For the official version of record, see here:
Watters, S. (2025). What Plato Said: Rehabilitating Food Techniques as Media. Media Theory, 9(2), 01–28. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i2.1269

What Plato Said: Rehabilitating Food Techniques as Media

SIOBHAN WATTERS
Independent, CANADA

Abstract

This article seeks to remedy the neglect of and ambivalence towards food techniques in communication and media studies. Such ambivalence is identified here with ancient and contemporary arguments as to the irrational and ‘nonsymbolizing’ nature of food-related operations such as cookery and farming. The analysis draws on applications of the theory of cultural techniques that rely on its often overlooked origins as an agricultural science and, therefore, claim food techniques as media. To overcome what the author identifies as an intellectualist and literate bias towards food techniques in the discipline, they perform a close reading of ancient texts typically included as the first works of literature and communication in the Western canon: Homer’s The Odyssey and the dialogues of Plato. The article argues that to rehabilitate food techniques as media in the discipline requires a critical reassessment of Plato, in particular, as the so-called first theorist of communication.

Keywords

food techniques, communication, media, techne, cultural techniques, knowledge, Plato, Homer

We cultivate knowledge and consume information. Ideas can ferment, percolate, or turn out half-baked. Despite the metaphors food techniques yield, they are rarely themselves considered to communicate. Likewise, food techniques may be understood as communicating symbolic value through representations of food and eating in literature, film, television, etc., but they are not appreciated for their potential to generate knowledge and mediate in their own right. Contradictions like this betray an ambivalence about food techniques in communication and media studies.

“If we agree that philosophy begins with Plato,” as Bernard Stiegler (2010) says, or that Plato was the first communication scholar (Sterne, 2012; Peters, 2001), then his works may also help us understand why food techniques are not envisioned as related to matters of epistemology and mediation today. Most damningly, Plato states in Gorgias (c. 380 B.C.E./1999) that cookery cannot be techne, because it is not a knowledgeable art. I think this is significant because communication and the production and transmission of knowledge are intrinsically linked; if an art is not ‘knowledgeable,’ it also has nothing to communicate. To paraphrase food sociologist Michael Symons (2004: ix), where food techniques are concerned, Plato prescribed ignorance. This is not surprising for, as the latter argues in The Republic (Plato, c. 380 B.C.E./1955), philosophers and rulers should not concern themselves with lowly matters such as food techniques. This article argues that Plato represents a trend recurring through Western epistemology that backgrounds food techniques and takes for granted their theoretical potential for communication and media studies.

Against a backdrop of communication thus steeped in an intellectualist as well as literate tradition, it is challenging to incorporate food techniques into communication and media studies by any traditional measure. In order to remedy this oversight, I therefore seek to name the theoretical and historical biases that have occluded the operations of food techniques as media. I have also developed the concept of food techniques (Watters, 2024) itself to capture the processual and mediating nature of the operations by which humans produce, distribute, and consume food. The Greek term techne is one source of inspiration for the concept, particularly as glossed by Yuk Hui (2016), who describes it as an operation whose products include material objects (ergon) and knowledge (episteme). In addition, the concept draws on the theory of cultural techniques from the German medienwissenschaften (Siegert, 2007; 2015; Vismann, 2013; Macho, 2013). The theory of cultural techniques urges us to delve deeper in our analyses of media and communication. For instance, how do we arrive at the distinction between what does and does not communicate, what produces and does not produce knowledge? The contribution of cultural techniques to this analysis is two-fold: on one hand, the agricultural origins of the concept (e.g. Geoghegan, 2013) promotes the inclusion of food techniques in discussions of media and communication as a corrective or retroactive measure. On the other hand, cultural techniques have been all but denuded of their agricultural origins by many who deploy the concept, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Siegert, 2015; Vismann, 2013; Miles, 2023).

While I posit that Plato is at the root of communication studies’ neglect of food techniques, this analysis starts with a much more recent debate between Thomas Macho (2013) and Bernhard Siegert (2013) about the inclusion of food techniques, like cookery, in the concept of cultural techniques. Whereas Macho, like Plato, excludes food techniques from having any communicative or symbolizing function, Siegert embraces them by pointing to the agricultural origins of the concept of cultural techniques. He gives me means with which to think food techniques as cultural techniques, and thus, as essentially communicative. His application of the term to not just cooking, but also food cultivation and husbandry, sets the stage for an intermediary reading of Homer’s The Odyssey, which is rich and reverent in representations of food techniques. As a hallmark of early Western literature and constituting part of the pedagogical canon of Plato’s Greece, the epic affirms the media-nature of food techniques as cultural techniques. Furthermore, Homeric poetry is critiqued at length by Plato in The Republic, at the end of which Socrates famously proclaims all poets should be expelled from Athens. Thus, I use the poem to connect cultural techniques to Plato. Given his status as the first communication theorist, the final section of this analysis asks what contribution Plato has made to the absence of food techniques in communication studies through his ambivalent descriptions of food techniques in Gorgias and The Republic.

Processing food, processing distinctions

Cultural techniques as a theory and method has been applied to such varied objects as pedagogical techniques, musical notation, filing systems, video and computer games, and predictive policing. According to Geoghegan, “cultural techniques concern the rules of selection, storage, and transmission that characterize a given system of mediation, including the formal structures that compose and constrict this process” (2013: 69). I argue that food techniques form such a system of mediation, the broader argument for which is the subject of my doctoral thesis (Watters, 2024). However, there is some disagreement over the inclusion of food techniques under the concept of cultural techniques, evident in a 2013 debate between Macho and Siegert.

Macho primarily defines cultural techniques as “symbolizing,” insisting that they, by definition, have the ability to refer to or “symbolize themselves”—one can write about the act of writing, or paint about the act of painting (2013: 31). In other words, cultural techniques are considered recursive operations. As such, Macho and Siegert (2011: 15) observe that among the symbolic distinctions that arise from cultural techniques are the very symbols or concepts we use to describe those operations—what we have come to call media. Macho says, “cultural techniques are always already older than their media […] People wrote long before the notions of writing or the alphabet were conceived […] Counting, too, is older than numbers” (2013: 44-5). Siegert, however, critiques Macho because he does not consider what operations historically or logically precede the distinctions he maintains between what is and what is not a cultural technique. For Macho, food techniques fall in the latter category.

