Martin Cohen

Martin Cohen is a well-established author specializing in popular books in philosophy, social science and politics.

I have a book being published November 2018 on the sociology of food this year, called provocatively 'I Think Therefore I Eat'! with an emphasis on how historical philosophers have approached the 'food issue'. It's a popular 'explainer' kind of book, already given a nice plug by Eater!

Food is very much an interdisciplinary area - though it is often treated in a narrow, specialised way. There is the nutritionist's perspective, the economist's, the cook's, the ecological... the list is as long as we want. And each perspective is 'valid', but only partial. So I think it's a good place to bring in a little philosophy.

Part of the book looks at the historical views of well-known philosophers on food (they have indeed had some!) but most of it looks at modern theories which are still philosophical in a fundamental sense, including for example, the ideas that we are living in an 'obesogenic' environment, or that our bodies, far from being guided by a single essential soul, are really constructed out of an uneasy alliance of micro-organisms.

It's published by Turner in the US mid-November, and this is their page for the book including my video trailer if you would like to see a little movie!

For rights inquiries, please contact my literary agent:

Mark Gottlieb

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So, the book contains analysis of many current food-related debates,

including the vexed question of the obesity epidemic, which is much more complicated than merely people eating the wrong things, a fact that won't surprise many of us have explored by trying to go on a diet ourselves!

But perhaps the 'USP element' in it is more on what those venerable philosophy gurus had to say anyway. On the social science side, these two extracts give the flavour:

1. If you went by TV and the newspapers, you could be forgiven for thinking that celebrities, be they chefs or models, have more of a handle on the key food issues than qualified doctors and nutritionists – let alone philosophers. And you might well be right. Because the worst thing about food science, the elephant in the room, is that it’s not just the opinions that are changing – but the ‘facts’ themselves shift too. To get to the bottom of the food question. requires us to tease apart the strands of diet science and biochemistry, as well as an ounce of economics and a dash of human psychology.

Rather the obesity epidemic is an economic issue as I put in back in 2016 in an article for the Guardian newspaper. "The causes of the epidemic are complex, spanning the social sciences to biology and technology"

I took the same issue a bit further when I compared figures for childhood obesity - and found more evidence that, as I wrote, "It's poverty, not individual choice, that is driving extraordinary obesity ..."

Incidentally, the same sort of disgraceful thing applies to educational achievement. Did you know, that you can pretty much do away with exams (hooray!), as exam results mimic exactly a student's position in the class hierarchy (boo!). Shocking and disgraceful and no one - of course - s gong to do anything about it.

So that's really the the Politics of Food Science – as I put it for Gavin Wren's fabulous Brain Food Magazine at Medium , wri