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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: body; and if the physician and the cook had to enter into a competition in
which children were the judges, or men who had no more sense than children,
as to which of them best understands the goodness or badness of food, the
physician would be starved to death. A flattery I deem this to be and of
an ignoble sort, Polus, for to you I am now addressing myself, because it
aims at pleasure without any thought of the best. An art I do not call it,
but only an experience, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason
of the nature of its own applications. And I do not call any irrational
thing an art; but if you dispute my words, I am prepared to argue in
defence of them.
Cookery, then, I maintain to be a flattery which takes the form of
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