The Philosophy of Apple Pie Order

November, 1997

I heard about a burgeoning new career field recently.

Professional degree-toting philosophers have found a niche somewhere between psychiatrists and stockbrokers as counselors to the rudderless upper middle-class. More than 400 professional philosophers currently practice in the U.S. Of course, compared to the number of psychic counselors, palm readers and astrologers, that's a pretty small number. Still, it's something new in the counseling domain. However, since no health insurance providers will spring for the fees, the trend isn't likely to get out of hand.

Theoretically, a philosopher would be able to help you grapple with life's more inscrutable questions, such as, "What is the meaning of life?" and "What's love got to do with it?"

I read a little Plato in my youth, and philosophy continues to interest me, but the more I read about it, the more I think you can't learn philosophy from books.

Philosophers who grapple with life's puzzles often work in the sanctuary of studies and libraries, where distractions won't interrupt thought. But I believe the answers to life's deepest mysteries won't be found in a book, or in meditation on a secluded mountain top. When I want to get to the bottom of something, I begin my search at the kitchen table.

The center of the universe is a kitchen table.

Intuitively, we all know this. Forget what your physics professor told you.

Our daily orbits, our frantic scurrying from point-to-point around the map, may take us far afield, but in the end we all return to the magnetic pole of the home – the kitchen table, where the coffee's hot, the pie's warm and the company doesn't put on any airs.

Probably there exist cultures without kitchens, and thus without kitchen tables. Yet I'll bet the kitchen table function persists, around the cook fire, or the wherever the hub of familial energy revolves. For whoever sits comfortably at my kitchen table belongs to my family, in the broadest sense of the word.

At the kitchen table, we let our hair down and spill our hearts. We seek the truth. Sometimes we stumble upon it. Sometimes we don't even get close. But, at least we still have the coffee and pie, so the time spent isn't a total loss.

A lot of folks might imagine that the coffee is the critical element in the scenario. It's not, though. It's the pie.

Why pie?

Ah, there we cut into the steaming hot heart of the matter. Pie, as any English major can tell you, is more than pie.

And when we in America speak of pie, one pie stands supreme in the symbolic lexicon of patriotism. I refer, of course, to Mom's Apple Pie, the pie for which we fight our wars and sing our anthems.

An exaggeration? Perhaps. But the importance of pie as a pillar of our national philosophy may be deduced from an editorial which appeared in the New York Times in 1902 which described pie as "the secret of our strength as a nation and the foundation of our industrial supremacy." The Times concluded that, "Pie is the American synonym of prosperity . . . Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished."

I imagine that the editor who penned those stirring lines might have been a tad pie-eyed when he wrote them. Nonetheless, he said a mouthful.

That's why, even when we share a casual cup of coffee and a slice of pie at the kitchen table, we're engaged in the serious business of ritual. And the ritual of pie-cutting filters through our culture in profound and telling ways.

Consider pie charts, for instance, the persuasive mechanism of choice for economists and pollsters. Not all of us can fathom the ups and downs of the stock market or the swirling currents of political gamesmanship, but we all understand the value of a fat slice of the pie. You don't have to be a scholar to read a pie chart. Little kids can look at them and figure out who's getting the biggest piece.

As a mother and baker of many pies, I know how hard it is to cut a pie in such a way that no one feels short-changed.

In a perfect world, everyone could count on getting a fair share of the big pie, the pie of life.

When things are as they should be, we sometimes say they're in "apple pie order." If the world were in apple pie order, presidents would always tell the truth, checkbooks would always be balanced, and no child would ever go to bed hungry.

Philosophers advise us not to expect perfection.

But we shouldn't have to wait for pie in the sky either.