Dishes of food

Let’s say I am eating a dish, say a soup, a salad or a sandwich. At some point there is half-eaten dish, and finally all that’s left are some odds and ends. When did the dish perish?

One option is that the dish perished when the elements distinctive of the type of dish have been eaten. But that doesn’t seem right. Suppose I am eating a cucumber and radish salad, and I have eaten out the cucumbers, leaving the best for last. I haven’t eaten the salad yet, so the salad continues to exist. And if someone asks “What is he eating?” while I am eating the last radish the right answer is still “A cucumber and radish salad.”

[So, interestingly, while it is essential to a cucumber and radish salad that it have cucumbers at the beginning, it is not essential that it have cucumbers at every time in its existence. So we need to distinguish between two kinds of essential parts: parts that are four-dimensionally essential in the sense that the entity must have them at at least one time (cucumbers) and parts that are three-dimensionally essential in the sense that they are needed at all times (the cucumber and radish salad doesn’t have specific parts like that, but it needs to have a bit of a cucumber or a bit of radish at any given time. It is plausible that the four-dimensionally essential parts must be found at the entity’s beginning (otherwise whether the entity exists depends on the future).]

The above argument suggests a test for whether the dish still exists: am I still eating it. But what if I am licking up the crumbs? I suspect, however, licking crumbs is not eating the dish—it’s eating what’s left of the dish.

So the dish perishes into the crumbs and other odds and ends. When exactly that happens is unclear, perhaps vague.

The felt absurdity in the above ontological investigation is rightly to be taken as evidence that dishes, and by extension most other artifacts, do not actually exist.