as a matter of external rules. Only so can it adapt and evolve on its own terms whether it be around the basin or, indeed, by communities outside it, as, for example, in the diaspora.

The kitchen. La cucina, the true mother country, this warm cave of the good witch deep in the desolate land of loneliness, with pots of sweet potions bubbling over the fire, a cavern of magic herbs, rosemary and thyme and sage and oregano, balm of lotus that brought sanity to lunatics, peace to troubled, joy to the joyless. (John Fante, Brotherhood of the Grape)

Doing something as a matter of external rule-following might also undermine something central to the very idea of the Mediterranean diet, which both the medicalised and the cultural heritage conceptions fail to capture: the pleasure that we take from it.

Let us return to the Satyricon, which, according to one interpretation might be named after the Latin ‘satura’, meaning a plate filled with various kinds of food, rather than the Greek-derived word ‘satyros’.

Seleucus, one of the diners at Trimalchio’s feast, has just been to the funeral of his friend Chrysanthus, who “slipped his wind”:

Why, only the other day he said good morning’ to me, and I almost think I’m talking to him now! God’s truth, we’re only blown-up bladders strutting around, we’re less than flies, for they have some good in them, but we’re only bubbles. And supposing he had not kept to such a low diet! Why, not a drop of water or a crumb of bread so much as passed his lips for five days; and yet he joined the majority! Too many doctors did away with him, or rather, his time had come, for a doctor’s not good for anything except for a consolation to your mind!

This is not to suggest that the Mediterranean way of eating necessarily entails a self-destructive jouissance but rather to emphasise that pleasure is resistant to rules outside of itself, and it is certainly not the outcome of rule-following, while, at the same time, it has itself the force to determine a social practice. Whether it be the joyfulness of abundance and sensory stimulation or the sense of emotional connectedness in mourning that eating the same meal – think of kollyva: wheat, sesame seeds, almonds, walnuts, cinnamon, sugar, pomegranate seeds, raisins, anise, parsley, the human condition, our common destiny in a bowl – to understand the Mediterranean diet without pleasure is to understand it in an impoverished manner. The question, then, which can only raised here, is how exactly the social rules that constitute the practice of the Mediterranean diet are reconciled with the pleasure that it offers.

Mediterranean peoples have been drifting away from the Mediterranean diet, this much is clear on the available evidence. The reasons for this are many and varied but, no doubt, it calls for self-reflection on a way of life that goes way beyond its nutritional value.

[1] The Collected Poems of Alvaro de Campos (1928-1935), Chris Daniels transl., Shearsman Books 2009.

[2] White beans and tripe, with olive oil, onion, garlic, bay leaf, chouriço and carrots. It ostensibly dates back to in the 14th century, when meat was reserved for the Portuguese army in Africa, which left Porto’s residents with the offal.

[3] https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/mediterranean-diet-00884

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On cooking and eating together

There’s some intuitive appeal to the idea that the experience of cooking and eating is enhanced when we do it together as a group, when we all participate in the different stages of production of a meal from picking and handling ingredients, combining them, seasoning, smelling, tasting to then setting the table, serving and sharing the product of the joint effort.

On closer inspection, however, it’s not all that clear from where the added value stems. Is it the plain fact of togetherness itself? That’s not immediately obvious. How about people eating together in prisons or military barracks or schools? Not only does their togetherness not improve a singularly awful experience but, if anything, it makes it torturous.

In fact, what does it even mean that we perform those acts “together” to start with? Eating is a quintessentially solitary activity. It engages the senses, an unshareable ability par excellence, and satisfies exclusively individual needs or desires. As for cooking, say that a group prepares a meal together and one chops vegetables, another adds spices, a third one stirs and so on, all following a given recipe. This chain activity is cooperative in that everyone shares the same goal but stays on a surface level as each participant contributes something distinct without the involvement of or interaction with others. The end result might, therefore, be more accurately considered not as the product of a joint activity but rather as the aggregative result of parallel actions. Nor does the overall experience seems to have been enhanced. Each participant might draw value from the end result, the meal, to the extent that it meets his or her desire and, possibly, from some sense of pride for having contributed to it but not from the process of having collectively prepared it.

Things begin to get more interesting and promising, when, instead of separating tasks, everyone has some input in all the stages of production including, significantly, the basic components of the dish, which will determine its flavour and appearance. Still, however, we have to wonder why this makes a difference.

It is, of course, the case that cooking and eating as a group can boost a social interaction between friends or strangers by framing it. Food and drink tend to make people content and, all things being equal, content people find it easier to open up to one another and form or strengthen relations. True as this may be, it is still not the result of jointly engaging in an activity but rather of the sense of well-being of individuals.

Might we make more headway by thinking of food as culture? UNESCO defines culture as “the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, that encompasses, not only art and literature but lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.”[1] Food practices are cultural: “Food lies at the core of human practices, community identity and social scripts. Food belongs to cultural heritage and it is viewed as such as an asset. Each country or community’s unique cuisine can reflect its unique history, lifestyle, values, and culture. Food is an essential part of people’s lives, and as such is much more than just a means of survival. It is also the main factor in how we view others and ourselves.” Not only is it pivotal to the self-understanding and identity of a group, “food culture is as a powerful tool for intercultural dialogue, social inclusion and sustainable development more broadly.”[2]

There is no reason to take issue with any of this. Nevertheless, even if true (and it often isn’t or, at least it’s exaggerated; you might be interested, for example, in how Alberto Grandi debunks myths about “traditional” Italian cuisine),[3] it seems rather unhelpful for our purpose, which is to begin to capture whether engaging in food practices in common adds value and, if so, how. To do this, we would need to take the viewpoint of the participants in the practice. When sitting at a lunch table after a funeral, when layering a moussaka, when placing the fork on the left of the plate and the knife on its right, no one self-consciously thinks of practicing a “culture”, it is simply what they do. In fact, to import an Archimedean understanding reifies the practice and thus potentially undermines its organic evolution. It certainly hinders genuine collective participation, because the “culture” determines the practice rather than the other way around.

