The Philosophical Burger

Do you eat ready-made beef, chicken or pork burgers? If you do, then you are performing the impossible because these food items no longer exist.

“Burgers” are on the menu for millions of people each day and with a generic name this patty is real enough. But it is the named specific burger content, the beef, chicken, pork, rabbit etc., which raises the ontological questions: the precise concern is not about the existence of burgers but is about the existence or otherwise of beef, chicken, pork, rabbit or whatever burgers.

Is this trivial? Burgers provide nutrition in a world where people are starving. So what if your beef burger does contain horse meat, pork, chicken or other poultry, donkey, onion, wheat flour, water, beef fat, dehydrated meat powders, soya protein isolate, salt, onion powder, yeast, sugar, barley malt extract, garlic powder, white pepper extract, celery extract, onion extract, rusk, stabilisers (diphosphates and triphosphates) and beef fat? It tastes good!

Anyway who is naïve enough to expect a beef burger to contain just beef?
Judging by the furore surrounding the discovery of horse meat in beef burgers in the UK, many people are naïve enough to expect a beef burger to contain just beef.  But this undifferentiated herding is really a symptom and not a cause.

Criminal gangs may well have herded the odd horse among burger cows at a meat processing plant in Poland and food safety officials failed to spot the difference in quadrupeds. This kind of trickery however is not an isolated incident. There is hidden among the offal and hides, a very big issue indeed. It is an issue that permeates Modern industry and it has to do with words and things.

Foucault's Philosophical Burger

Michel Foucault wrote a book about “words and things” in French and it was called “Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines.” (1966.)(“Les Mots et les Choses” translates as “words and things”). Michel became very famous in France as a result of his work that explored the world of things in everyday life and its relations with another world, the world created by the words that people use.

In essence, Michel showed that the relation between words and things has differed over the centuries in Europe. Furthermore, he argued that as the relation changed then the different man-made world of words and representations that were created were in fact tantamount to different worlds. Change the words and representations we use to describe and understand the world and the world changes!! It cannot be otherwise.

Think how the words “Beef Burger” now relate to a different world than they did before horses came galloping along. Does this send a shudder down your spine – it ought to.

How do we know if any other of the words and descriptions we use to describe and understand the world are trustworthy? What else – other than a patty – might come tumbling down if the relation between words and things changes? Could neo-classical economics, free-markets, finance markets and company accounting systems all change if these words are revealed as false because they no longer relate properly to some thing?  Of course they could, and the things that came galloping along to cause this change are known as overpopulation, social injustice, inequities in wealth distribution, environmental degradation, and climate change – the whole gamut of unsustainable development.

The way in which we manage our economies and impact upon and make things is changing. Some big words have been revealed to have as false a content as a Beef Burger. Our words have changed and the human world is changing. The book “Intrinsic Sustainable Development: epistemes, science, business and sustainability” (Birkin and Polesie 2011) helps to reveal what really is in your patty!

References

Foucault, M. Les Mots et Les Choses - Published in English as The Order of Things: an archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1970. London, Routledge.

Birkin, F.K. and Polesie, T. Intrinsic Sustainable Development: epistemes, science, business and sustainability. 2011. Singapore, World Scientific Press.