Decadence as Destiny

In the opening pages of The Table Comes First, Adam Gopnik offers a simple but unsettling image: a condemned prisoner eating his last meal. And then he asks—“Why do we think of food at times like these?” He doesn’t quite answer the question, not fully. But the question lingers. Because in that moment of finality, when all symbols falter and all stories end, the prisoner eats. We eat. And it isn’t just about comfort. It’s about contact—sensory, visceral, and metaphysical contact with the world.

We shouldn’t be sentimental about it. Eating is not merely the pleasure of a well-cooked meal or a reminder of mother’s table. It is, at its root, a symbolic act of transubstantiation. Not in the theological sense (though there’s something liturgical about it), but in the physical, existential sense: we take in what is alien, what was not-us, and make it ours. We draw the world into ourselves and, for a fleeting moment, assert a kind of dominion. We don’t just survive by eating. We possess.

Every act of cooking, every simmering pot and salted crust, participates in this transformation. It is how we make the world not just habitable, but ours. The kitchen is our laboratory of intimacy, the hearth around which we shape meaning. Even in a world of takeout containers and distracted dinners, food remains the primary technology by which we turn raw, indifferent nature into something bearing the mark of human intention.

The act of eating, then, is not just functional. It’s metaphysical. We break bread not just to feed but to bind—to tether ourselves to a place, a culture, a memory, a self. It’s no coincidence that “comfort food” is so often the cuisine of childhood or home. These dishes are not just calories; they are edible memories and rituals of belonging.

But what lies beneath this comfort is something more primal. In eating, we are doing something to the world. We cut, sear, chew, dissolve. We convert living matter into our own flesh. It is an act of force—and not just force, but of choice as well. Most of what we eat today is not dictated by necessity. It’s preference, aesthetic, whim, indulgence. And that makes it all the more symbolically potent. We choose to transform the world into pleasure.

Even vegetarians, despite their moral restraint, participate in this transformation. (After all, plants are living organisms too, possessed of their own subtle agencies.) We may not live to kill—but we live to assimilate. That’s the deeper drive. Not destruction for its own sake, but the thrill of remaking what is other into the intimacy of self.

Animals digest but only humans dine.

We’re the species that turns necessity into aesthetics. We ritualize our needs, perform them, layer them with meaning. We take what evolution gave us—hunger, satiety, nourishment—and turn it into gastronomy, celebration, memory. This capacity to live decadently—to choose pleasure as a value, to revel in excess not out of gluttony but as an affirmation of our agency—is as distinctive as rationality or language.

And yet, decadence is rarely included in the official list of human traits. Philosophers, in their high-minded detachment, prefer to speak of reason, reflection, tool use. But look at human history and it is hard not to conclude that the pursuit of pleasure, especially culinary pleasure, is a central human endeavor. We do not merely eat to live. We live to eat well. And “well” does not mean nutritiously. It means deliciously, meaningfully, communally.

Food is not a diversion from life’s deeper purposes—it is one of those purposes. A kind of edible metaphysics. A practice of embodiment that reminds us of our aliveness, our entanglement with the world, and our power to make that entanglement beautiful.

So perhaps Gopnik’s prisoner isn’t reaching for a last comfort so much as making a final assertion. To eat, even at the end, is to say: I am still here. I am still part of the world. I take it in. I make it mine. Even in the face of death, the sensual act of eating stakes a claim on life—not as abstraction, but as texture, taste, and transformation.

The table doesn’t just come first. It comes last. It is the threshold where matter becomes meaning, where nature is remade as nurture, and where we remember—if only dimly—that our deepest pleasures are also our most profound ways of being in the world.