in progress: Take and Eat

Take and Eat explores the history and practice of theophagy. Against accounts that reduce wine to tasting notes, preventive medicine, or revelatory excess, the book treats food and wine as worked substances: cultivated, made, transported, priced, offered, and used. It follows how these substances move from nourishment and pleasure into ritual, where they gather labor, exchange, sacrifice, holiness, and social relation, and asks what kinds of worlds they disclose and help compose when they are blessed, shared, and asked to become more than themselves.

One of the book’s central claims is what I call the Evic Distinction. In contrast to the Mosaic Distinction, which organizes religious life through codified oppositions—true and false, permitted and forbidden—the Evic Distinction names a more basic, pre-legal form of discernment. In Genesis 3, Eve does not act out of pure impulse: she weighs the fruit as good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for wisdom, then takes some and eats. The point is not ecstasy but measure. The Evic Distinction names a logic of taking and sparing, of enough rather than all, by which finite creatures bring the world’s excess into livable proportion. In that sense, the book reads eating as a scene in which knowledge and mortality become inseparable, and in which questions of value, danger, and sufficiency are first negotiated in the body.

For that reason, the mouth occupies a privileged place in the argument. The mouth is not just an organ of appetite, nor an organ of speech. It is the threshold where sensation becomes judgment––where a substance is received, tested, incorporated, or refused. The book treats taste as a serious mode of discernment: not brute immediacy, but formed and object-directed attention, shaped by training, pleasure, risk, and use. In sacramental and theophagic settings, the mouth is also where sign passes into participation. Moving from Eve and Moses to Augustine, Spinoza, and Freud, Take and Eat argues that Western religious thought has been shaped not only by what may be believed, but by what may be eaten, what must be spared, and how finite beings learn measure through incorporation.