You Are What You Eat. But Who Are You?

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote his aphorism in 1825, at the edge of a long life, large parts of which he had spent at the table. Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es. Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are. He did not mean a diet plan. He meant culture, origin, character. The way a person eats betrays who he is: in company, in silence, with what appetite, with what bearing.

Two hundred years later the sentence adorns protein shakers and detox programmes.

The wellness industry has hijacked it and simplified it until it fits: you are what you eat, so eat the right thing, buy the right thing, become the right thing. The table as a place of optimisation. Food as a variable in an equation whose result promises a better self.

Brillat-Savarin would not have understood that. And if he had, it would have embarrassed him.

What he described was not a programme. It was an observation: that something shows itself at the table which otherwise stays hidden. Not on the plate, but in the conversation around the plate. Who keeps quiet. Who talks. Who tops up the glasses. Who waits until everyone is seated.

So the sentence is true, only differently from how it is taken. You are not what you eat. You are whom you eat with.

That sounds simpler than it is. Because whom you eat with is rarely a conscious decision. You end up somewhere, pull up a chair, and suddenly you are sitting next to someone you would otherwise have nothing to do with. A conversation begins because the table is small. Because the food arrives before you could introduce yourselves. Because in such moments silence is more uncomfortable than talking. What arises there has no name, and needs none. It is what Brillat-Savarin had in mind. And it cannot be ordered.