Scott Samuelson: 'The Art of Living' in Springfield, Ohio

What John Gardner's masterful short story tells us about ourselves, the "other," and eating dogs.

Illustration by Mark Penberthy from the cover of John Gardner’s The Art of Living and Other Stories (1981).

By Scott Samuelson

Donald Trump has rightfully received a lot of negative attention for having asserted in the recent debate that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating dogs and cats. It’s a shameless amplification of a baseless claim that’s now causing truly serious problems for the people of Springfield, Ohio.

But I’m not sure that we’re really getting what’s going on—either with Trump or with us more generally.

I’ve been working on a book on the philosophy of eating. Among many other things, I’ve been thinking about the categories we use to carve up the world of food.

Nowadays we’re likely to shake our head in amazement about, say, ancient Biblical prohibitions against eating animals that chew their cud but don’t have cloven hooves.

But our contemporary American categories concerning which animals can and cannot be eaten also have little to do with nutritional value or even tas…