Macho defines cultural techniques thus:

Cultural techniques differ from all other techniques through their potential self-referentiality […] From their very beginnings, speaking can be spoken about and communication be communicated […] And one can of course write about writing, sing about singing, and read about reading. On the other hand, it’s impossible to thematize fire while making a fire, just as it is impossible to thematize field tilling while tilling a field, cooking while cooking, and hunting while hunting. We may talk about recipes or hunting practices […] but in order to do so we need to avail ourselves of the techniques of symbolic work, which is to say, we are not making a fire, hunting, cooking, or building at that very moment. Using a phrase coming out of systems theory, we could say that cultural techniques are second-order techniques (Macho, 2013: 31; emphasis mine).

Following Macho’s argument, then, tilling, cooking, and hunting, are first-order techniques which must ‘avail themselves’ of second-order techniques in order to be communicated or represented. Given their categorical omission from cultural techniques, we can infer that for Macho, food techniques are not “tools of knowledge” nor do they generate “rule(s) that make knowledge possible” (Serres qtd. in Macho, 2013: 40).

Beyond the more basal techniques of writing and counting, second-order techniques are primarily characterized by Macho as ‘speaking objects,’ e.g. portraits, seals and stamps, signatures, and PIN codes. Importantly, Macho argues that we are addressed as and come to know ourselves as subjects through these cultural techniques. They are “techniques of identity. In a certain sense, they generate the subjects that, retrospectively, come to understand themselves as the preconditions and nodal points of their very operations” (2013: 44). Again, by having already discounted food techniques as cultural techniques, Macho implies that they cannot afford us a form of identification on their own; they must be interpreted through symbolic orders that operate at a remove from or are not conditioned by the food techniques themselves. But are not the food technical practices Macho mentions in passing—cooking, tilling—capable of producing a trace, a sign, or even a symbol accepted as such by a sensing subject? When I turn to The Odyssey, we will see that food techniques have just this function; they form a condition of Odysseus’ self-knowledge as a human and Grecian man.

For Siegert, Macho’s definition of cultural techniques falls at the first hurdle—the sorting of techniques into a first and second order: “It is no doubt very tempting to follow a proposal of such alluring simplicity, but unfortunately it suffers from an overly reductive notion of the symbolic in combination with a too static distinction between first- and second-order techniques” (2013: 59). He also accuses Macho of ontologizing the distinction between culture and technology by asserting that so-called first-order techniques like cooking and tilling have no epistemological status (Siegert, 2013: 59-60). This move overlooks the “physics of media” (Siegert, 2011: 14) which themselves determine the conditions of perception and knowledge, and of how so-called ‘culture’ is produced and received. Contra Macho, Siegert draws on Claude Lévi-Strauss to illustrate that cooking does indeed process symbolic distinctions, most fundamentally between nature and culture, but also a great many more signs and symbols derived from the broad suite of operations that transform raw matter into ‘food.’

Cooking, a differentiated set of activities linked to food preparation, is both a technical procedure that brings about a transformation of the real and a symbolic act distinct from other possible acts…every instance of boiling, roasting or smoking is always already an act of communication… Because it is constituted by structural differences, cooking does indeed thematize cooking in the act of cooking (Siegert, 2013: 59-60).

In essence, the technique of cooking, the physical transformation of matter, also processes the ontological category of food and its countless subsidiaries: as Siegert says, boiled, roasted, and smoked foods, but also salted, pickled, dried, frozen, dehydrated, etc. We often take for granted the operations that underlie these distinctions. This is certainly true today, where the commercial food industry performs the majority of these cultural techniques for us, so we have no sense of the ‘pickling’ operation that processed our ‘pickles.’ In this sense, food techniques remain, to quote Lévi-Strauss, “on the margin of the semantic field which embraces all food products; it is a means of acquiring food, without being itself food” (1970: 267). Put another way, food-technical processes are eclipsed by their products. In this semantic field, verbs become nouns. The goal of my project is to bring food techniques from the margins into the center of focus.

The myths Lévi-Strauss analyzed demonstrate “that cooking is conceived of in native thought as a form of mediation” (1970: 64) and that “culinary operations [act] as mediatory activities between heaven and earth, life and death, nature and society” (1970: 65). Siegert would argue that this mediation takes place not just in myth, but ontically^[i] in the operation of cooking techniques. Even Lévi-Strauss remarks that perhaps these narratives are “merely the reflection in men’s minds of certain social demands that had been objectified in institutions” (1970: 10). For example, myths describing the transformation of men into pigs “preserved the memory of a technique of hunting […] of driving [pigs] into enclosures where they were kept and fed before being killed according to need” (Lévi-Strauss, 1970: 87). This observation is consistent with Siegert’s insistence that cultural techniques exist long before they are named (2013: 58), or in this case, mythologized. Lévi-Strauss highlights how the enclosure or pig pen transforms men into pigs, or in other words, separates one type of animal from another. We will return to this in the next section, as the animal pen or enclosure is for Siegert a cultural technique of hominization, forming the margins of what it means to be human as such. And for Odysseus, the pens built by his swineherd Eumeaus and his own father Laertes offer self-reflexive evidence of humanity and civility—it is a technique of identity and, thus, a cultural technique (Macho, 2013: 44).

That other cultural techniques like writing and painting have succeeded food techniques in our estimation of what defines the human does not detract from the fact that food techniques reproduce in reality the ontological divisions we maintain between humans, humans and animals, and between other entities. As we will see in The Odyssey, from the perspective of its hero Odysseus, food techniques process the distinction between humans and animals, nature and culture, divinity and mortality, as well as civilization and barbarism. These oppositions have their basis in a cultural-technical reality evident in the very landscapes Odysseus traverses.

A food-technical odyssey

The Odyssey recounts the epic journey of the Greek soldier, Odysseus, on his way home from the decade-long Trojan war. His odyssey takes a further ten years before he returns to his island domain, Ithaca, and to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. After twenty years away, it is feared (and hoped, by some) that Odysseus has perished. Favoured by the goddess Athena and punished relentlessly by the sea-god Poseidon, Odysseus is driven between lands occupied by humans, gods and demi-gods, witches, and what are interpreted as subhuman or barbaric peoples, in part, because of their lack of agriculture. What I find striking about The Odyssey is that food techniques mediate almost every episode of the epic, whether at feasts, in sacrifice, on ships, farms, or in stables. Food techniques often precede and enable communication; introductions and discourse tend to occur between characters in the epic—be they gods or humans—only “Once they’d put aside desire for food and drink” (3.75, trans. Fagles).^[i] Homer also includes scenes of provisioning throughout the poem (e.g. 2.322-3,456-7, 5.184-5,291-3, trans. Fagles), for the Greek seafaring culture would be impossible without provisions, themselves products of cultural-technical processes (fermentation, salting, baking, etc.).

