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Book Reviews : The Hungry Soul: eating and the perfecting of our nature, by Leon R. Kass. New York, Free Press, (London, Simon & Schuster) 1994. xviii+248 pp. hb. £19.95

We have been led to believe, as C.S. Lewis prophesied in The V Abolition of Man, that ’the real world’ is uncovered only by a supposedly value-neutral science, and that any innate or cultural discriminations we may make are only artifice. The result is anomie, and ennui (the two together making accidie). Leon Kass’s book is primarily an attempt to restore a sense of the human significance of the world. Specifically, he is out to understand ’the meaning of eating’. In the course of his argument he discusses such things as the culturally subversive effect of popular Darwinism, and the humanities’ failure of nerve (as evidenced in deconstructionism and other ideological retreats from truth and reason) in the face of scientism. The world we