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I thoroughly enjoyed the beginnings of our conversations together this week; thanks to all who came and participated. I've liked reading about the wide variety in our favorite foods in this forum, and liked even more beginning to explore the implications of our likings in conversation together.

It also occurs to me that--so far--Peter and I make pretty good complement, as guides to this discussion, with me always pushing towards the philosophical, he to the experimental. While I was asking my section about the boundaries of knowledge on Thursday, he was encouraging his to have a lick of corn syrup, a taste of cornstarch. If we can keep these two ends of the discussion connected--from concrete to abstract and back again--it sounds like the beginnings of intellectual work to me!

In Dalton 2 on Thursday, we described our reactions to Pollan's (contrary?) claims that “whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety," and that “to eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake…affords satisfaction…the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing." We wrote for a while about our own experiences of “knowing more”--has it led us to anxiety or to pleasure?

Afterwards, trying to graph our responses, this is what we came up with:

Don't know how legible this will be to anyone who wasn't there, but bottom line is...we're all over the map (both as a group and individually) in terms of our relationship to "wanting to know more. On the one hand, we experience dissatisfaction, confusion, disgust and a fear of risk; on the other, there's adventure, excitement, satisfaction, gratitude and a sense of responsibility...

Very interested to see where we go from here...