I chose to include this analysis because Homer’s epics constituted the curriculum of learned men in Plato’s Greece. Moreover, Plato states in The Republic that much of Homer’s poetry should be omitted from the educational program of his ideal rulers; i.e., the guardians. This, even though Plato continues to cite Homer as authoritative on spare matters such as the rule of reason over emotions, and the appropriate diet for soldiers-cum-guardians. I find the comparison fitting for two reasons. First, The Odyssey contains far more appreciation of food techniques and their constitutive role in society than Plato’s work ever does despite affirming their necessity to his republic. Second, food techniques in the epic do ‘symbolic work’ in similar terms to how Macho defines cultural techniques, revealing food techniques in their powers of inscription and social organization. With our modern attachment to writing, print, and code, we sometimes fail to see how other media or techniques inscribe identity, whereas for Odysseus, self-knowledge is expressed explicitly with reference to food techniques—they are for him ‘techniques of identity’ (Macho, 2013: 44). The analysis therefore pays heed to food techniques such as cooking, cultivation, and husbandry in The Odyssey, for these best encapsulate the concept of cultural techniques as it relates to the production of knowledge, especially self-knowledge. In the subsections that follow, I discuss how food techniques in the epic (a) are shown to process distinctions between the human, divine and nonhuman, and (b) act as a form of inscription or symbolization in an otherwise oral society. This analysis will set up the discussion of Plato’s works, for by the time of their writing, food techniques appear to have become epistemically insignificant and excluded from thought, as indeed could be said of their place in communication studies today.

(a) ‘Human’ food techniques

The Odyssey lends itself readily to a cultural techniques analysis because the epic recognizes food techniques as operations giving rise to symbolic and ontological distinctions. Whether or not we accept these distinctions at face value is less important than the fact that Odysseus self-reflexively evaluates humanity based on a variety of food techniques, in affirmation of Macho’s definition of cultural techniques. Indeed, I argue that when Odysseus recognizes food (and himself) as human, the distinction can be attributed to the ontic ways humans acquire food rather than an essential and mythologized view of the human.

In Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Odysseus serves as a motif for the quintessential ‘rational man’ who exerts reason over nature both internal and external. Importantly, they observe that the presence or absence of agriculture in The Odyssey draws a line between the human and nonhuman, or else uncivilized beings.

For Homer, the definition of barbarism coincides with that of a state in which no systematic agriculture, and therefore no systematic, time-managing organization of work and society, has yet been achieved. He calls the Cyclopes ‘fierce, uncivilized people’ because […] they ‘never lift a hand to plant or plough but put their trust in Providence. All the crops they require spring up unsown and untilled, wheat and barley and the vines whose generous clusters give them wine when ripened for them by the timely rains.’ Abundance needs no law (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 50).

To ‘plant or plough’ represents not only a stable and reliable method of food-getting; it inaugurates new temporal and spatial orders, responsibilities, and subjectivities that could not arise in an environment of orderless abundance. Though the concept of cultural techniques was not available to them, Horkheimer and Adorno are discussing food techniques in similar terms—as operations that produce distinctions between Odysseus and other beings, such as the Cyclopes and Lotus Eaters, and give order or discreteness to an otherwise undifferentiated world. The Lotus Eaters, in particular, are said to dine on an abundance of wild foods, meaning there is no mediation and, therefore, distance between themselves and nature. Ontically, the rational order that Horkheimer and Adorno says is given to Odysseus by systematic agriculture, arises through the mediation of a number of techniques that distance the human-so-defined from other beings: cultivation, methods of storage, milling, and further processes of transformation (e.g., preservation, baking).

At many stages of the epic, Odysseus abhors and avoids the foods of the other, distinguished by their lack of cultural techniques. Pierre Vidal-Naquet observes that

The Odyssey as a whole is in one sense the story of Odysseus’s return to normality, of his deliberate acceptance of the human condition. There is therefore no paradox in saying that, from the Lotus-Eaters to Calypso by way of the land of the Cyclopes to the Underworld, Odysseus meets with no creature that is strictly human (1996: 39).

By definition, humans in The Odyssey are “men who eat bread on earth” (1.348-9, trans. Fagles) in contrast to the Lotus Eaters who eat only wild foods or the gods who dine on ambrosia (V.200, trans. Fagles). Likewise, the Cyclops Polyphemus is “an amazing monster, nothing like an ordinary man who eats bread” (9.191, trans. Fagles). Polyphemus is coded as other, in part, because he does not cook his food. Although the demi-god appears to husband animals and produce cheese, he consumes his produce, and men, raw (Vidal-Naquet, 1996: 41-2). As with Lévi-Strauss’ cycle of Brazilian myths, here too the distinctions of what is raw and cooked are significant for defining the boundaries of nature and culture, humanity and nonhumanity.

Moreover, the absence of bread defines Polyphemus’ barbarity in starker terms because its production requires a complex of food techniques. As Vidal-Naquet observes “agriculture [is] intimately linked with cooking […] the cultivation of cereals, which replaced the eating of raw foods, is founded upon a form of food that has to be cooked” (1996: 37). The presence of bread marks the cultivation of the staple barley but also the co-evolution of agriculture with techniques of milling and baking. As discussed above in reference to Horkheimer and Adorno, the more levels of mediation or greater number of cultural-technical operations involved in the production of food, the more ‘human’ or ‘civilized’ it appears.^[i] However, it is important to note that the distinction between human and other in the Odyssey is not essential—indeed characters pass in and out of these categories through the medium of food. We see this, in particular, in the Circe episode.

Having nearly arrived at Ithaca, Odysseus is thrown off course again through the folly of his ship’s crew, a circumstance repeated throughout the epic. First landing among the Laestygonians, Odysseus sends some scouts “ahead to learn who lived there—men like us perhaps, who live on bread?” (10.110-11, trans. Fagles), but finds giants and cannibals instead (one scout is devoured by King Antiphanes). Odysseus and his men then land on Aeaea, ruled over by the cruel and beautiful Circe. After searching the island “hoping to glimpse some sign of human labor” (10.161, trans. Fagles), they come across Circe’s castle. When they call out to the castle’s mistress, the ‘nymph with lovely braids’ appears and invites them in.

She ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs, then she mixed them a potion—cheese, barley and pale honey mulled in Prammian wine—but into the brew she stirred her wicked drugs to wipe from their memories any thought of home. Once they’d drained the bowls she filled, suddenly she struck with her wand, drove them into her pigsties, all of them bristling into swine—with grunts, snouts—even their bodies, yes, and only the men’s minds stayed steadfast as before. So off they went to their pens, sobbing, squealing as Circe flung them acorns, cornel nuts and mast, common fodder for hogs that root and roll in the mud (10.257-68, trans. Fagles).

While food is used to transform Odysseus’ men into pigs—he escapes this fate, having ingested an antidote given him by Hermes—the styes they are driven into are significant for Siegert, originally processing the distinction between human and animal: “The corral that separates hunter and prey…in the course of a coevolutionary domestication produces the anthropological difference between human beings and animals” (2007: 30).^[ii] Rather than essentializing this difference, Siegert’s point is that ontic processes involved in penning animals work to physically maintain divisions between species that are not affirmed essentially or ontologically (2015: 61), such as the view that humans are unique in their language, cognitive, and tool-using abilities—characteristics we share with other species. Cultural techniques such as the animal pen or enclosure are thus prior to the categories of human and animal (as suggested by Lévi-Strauss in reference to myths where men are likewise turned to pigs).

Interestingly, Vidal-Naquet suggests that the domesticated animal is closer to the human than wild animals. “Where Odysseus’s companions regain their shape, the men who had been turned into wild animals do not. The episode thus contains a clear hierarchy: men—domestic animals –wild animals. This last category has no connection with humanity and cannot be restored to it even by magical means” (Vidal-Naquet, 1996: 43). In other words, it is possible for the dehumanized men to re-cross the barrier between human and animal because they are at least the subject of human food techniques; their domestication implies an embeddedness in a human milieu. Moreover, cultural techniques not only bring ontological distinction into being, they can dissolve distinctions as well (Karppi, Bohlen and Granata, 2016). In questions of what it means to be human, whether we have always been or will continue to be human, food techniques may be the crux.

(b) Food-technical inscription

Odysseus looks for evidence of humanity in the food, and thus food techniques, that mark the people and lands through which he journeys. The most obvious moments are when he seeks ‘men who eat bread.’ However, he also seeks evidence of food techniques in the landscape itself. While some translations show Odysseus seeking a ‘glimpse of human labor’ on Circe’s island, others refer to ‘human cultivation’ specifically^[i] as affirmed by Vidal-Naquet: “they search in vain for the erga broton, the ‘works of men,’ that is crops. But all they see is scrub and forest” (1996: 39). It is pertinent to remember that Macho argued that these human acts could not signify—one cannot till about tilling, he says (2013: 31)—but they are for Odysseus a form of inscription that symbolizes the presence or absence of peoples with which he identifies.

As one of the few theorists of cultural techniques to truly employ the original agricultural sense of the term, Siegert argues that

ploughing too can be a symbolic act. If, as ancient sources attest, ploughs were used to draw a sacred furrow to demarcate the limits of a new city, then this constitutes an act of writing in the sense of Greek graphé. To plough is in this case to engage in symbolic work because the graphein serves to mark the distinction between inside and outside, civilization and barbarism, an inside domain in which the law prevails and one outside in which it does not (2013: 60).

Cornelia Vismann also assigns plow agriculture an integral role in establishing civilizational bounds and affirms the close relationship of food and administrative techniques. According to Vismann, “the agricultural tool determines the political act; and the operation itself produces the subject, who will claim mastery over both the tool and the action associated with it. Thus, the Imperium Romanum is the result of drawing a line […] ownership does not precede the act” (2013: 84). Cultural techniques are essentially reproductive acts—reproducing the conditions under which distinctions, subjectivities, and regimes are stabilized (or eventually destabilized—new techniques can unseat old and inaugurate entirely new regimes). Indeed, cultural techniques of cultivation and husbandry reproduce and inscribe Odysseus’ claim in Ithaca.

Though he may be the eminent master and landowner, Odysseus has been “far from his own soil” (24.324, trans. Fagles) for twenty years, and is only able to claim his land because of the cultural techniques and technicians that hold that claim in place. The first person he seeks when he lands in Ithaca is not his long-suffering wife, Penelope, but his faithful swineherd Eumaeus. This “foreman of men” (14.25, trans. Fagles) works tirelessly to keep Odysseus’ prized herds and preserve Telemachus’ birthright, though he loses hope daily of the master’s return, as well as fine pigs to the suitors dogging Penelope for her hand (2.60-1; 14.14-20, trans. Fagles). In the guise of an old wanderer, Odysseus looks upon the cultural techniques that sustain him with admiration, including the animal pen in which Eumaeus husbands the family herd: “The swineherd made those walls with his own hands to enclose the pigs of his master gone for years” (14.9-18, trans. Fagles).^[ii] The animal pen and its maintenance by the loyal Eumaeus is Odysseus’ literal stake in the land, a marker of his identity as king of Ithaca. There is a sense in the narrative that if once and for all, the suitors deplete the pen of its herd, then so too evaporates Odysseus’ claim.

We see a similar depiction of the way food techniques inscribe Odysseus’s identity when he visits his father, the former king Laertes, at his “large well-tended farm” in the final book of The Odyssey (24.227, trans. Fagles). There too, Odysseus can only admire what the work of hands have wrought there: the lands “that the old king himself had wrested from the wilds…laboring long and hard” (24.228-9, trans. Fagles); sheds housing Laertes’ fieldhands (24.230-1, trans. Fagles); and the “thriving vineyard” (24.243, trans. Fagles). Upon meeting his father for the first time in twenty years, Odysseus’ first words to the man are: “You want no skill, old man, at tending a garden. All’s well-kept here; not one thing in the plot, no plant, no fig, no pear, no olive, no vine, not a vegetable, lacks your tender, loving care” (24.270-3, trans. Fagles). To Laertes, shocked and disbelieving his son has really returned, Odysseus offers “living proof” of the body and soil: a scar on his flesh and the very garden they stand in.

