Few are the places where we find references to cuisine in the western philosophical texts, which leads us to conclude that there is a certain special relation between this subject and discourse in general. Our thesis is that its appearance in the texts devoted to knowledge is always performing a certain rhetorical function. The following article shows through certain unpublished and published writings of J. Derrida that eating and cooking are metonymies for the general logic of philosophical discourse, because it cannot distance itself from its intrinsic rhetorical nature. We track these elements in texts from Plato to Levi-Strauss and show how cuisine is a kind of philosophical language that philosophy would like to exclude, unsuccessfully, from its own domain.