Eating with the Hands. Toward a Gastronomic Degree Zero?

Abstract

A new expression of the burgeoning naturalist ideology, eating with the hands seems to embody a return to origins, to a direct and sensual contact with food. Yet, a closer look reveals it as a field of implicit and explicit rules that shift across time and space. From the medieval banquet to contemporary street food, the absence of cutlery does not eliminate mediation but rather transforms it: the introduction of hands at the table challenges established codes of good taste, proposing new forms of relation with food and with others. Far from being a mere act of transgression, eating with the hands opens up complex horizons of meaning, where hygiene, aesthetics, decorum and conviviality intersect. In this sense, eating with the hands is not a return to a gastronomic "degree zero", but the opening to forms of life that continually reshape our understanding of taste, body, and society.