Last week, a thinker who most influenced the last, century Claude Levi-Strauss, died at the age of 100. How did you react to this?

I feel his loss in almost a personal way. My paper 'Thought about Food' gave me perhaps the greatest satisfaction of my writings, and in it I owe a great deal to Levi-Strauss.

My argument is that our choice of what food to eat is always a way of self-definition, of showing what we think a human being is. For instance, if I eat meat, I manifestly adhere to the view that morality for humans consists in dominating, and not in conforming with nature.

Clearly, the teeth and nails of a human being, unlike those of carnivore animals, are not made capable of tearing apart the flesh of animals, and we only manage to eat meat by cooking it over a fire and by cutting it up with artificial instruments like knives.

Nature equipped human beings, like monkeys and other close relatives, to eat easily vegetal products. In fact, if one is a vegetarian, one is declaring his belief that human beings should not act against nature through their productive ability, which resulted in the invention of fire and such technologies as the use of sharp cutting instruments.

One of the most important of Levi-Strauss's mature works, The Raw and the Cooked, brings out the fact that different ways of cooking enable more nuanced self-definition. If you roast food, you are keeping as close as you can to eating it raw, since there is nothing between the fire and the food.

If you boil it, you are inserting a pot and water between the fire and the food, so you are moving a step away from nature in the direction of assertion of man's mastery over it. Further steps are taken if you fry, since now you are using a substance such as oil that alters the natural flavour of the food.

Similarly, the more use you make of spices and sauces, the more aggressively you will be rejecting the concept of the human being that most ecologists support today. Levi-Strauss was perhaps their earliest, most listened to prophet.

Apart from his philosophy of food, who was Levi-Strauss and what were the contributions that made him such a major influence on the culture of the 20th Century?

He graduated in philosophy, but he became famous as a self-taught ethnographer and anthropologist. The studies that first earned him his reputation were about some of the most 'primitive' tribes still living in tropical Brazil.

He argued that the self-styled 'civilised' people of the West had restricted their collective memory to archives and other documented material. They had forgotten about the much more behaviour-influencing deposits in the depths of the unconscious. Of these, memory still existed in the myths and rituals of 'savages'.

Moreover, he held that the systems of thought and patterns of action of all human beings, whatever their degree of rawness or sophistication, were the same. There is an obvious similarity in method between Levi-Straussian universalist anthropological theory and the theory of Language of Noam Chomsky. Both assert worldwide, formal, deep organisation concealed by superficial regional appearances. Because of this analogous analytic approach, Levi-Strauss, like Chomsky, was labelled a 'structuralist' in homage to the founder of this way of thought, Fernand de Saussure.

What is the relevance of Levi-Strauss to Christianity?

Perhaps the major positive contribution that Levi-Strauss made to philosophy is his deadly criticism of the concept of the Self that had predominated especially in French culture since Descartes.

In order to understand what it is like to be a human being, it is the meaning of 'we' rather than of 'I' that should be explored. If the emphasis laid by Levi-Strauss on the unconscious forces operative in human existence owes plainly a lot to Freud, his stress on the essentially social nature of the human being and on such dimensions of it as collective memory and oral traditions is equally indebted to Marx.

The communitarian as opposed to the ego-centred concept of the human being is the area of greatest cultural kinship, to use a key Levi-Straussian term, between Levi-Strauss, a Jewish agnostic, and Judeo-Christianity-Islam.

There are two ways in which Levi-Strauss has particularly influenced Christian thought. He basically asserted a paradox. On one hand, there were universal, timeless structures in human existence. On the other, Western culture had a merely relative value in comparison with other cultures, even those that Westerners had been used to regard with a superiority complex, not to use harsher language.

Christians have come to depict their own vision using the Levi-Straussian method. Christianity is constituted by the inter-section of the 'structure' of Eternal Love, that is the Trinitarian God, and the contingencies of human history within which the life of Christ and the Church takes place.

The second way in which Levi-Strauss has considerably influenced Christian thought is in Biblical exegesis. Many interpreters of the New as well as the Hebrew Testament use structuralist-influenced techniques to bring out the deep spiritual meanings underlying superficial, culturally dependent language used to express them.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.