{"id":803,"date":"2011-02-25T15:25:10","date_gmt":"2011-02-25T19:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/?p=803"},"modified":"2011-02-25T15:25:10","modified_gmt":"2011-02-25T19:25:10","slug":"thus-ate-zarathustra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/2011\/02\/25\/thus-ate-zarathustra\/","title":{"rendered":"Thus Ate Zarathustra"},"content":{"rendered":"

Woody Allen gives a comical and tongue-in-cheek summary, complete with excerpt, of Nietzsche’s alleged lost book on dieting to The New Yorker<\/em>:<\/p>\n

No philosopher came close to solving the problem of guilt and weight until Descartes divided mind and body in two, so that the body could gorge itself while the mind thought, Who cares, it\u2019s not me. The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup? It was Leibniz who first said that fat consisted of monads. Leibniz dieted and exercised but never did get rid of his monads\u2014at least, not the ones that adhered to his thighs. Spinoza, on the other hand, dined sparingly because he believed that God existed in everything and it\u2019s intimidating to wolf down a knish if you think you\u2019re ladling mustard onto the First Cause of All Things.<\/p>\n

Is there a relationship between a healthy regimen and creative genius? We need only look at the composer Richard Wagner and see what he puts away. French fries, grilled cheese, nachos\u2014Christ, there\u2019s no limit to the man\u2019s appetite, and yet his music is sublime. Cosima, his wife, goes pretty good, too, but at least she runs every day. In a scene cut from the \u201cRing\u201d cycle, Siegfried decides to dine out with the Rhine maidens and in heroic fashion consumes an ox, two dozen fowl, several wheels of cheese, and fifteen kegs of beer. Then the check comes and he\u2019s short. The point here is that in life one is entitled to a side dish of either coleslaw or potato salad, and the choice must be made in terror, with the knowledge that not only is our time on earth limited but most kitchens close at ten.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the full text here<\/a>.\u00a0 Can you think of any other Core authors’ approaches to food?\u00a0 Feel free to leave your thoughts below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Woody Allen gives a comical and tongue-in-cheek summary, complete with excerpt, of Nietzsche’s alleged lost book on dieting to The New Yorker: No philosopher came close to solving the problem of guilt and weight until Descartes divided mind and body in two, so that the body could gorge itself while the mind thought, Who cares, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1284,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[3831,30,5064],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=803"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":809,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions\/809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}