Or these, these trees—let me tell you the trees you gave me years ago, here on this well-worked plot […] I begged you for everything I saw, a little boy trailing you through the orchard, picking our way among these trees, and you named them one by one. You gave me thirteen pear, ten apple trees, and forty figs—and promised to give me, look, fifty vinerows, bearing hard on each other’s heels, clusters of grapes year-round at every grade of ripeness (24.374-82, trans. Fagles).

Laertes’ doubts are quelled with these “strong clear signs” (24.386, trans. Fagles) of Odysseus’ identity. Odysseus’ family bonds and claim to Ithaca are, again, reflected—symbolized—by the cultural techniques carried out on its soil.

This section has attempted to bring the communicative nature of food techniques into clearer view using The Odyssey as an example. In the epic, we see that food techniques bear many of the qualities Siegert says belong to ‘cultural techniques,’ for they are ontic operations which produce ontological distinctions. Cooking, cultivation, and husbandry process distinctions between the human and divine, animal, and barbaric beings. The practices of cultivation and husbandry were also shown to constitute a form of inscription for Odysseus, who seeks out evidence in the landscape of these food techniques in order to locate himself in space and confirm his identity as man and master of Ithaca, which he returns to claim at the end of his ten-year journey and twenty-year absence. Thus, counter to Macho’s insistence that food techniques are not cultural techniques, we see Odysseus use food techniques as means of self-identification or ‘techniques of identity.’ I also briefly discussed how food techniques are often acknowledged as a necessary precursor to communication or transmission, in the context of dining and provisioning sea-travel. This analysis sets up my next section, which contemplates whether Plato’s banishment of food techniques to epistemic insignificance has contributed to the neglect of food techniques in communication and media studies. While The Odyssey lends credence to my argument that food techniques are communicative and productive of knowledge, Plato argues the opposite and also recommends that Homer’s texts be eliminated from the curriculum of learned men precisely because it depicts food techniques and other aspects of social life which should not concern his philosopher kings.

Platonic food

Though Phaedrus may be considered the first media theoretical text because of its commentary on writing, my analysis of Plato begins with Gorgias. Arguably, this text also concerns communication, not only because it debates the merits of rhetoric, but because Plato contends that all human arts are accompanied by some form of discourse, constituting what is knowable about an art. This discourse necessarily develops in the process and practice of an art—which is why Socrates is so suspicious in the dialogue when Gorgias claims that rhetoric deals only in discourse. Similarly, in Phaedrus, Socrates critiques the notion that one could learn an art (e.g. medicine) from books alone, because they deal only in discourse (a one-sided discourse, at that).^[i] More importantly, with all its talk of discourse and knowledge, Gorgias gave me my first hint that ancient roots underpin the ambivalence I have identified around food techniques in contemporary communication and media studies. For in it, ‘cookery’ is dismissed as being irrational next to the rational and noble pursuit of medicine. Plato states that cookery cannot properly be called an art, therefore implying that it does not have a corresponding discourse or does not produce true knowledge.

Gorgias

The dialogue, fittingly, is set at a dinner party held to celebrate the arrival of the Sicilian sophist and rhetorician Gorgias in Athens. Another guest at the party, Polus, is Gorgias’s paying pupil. Socrates uses the opportunity to demonstrate the falsity of rhetoric and supremacy of dialogue as arts. Of course, all arts in Plato’s Greece bear the name of techne. Plato’s translator provides the following gloss: “It may be said to cover any skilled activity with its rules of operation, the knowledge of which is acquired by training” (Lee in Plato, trans. Lee, 1955: 62).^[i] The ambiguity of the term is important for this analysis, raising again the question of what constitutes the conditions of knowledge production and communication. For Plato, cookery, like rhetoric, is seen to have no bearing on true knowledge, except to obscure it. Neither are considered to be arts, or techne, at all. If reinterpreted through Macho, we could say that cookery does not produce its own ‘rules of operation,’ lacking the recursivity that he says defines cultural techniques.

In the dialogue, Socrates arrives at the home of Callicles ready to question his friend’s houseguest, the titular rhetorician. “[F]or I want to hear from him what is the nature of his art, and what it is which he professes and teaches” (trans. Jowett). Does a rhetorician have a product, like the cobbler who produces shoes, or the weaver, garments? To this, Gorgias replies that rhetoric is concerned with discourse: rhetoric “make[s] men able to speak” and “understand that about which they speak” (trans. Jowett). Socrates finds this definition curious, because all “arts treat of discourse concerning the subjects with which they severally have to do” (trans. Jowett). That rhetoric deals in discourse clarifies nothing for Socrates.

Gorgias’ student, Polus, redirects the question of what sort of art rhetoric is to Socrates himself. Socrates asks an indulgence in order to illustrate his point. “Will you ask me, what sort of an art is cookery?” (trans. Jowett). Polus obliges and Socrates answers, “Not an art at all, Polus” (trans. Jowett). Although cookery “may seem to be an art”, Socrates maintains that it “is only an experience or routine” (trans. Jowett). Cookery is akin to rhetoric, says Socrates, because it flatters the tastes of man instead of nourishing it, the way rhetoric works up feeling instead of knowledge in the listener. Both are ignoble arts that feign nobility. Rhetoric, Socrates argues, is a counterfeit of politics and justice,^[ii] and cookery, of medicine. “Cookery simulates the disguise of medicine, and pretends to know what food is the best for the body” (trans. Jowett).^[iii] Condemning cookery further, Socrates states: “An art I do not call it, but only an experience, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason of the nature of its own applications. And I do not call any irrational thing an art” (trans. Jowett; emphasis mine). But what do we make of Socrates’ “talk about meats and drinks and physicians and other nonsense” (trans. Jowett), as Callicles puts it, in Gorgias? How does cookery earn this detestable position? And why next to medicine, when food and medicine have a long and fundamental relationship? At this stage in the analysis, it is pertinent to discuss the concept of art-as-techne to better understand why Plato includes medicine and excludes cookery from the category.

As Maria Plastira-Valkanou observes, Plato distinguishes cookery from the more genuine art of medicine in Gorgias

insofar as two points are concerned: a) the aim [of cookery] is to produce a kind of gratification and pleasure, without necessarily presupposing the knowledge of good or bad, and b) [its] empirical character obtained through long experience and exercise, through the trials of success and failure without being able to give procedure (1998: 195-6; emphasis mine).