I am certainly not going to try to develop a philosophy of cooking and eating together here. Let me only outline what I think is a promising way of thinking about it.

When we cook, we follow a web of rules, social in their origin and the scope of their application and drawn from books and notes or memory, conscious or subconscious. These pertain to every aspect of the process: the properties of ingredients, how to handle them, combine them, at what temperature to cook them at and in which pots and pans, what to do with leftovers and waste. The practice, however, remains radically pluralistic in at least two senses. First, it is determined by a wide variety of rules. Second, no one set of rules determines it exclusively. One further particularity of the practice of cooking, although probably not unique to it, is that it is directed towards and guided by the satisfaction of a desire. As a result, there is a constant back and forth between what we envisage as fulfilling that desire and the rules of the practice.

When people, especially people from diverse backgrounds, cook together, they import into the common practice a variety of rules and desires. None of these enjoys an ex ante privileged position over the others, none can claim superiority or exclusivity. For the practice to be carried out fully, that is for people to cook together rather than in parallel, rules and desires will have to be articulated, problematised, understood in their co-dependence in a constant back and forth, which will entail negotiating, balancing and, in the process, a mutual understanding and consideration. The magic of this is that a new community emerges, one that has formed its own rules and that has directed itself towards the pleasure of all its members. It is a transient community, completed and exhausted within the limits of the joint practice, though this doesn’t mean that it will not leave the participants with commonalities that will outlive it, and that too is one of its wonderful features.

The same applies equally to eating together, which is also pluralistically governed by rules (from table manners to combining dishes and flavours) and desires. And when a group does both, then this ephemeral community of self-governance and pleasure is complete.

On 08 October 2023, I participated, as one of three chefs planning and supervising the menu (Thursday Pastry provided the baklava dessert), in an event, organised by the Centre for Social Innovation and Hush-Hush Cyprus held at the Gardens of the Future in Nicosia. The idea was to bring people together to cook and dine with the aim of forging precisely that sense of community that I hinted at and to drive home some basic facts about sustainability.

It was a very rewarding experience. I very much enjoyed introducing my team to Greek recipes (we made a parsley dip, tzatziki, and a vegan stifado with mushrooms and chestnuts) and tweaking and enriching them through communication so as to make them our dishes. It will hopefully be repeated before too long.

[1] http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CLT/pdf/5_Cultural_Diversity_EN.pdf

[2] https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367359

[3] Alberto Grandi, Denominazione di origine inventata: Le bugie del marketing sui prodotti tipici italiani, Mondadori 2018.

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Cooking at a mountain retreat

On Friday, 15 September, I rushed from an official lunch in Nicosia to get to the village of Vasa Kilaniou in time to prepare dinner.

Once you get past the traffic havoc of the capital and its outskirts, you cross a mountainous landscape dotted with stone-built villages, fields, green and lush in spring, golden and dry in the summer, but also junkyards and tavernas with plastic white chairs stacked up sky-high, and, the further you venture into the wine country, terraced vineyards and wineries.

Vasa is small and sparsely populated save for during fair weather weekends and holidays, when those with descent from, and properties in, the village and tourists flock in. It is exceptionally well-kept and idyllic without being overdeveloped – the bougainvilleas and the vines are not draped over wooden pergolas just for show, it is how it is.

My talented friend Nicoletta Demetriou, a musician, ethnomusicologist, author, creative writing teacher, runs Topos Retreat for writers, though not exclusively, at Vasa Kilaniou. When I decided to give up academia some six years ago, I did it to fulfil my dream of devoting myself to cooking and writing fiction so I can scarcely overstate my excitement, when she asked me to be the retreat’s resident chef.

The inaugural session of the retreat took place in June 2023. It lasted a week and the tutor and guests came from the UK. It was the most thoughtful and sensitive group, each of them a wealth of experience and wisdom, and it was a great pleasure to cook for them and introduce them to or reacquaint them with dishes from Greece and the rest of the Mediterranean. We kicked off with a meze dinner on the first evening: fava, tomato and onion fritters, parsley dip from the island of Syros, smoked aubergine dip, griddled watermelon with halloumi, walnuts, and mint, manouri cheese with homemade chutneys, lentils with chicory, hazelnuts and a mountain tea dressing, roast cauliflower with tahini and lemon sauce and za’atar, fish with salmoriglio, baklava by Thursday Pastry, who provided all the desserts and cakes. Our other meals included stuffed tomatoes, vegetarian moussaka, pearl barley “risotto”, skioufichta (a traditional pasta from Crete) with aubergine pesto, and much more. 

The second retreat, held over the 15-17 September 2023 weekend, was attended by writers from Cyprus, all of whom have been on Nicoletta’s classes for years. It was a couple of days full of reflection, sounding out ideas, discovery, but also fun, and, of course, good food. Homemade granola, fresh fruit, cheese pie, oven-baked omelette for breakfast, banana bread and biscuits (once again by Thursday Pastry) at coffee break, linguine al limone for lunch, fish with a red wine jus and tiramisu for dinner.

There’s truth in the cliché about the affinity between cooking and eating, on the one hand, and, on the other, writing. Stories leave you with a flavour, a physical sensation in your tastebuds, good food leaves you with a memory, and what is a memory other than a story? That’s one of the many reasons for which I love being part of Topos Retreat and I think many of you would feel the same so how about joining us in one of the upcoming retreats?

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