Food preferences express one’s fundamental existential project

Evidence

If I eat a pink cake, the taste of it is pink; the light sugary perfume, the oiliness of the butter cream are the pink. Thus I eat the pink as I see the sugary. We conclude that flavor, due to this fact, has a complex architecture and differentiated matter; it is this structured matter—which represents for us a particular type of being—that we can assimilate or reject with nausea, according to our original project. It is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the existential significance of these foods. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1414

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s interest in how taste and materiality carry meaning; also complements the sacrificial framing of appropriation/destruction in the ‘On Sacrifice’ piece.
• QUESTION: Sartre asserts gut-level food tastes reveal an original project — worth chasing how this squares with his anti-essentialist freedom elsewhere.
• XREF: Builds toward Beauvoir’s treatment of the body, appetite, and nausea; also connects to Sartre’s nausea concept itself. — connects to: Tastes encode a whole choice of being rather than sexual or physiological facts; Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1025; Existential psychoanalysis decodes behavior to reveal each person’s fundamental choice of being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1346 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Personal possessions and surroundings concretely express one’s fundamental self-choice. #exemplifies (0.90)
• Existential psychoanalysis decodes behavior to reveal each person’s fundamental choice of being. #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1346
• Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems #corroborates (0.70) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1025