Techne per the initial definition I supplied is ‘skilled activity’ accompanied by knowledge of ‘the rules of operation’ of that skill. Cooking is not a techne for Plato because it does not produce knowledge of itself. As Macho would say, cooking cannot thematize itself, which is to say it cannot communicate its own rules of operation. I argue, however, that Plato, like Macho, is guilty of not interrogating the “inconspicuous techniques of knowledge” (Siegert, 2011: 14) that allow the distinction between art, noble and ignoble, rational and irrational, to come into being in the first place. I argue that food techniques process these distinctions. A short survey of the intimacy of food techniques and medicine supports this assertion.

Plato argues that cookery is the counterfeit of medicine, setting them in opposition, but it is curious that any distinction is made at all. Many cultures including Plato’s Greeks used food as medicine (Goody, 1982: 117, 131; Plastira-Valkanou, 1998; Foucault, 1986). As Jack Goody observes, “in all societies the control of diet is seen as an important aspect of medical treatment” (1982: 117). Likewise, Plastira-Valkanou emphasizes how intimately related food and medicine was in Ancient Greece. Both Democritus and the Hippocratic Corpus emphasized the techniques necessary to produce healthful food. In the Corpus, “Not only the kind of food which is consumed, but preparation and cooking techniques” are outlined (1998: 197-8); e.g., a detailed recipe for how to cook lentils (1998: 199), descriptions of what spices to use, and whether a food should be roasted or boiled (1998: 200). According to the Hippocratic tradition, the doctor should know “‘the dynamis (Hp., VM: 13) of each food in its natural condition and when it is changed due to cooking’” (Plastira-Valkanou, 1998: 198-9). Cookery is, thus, an art or techne practiced by the physician.

The close connection of food techniques and medicine can also be concluded from Foucault’s The Care of the Self, which explores the relation of ethics to self-control of the body, including diet, among the ancient Greeks. Foucault states that medicine in this time should be understood as

not simply…a technique of intervention, relying, in cases of illness, on remedies or operations. It was also supposed to define, in the form of a corpus of knowledge and rules, a way of living, a reflective relation to oneself, to one’s body, to food, to wakefulness and sleep, to the various activities, and to the environment (1986: 99-100).

He concludes that the “medical logos” dictated “at every moment the correct regimen of life” (1986: 101), referring to this logos as a “health techne” (1986: 101). Food techniques were part of this “health techne” but Plato frames them as lacking a history of mindful reflection and application, relegating ‘cookery’ to irrationality—a matter of sensory ‘experience’ and ‘mere routine.’  But Plato’s position does not conform with the eminent medical texts of the time, for example, the Hippocratic Corpus.

If we turn to Hippocrates’ On Ancient Medicine (c. 450 BC), we see that not only are food and medicine intimately related, but that the physician argues that the discovery and investigation of techniques that made more and better foods for humans could have no other name than medicine. Far from being a matter of experience or routine, medicinal knowledge, argues Hippocrates, is the product of food techniques and their resultant effects on the body as observed over “a long lapse of time” (Part 3, trans. Adams). Thus, humans discovered and selected distinct traits of foods, particular to the techniques employed to process them:

that from wheat, by macerating it, stripping it of its hull, grinding it all down, sifting, toasting, and baking it, they formed bread; and from barley they formed cake (maza), performing many operations in regard to it; they boiled, they roasted, they mixed, they diluted those things which are strong and of intense qualities with weaker things, fashioning them to the nature and powers of man […] To such a discovery and investigation what more suitable name could one give than that of Medicine? (Part 3, trans. Adams).

Hippocrates affirms that, like all cultural techniques which ‘historically and logically precede the concepts they generate,’ food techniques are the ontic precondition for the concepts of medicine and cookery. Certainly, over time, much knowledge was produced around what foods were inedible and edible, what healed and what poisoned. Food techniques process those distinctions and, thus, form the basis of ancient medical knowledge. Indeed, the ontic relation of cookery and medicine is, I argue, why Plato pairs them in the first place.

To mention cookery at all is to assign it great power, as Plato knows rhetoric to have in spite of, or because of, its falsity. Food techniques are, in this sense, the true pharmakon.^[iv] In opposing medicine and cookery, Plato arguably asserts their unity rather than division, for understood as pharmakon, they use the same tools and treat the body by the same channels (the mouth), just as dialogue and rhetoric both make use of language and oration. This is why one can masquerade as the other, and why what appears healthful may be, in reality, harmful.

Although Hippocrates acknowledges the primacy of food techniques in the development of medicine, the significance of food techniques and medicine are reversed over time, with medicine ascending to what Gilbert Simondon might call ‘majority status’ (2016: 104-5) among the techniques employed in Plato’s time. Foucault’s observations about the pervasity of the medical logos in Classical Greece affirms this—a clear shift from what could be called the ‘agricultural logos’ permeating the Homeric world. Hence, in The Republic, we find that food techniques (and knowledge of them), though an acknowledged component of society, are eschewed by Plato’s mouthpiece, Socrates. To court such knowledge is to denigrate oneself to the class of farmers and husbandmen, who can never aspire to leadership.

The Republic

Plato identifies cookery as a counterfeit art, but nevertheless as a powerful form of mediation. Food techniques of a larger-scale, by contrast, are given little notice in Gorgias—where the ingredients for medicine or cookery come from have no bearing on the conversation. Arguably, food only concerns Plato where it contributes to or threatens the individual’s path to knowledge; in this way, Plato is most concerned with food-as-consumption instead of food-as-production. Food techniques of a larger scale, such as cultivation, do not factor into Platonic philosophy, for they have nothing to do with the cultivation of wisdom and true knowledge.

If we look to Plato’s The Republic, in particular, knowledge about food techniques is framed as inferior or marginal, confirming that “Throughout antiquity, a large part of technical operations were excluded…from the universe of discourse, reflexive thought, and culture” (Simondon, 2016: 104). For, in The Republic, Socrates argues that scenes in the Homeric epics recounting the lives of craftsmen and farmers should not be taught to the guardian class of his ideal society. That is, guardians, though they may be ‘lovers of knowledge’ (philosophers), should never concern themselves with these forms of knowledge or techne. Food techniques that had acted in The Odyssey as self-reflexive markers of identity and inscriptions producing knowledge of self and others, have evidently passed out of the realm of knowledge into silent obscurity in Plato’s writings.

The Republic concerns what conditions are necessary to form a just and virtuous community. The first books of the dialogue ask what is justice and what is a just polis? How does one cultivate just citizens and, in particular, just rulers?

My analysis begins in Book II of the dialogue, though preceding it is a lengthy exchange between Socrates and Thrasymachus on the nature of justice. By the end of Book I, however, Socrates says all their musings on justice have come up short. In Book II, he scales up the discussion from the individual to the community (2.368-9, trans. Lee). Socrates suggests further, “if we were to look at the community coming into existence, we might be able to see how justice and injustice originate in it” (2.369, trans. Lee). Perhaps contrary to my assertions so far, Plato gives full acknowledgement here to the necessity of food techniques to social organization, for “Society originates…because the individual is not self-sufficient, but has many needs which he can’t supply himself […] And our first and greatest need is clearly the provision of food to keep us alive” (2.369, trans. Lee). Moreover, Socrates states that “the minimum state would consist of four or five men,” with the farmer or husbandmen first named among them (2.369, trans. Lee). Socrates then describes the hypothetical stages of this community’s development, from a simple division of labour that supplies simple wants, to a community plagued by war and greed as it grows in complexity and luxuries, finally arriving at the harmonious society he sees as tempering the best and worst of its predecessors—a community of three classes: farmers and craftspeople, soldiers or auxiliaries, and the rulers or guardians.

One of the definitions of justice advanced in the dialogue suggests that justice is maintained in a society only when a division of labour and, thus, knowledge is maintained.^[i] Each man is endowed with specific knowledge of their craft and no other, “the shoemaker sticking to his shoemaking and not turning pilot as well, the farmer sticking to his farming and not taking on court work into the bargain, and the soldier sticking to his soldiering” (3.397, trans. Lee). The farmer should not even attempt to make his own plough or hoe, or any of his other agricultural implements, if they are to be well made (2.370, trans. Lee); that is a job for another man—or woman, Socrates allows.^[ii] Thus The Republic describes a community that is just because each class works towards the ends prescribed by their own function in society—“when each of our three classes […] does its own job and minds its own business, that […] is justice and makes our city just” (4.434, trans. Lee). Conversely, “Interference by the three classes with each other’s jobs, and interchange of jobs between them, therefore, does the greatest harm to our state […] that gives us a definition of injustice” (4.434. trans Lee). Interestingly, Socrates reframes this argument with respect to the Homeric epics.

For the same reasons I argued it was important to include Homer in my discussion of the ambivalence towards food techniques in communication and media studies, Plato seeks to exclude the poet from the education of his auxiliary and guardian class unless in a very modified form. In The Odyssey, I analyzed descriptions of food techniques that highlighted their powers of mediation and affirmed that they are, indeed, cultural techniques. It is such descriptions that disqualifies the epics from Plato’s curriculum.

Regarding the epics and food specifically, Socrates calls for the removal of all scenes that call wise anything to do with bodily appetites:

Then is it likely to encourage self-restraint in the young, if the poets represent the wisest of men saying that he thinks the best moment of all is when ‘the tables are laden with meat, and a steward carries round the wine he has drawn from bowl and fills their cups’? And what about lines like ‘death by starvation is the most miserable end that one can meet’? (3.390, trans. Lee).

Plato refers to Odysseus himself here. By contrast, the only lines of poetry that are worth quoting are those where Odysseus calls his emotions to rational order, and those that concern the diet of soldiers.

Even Homer can tell you that […] For you know that when his heroes are on campaign he does not give them fish to eat, although they are on the shore of the Hellespont, nor boiled meat, but only roast. This is what suits soldiers best, because it is, generally speaking, easier to cook something direct on the fire than carry round pots and pans for the purpose […] And Homer, I think, never mentions seasonings. Indeed, even the ordinary athlete knows that if he is to be fit he must keep off them (3.404, trans. Lee).

I argued earlier that the greater number of techniques involved in a food’s production, the greater appears its ‘humanity’ or ‘civility’ in The Odyssey. By contrast, Plato seems to prefer food mediated by as few techniques as possible^[iii]—cooked ‘directly’ over the flames rather than in containers, which are too cumbersome for soldiers to carry. This is interesting considering his similar distaste for mediation in the context of writing, sometimes characterized as a ‘container’ for memory or knowledge.

Homer is censured on two points in particular: first, that the poet inhabits many roles and voices in his tales, thus performing in poetry a kind of injustice that should never be emulated in reality—the crossing of divisions of labour and knowledge.

Do you think, then, Adeimantus, that we want our guardians to be capable of playing many characters, or not? Does it not follow from the principles we adopted earlier, that one man does one job well, and that if he tries to take on a number of jobs, the division of effort will mean that he will fail to make his mark at any of them? (3.384, trans. Lee).

Second, future guardians should not be made to read accounts of work and knowledge they have no business knowing: “we agreed originally that our guardians were to be freed from all forms of manual work […] Then can we tolerate representations of smiths or craftsmen at work […] No: because none of these are occupations to which our guardians should pay any attention” (3.395-6, trans. Lee). Indeed, Socrates concludes that wisdom and judgement, the properties most essential to the guardian class, are not to be gained from everyday crafts. A wise city, by extension, is not made so “because of the skill of its carpenters […] because it has the highest degree of skill in woodwork;” likewise, a city’s skill in farming “merely makes it good at agriculture” (4.428, trans. Lee). Evidently, no wisdom is to be drawn from food techniques, whether they be more discrete acts of food preparation or primary food production.

Like cookery in Gorgias, agriculture in The Republic does not produce the kind of true knowledge sought by philosopher kings. “After all, [the farmer’s] lives of manual labor represent the appetitive part of the city, comparable to the bodily appetites of individuals (442a-b), and they are subject to corruption by both wealth and poverty (421c-d)” (Breen, 2011: 8). In particular, the farmer’s relation to the land and, thus property, makes him ill-suited to a position of power in the polis. While the necessity of the farmer is affirmed, so too is the inferiority and immobility of his class. If a guardian acquires land and, as a result, a personal stake in material matters, he becomes akin to the farmer.^[iv] Even more damning, in cases of conduct unbecoming their position, soldiers may also be relegated to this class; e.g., “I think that any [soldier] who deserts or runs away or shows any other signs of cowardice should be relegated to the artisans or farmers” (5.468, trans. Lee). If a farmer, one’s lot is cast; if a warrior or guardian, it is clearly a demotion to become a farmer, no matter how essential the latter’s labour and knowledge is to the reproduction of the whole.^[v] This differs starkly from The Odyssey, where the admiration that Odysseus expresses for the loyal swineherd Eumaeus and his works suggests something noble in the latter’s art. Moreover, there is no sense of demotion implied in descriptions of Odysseus’ father Laertes, who clearly farmed and husbanded animals as king and continues to, now that his son rules Ithaca.

Conclusion

From my analysis of Gorgias and The Republic, Plato’s ambivalence towards food techniques is clear. As the so-called first communication theorist, Plato refers to food techniques with frequency in his dialogues, but they are routinely cast as unintelligent, base, and ‘natural;’ that is, necessary but not part of what makes the thinking human wise, or societies just. With techne serving as a basis for notions of art and communication into the present, it is noteworthy how effectively Plato forecloses on the possibility of food techniques as techne, or, for the purposes of this analysis, media. Whereas the contribution of cultural techniques theory here provides ways of excavating or tapping into the conditions of communication, before proceeding with definitions of communication, opening up the concept of media to more ‘inconspicuous techniques of knowledge’ such as food techniques. Similarly, exploring the way food techniques communicate identity and knowledge in the wholly oral world of Homer sets in relief the obfuscation of food techniques as media seen from an intellectualist and literate point of view. Thus, a defamiliarizing and heterodox approach is necessary for rehabilitating food techniques as media against some of the oldest and most persistent biases of the communication tradition.

References

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Notes

[1] Siegert uses this term, predominantly associated with Heidegger, to describe how the physical operations of cultural techniques institute the distinction between being and non-being. He has said that cultural techniques “shift the analytic gaze from ontological distinctions to the ontic operations that gave rise to the former in the first place” (2013: 48). As Siegert says of the great binary, nature and culture, media operations ensure the articulation of one with the other: ‘the distinction between nature and culture is itself contingent and based on a distinction that is processed by cultural techniques” (Siegert, 2013: 30). In other words, ontological distinctions can never truly be independent of the ontic operations from which they arise and are reproduced. Concepts, such as nature and culture, appear static and essential, but as Siegert argues, must be re-articulated through the renewal of ontic operations that process the distinction. The ‘essence’ of the human being is also renewed in this way, inhering in processes of reproduction—such as food techniques—and not in the human as such.

^[2] In the epic, men may expect to feed themselves before having to give account of their person and purpose for imposing on a household (e.g. 7.250, trans. Fagles), a courtesy also shown between the gods Calypso and Hermes (5.106-7, trans. Fagles).

^[3] Interestingly, where The Odyssey recognizes the mediation of food techniques as granting rational order to society, Plato sees no such rationality in cookery, which he depicts as an undertaking without reflection.

^[4] This can be related to Siegert’s eminent example of cultural techniques—the door (2007: 30)—which processes the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside; a not-insignificant distinction for, say, a black man outside of a whites’ only club in 1950’s America, or a prisoner inside a jail cell.

^[5] The Odyssey (2000) ed. Martin Hammond. London, UK: Bloomsbury.

[6] The description continues “he’d built them up of quarried blocks of stone and coped them well with a fence of wild pear. Outside he’d driven stakes in a long-line stockade, a ring of thickset palings split from an oak’s dark heart. Within the yard he’d built twelve sties, side-by-side, to bed his pigs, and in each one fifty brood-sows slept aground, penned and kept for breeding” (14.9-18, trans. Fagles).

[7] By the end of his dialogue with Socrates, Phaedrus concludes that it is lunacy to seek education from a book alone. “I think they would say that he was a raving madman, if he thinks he has become a doctor after hearing something from a book or happening upon a few drugs, when he has no understanding of the art” (268c, trans. Scully).

[8] Drawn from The Republic.

[9] As we see with The Republic, one definition of justice means to be knowledgeable and skilled in one profession, in a division of labour where everyone plays their part well and does not strive to straddle those divisions. By this definition, rhetoric is a mockery of justice because it claims to know and be able to transmit many knowledges, without basis in learning.

[10] “Cookery simulates the disguise of medicine, and pretends to know what food is the best for the body; and if the physician and the cook had to enter into a competition in which children were the judges, or men who had no more sense than children, as to which of them best understands the goodness or badness of food, the physician would be starved to death. A flattery I deem this to be and of an ignoble sort, Polus, for to you I am now addressing myself, because it aims at pleasure without any thought of the best. An art I do not call it, but only an experience, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason of the nature of its own applications. And I do not call any irrational thing an art; but if you dispute my words, I am prepared to argue in defence of them” (trans. Jowett).

[11] In Phaedrus, writing is presented as pharmakon—what is offered as a cure for memory is reframed as a poison, fostering forgetfulness or belief without knowledge.

[12] The farmer is named as one of the essential and originary citizens of the polis, who provisions other quintessential craftsmen with food; he, in turn, is outfitted with tools and shelter. By definition, the farmer is categorically denied any greater participatory role because his knowledge is limited to that craft and does not grasp the working of society as a whole, nor does it ‘look well’ upon a person to have more than one occupation and thus a broader knowledge unbecoming his class.

[13] Ironically, while Socrates argues women are quite capable with the right education of performing the same tasks men do, he finds laughable the idea that anyone but women could be skilled at cookery. “We need not waste time over exceptions like weaving and cooking, at which women are thought to be experts, and get badly laughed at if men do them better” (5.455, trans. Lee).

[14] In his imaginary history of civilization, the first, largely vegetarian people represented what should be “the true norm” to Socrates (2.373, trans. Lee), absent all the luxuries that corrupt weak-minded people.

[15] “If they acquire private property in land, houses, or money, they will become farmers and men of business instead of Guardians” (3.417, trans. Lee).

[16] It is also worth noting that in Phaedrus, when describing the reincarnation of souls relative to earthly occupations, farmers are only rated higher than sophists and tyrants—seventh on a scale of nine, one belonging to those who have lived most justly, and ninth, the least (248e, trans. Scully).

Siobhan Watters holds a PhD from the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Watters’ published work explores the spectacular nature of food supply chains and packaging, food distribution in crisis, food rethought through a posthuman lens, and the future of food and space settlement.

Email: siobhan.watters@gmail.com

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
None declared

Article history
Article submitted: 27/03/2025
Date of original decision: 17/06/2025
Revised article submitted: 29/08/2025
Article accepted: 02/09/2025