Philosophy of Food

While species have historically been introduced to new areas of the world in order to be used as food sources, many species are now being viewed as food sources subsequent to having been seen as invasive to an ecosystem. One management strategy is to encourage people to eat them. There are, however, also a number of economic, health, and legal concerns associated with eating invasive species.

In this paper I attempt to show that a certain degree of hunger, intended as a material and psychological condition of the diner, can become a constitutive property of a culinary work. One may believe that the best possible argument supporting this thesis is one relying on the general assertion that an author's stipulative authority over the features of his or her work, if adequately exercised, is absolute. Quite the contrary, I show that we should prefer a different and more specific argumentative strategy based on the twofold fact that the conventions ruling over culinary works are peculiarly less stringent than in many other art fields, and that hunger has a very special status with regard to culinary works, in the sense that fixing the degree of hunger of the diner may serve to fix the appropriate conditions for any minimally acceptable perceptual experience of a culinary work to take place.

The entry employs the conceptual tools of metaphysics to critically study the adjective 'natural,' when utilized to characterize a food or beverage. There is some skepticism regarding the purposefuleness of the adjective in picking out genuine characteristics of a food. While some countries, such as the United States, have abstained from issuing specific regulations circa the use of the term 'natural' to describe a food, others – e.g. England and Israel – do have such regulations. The entry first draws a distinction between the application of the adjective to whole foods and to compound foods. Hence, four typical misunderstandings of the term are flagged. They comprise circumstances in which 'natural' is taken to imply – respectively – nutritional suitability, a health claim, lack of human influence, and authenticity or familiarity. Finally, four classic metaphysical positions on nature are introduced. The positions jointly support the different facets that the adjective 'natural' takes in describing a food. They also reveal how the adjective 'natural,' when applied to food, can hardly be reduced to one metaphysical schema.

In the past years, it seems that food has found itself a central focus of creativity in contemporary culture. To wit, streaming platforms are littered with cooking shows celebrating chefs' creativity around the world, books take culinary creativity as their central topic (see, e.g., Redzepi 2013 and Questlove 2016), and people seem to be constantly concerned about the last culinary trend. But what is culinary creativity? And what are the forms it can take? This paper addresses these issues. Building upon pioneering work on creativity by Margaret Boden, I argue that creativity is a matter of adding new valuable things to the world. Creative people are those that take on this task, and creative things are the output of their creative processes. Many recipes and many chefs meet this characterization. However, as we shall see, they don't all meet it in the same sense, and some forms of culinary creativity can be deemed more valuable than others. I will argue that this is especially the case with the kind of culinary creativity displayed at Noma in Copenhagen, one of today's most creative restaurants, headed by its celebrated chef René Redzepi. Indeed, the kind of culinary creativity displayed at Noma emphasizes the mediating role that recipes can have with respect to the environment and realizes the full potential of this mediating relation by taking into account not only its sensory, but also its cognitive and disruptive aspects. The structure of the paper is the following. In the first section, I expound on some background issues about creativity and recipes. In the second section, I provide a summary of the creative perspective at Noma. In a third section, I discuss three ways creativity can occur in the culinary domain and discuss three important culinary movements: fusion food, nouvelle cuisine, and modernist cuisine. Before summarizing my results in the conclusion, I then expound, in a fourth section, my reasons to consider that the kind of culinary creativity displayed at Noma is distinctive.

Local food projects are steadily becoming a part of contemporary food systems and take on many forms. They are typically analyzed using an ethical, or socio-political, lens. Food focused initiatives can be understood as strategies to achieve ethical change in food systems and, as such, ethics play a guiding role. But local food is also a social movement and, thus social and political theories provide unique insights during analysis. This paper begins with the position that ontology should play a more prominent part in the analysis of local food movements, as this lens could provide unique insights into basic commitments guiding such initiatives. The paper presents the argument that ontological analyses are imperative for fully understanding local food movements. It then provides an overview of the justice frameworks and ontological orientations that guide two dominant types of initiatives: Those committed to increasing food security and those committed to food sovereignty. The paper...

This essay provides an overview of Plato’s contribution to food ethics. Drawing on various Platonic dialogues, the discussion includes an analysis of the problem of gluttony and the correlate virtue of moderation, the diet of the Republic’s ideal city, and the harmonious order of the tripartite soul.

Insignito del Premio Internazionale d’Estetica conferito dalla Società Italiana di Estetica, il volume di Carolyn Korsmeyer Il senso del gusto. Cibo e filosofia costituisce un “classico” dell’estetica del cibo, un imprescindibile termine di riferimento, sia per gli specialisti del tema, sia per coloro che intendono avvicinare per la prima volta questa nuova area di studi estetologici. Korsmeyer, da un lato, descrive le vicende del gusto del palato, analizzando il paradigma prevalente nella tradizione filosofica occidentale che ha portato alla sua esclusione o marginalizzazione dal dominio dell'estetica; dall’altro, elabora una proposta alternativa nella quale il gusto del cibo acquista invece un senso specifico e positivo. Conclude il volume la rappresentazione del gusto e del cibo nell’arte figurativa e nella narrativa, attraverso casi esemplari che permettono di aprire la filosofia del cibo anche verso regioni canoniche dell’estetica quali la critica e la narratologia.

This essay reflects on the claim by which “Christianity stands or falls”: the Word became Flesh. It suggests that a long history of misreadings and misappropriations have caused us to think in terms of spiritualizing the flesh rather than incarnating the spirit. Hermeneutics has forgotten the command “take, eat, this is my body” in favor of a textual rumination that results in regurgitation rather than digestion and sustenance. This is reflected in the marginalization of the Eucharist. The essay offers a detailed and original reading of St. Augustine’s Confessions as an exemplary text of carnal hermeneutics in which he finds a “conversion of the flesh” alongside the more familiar episodes of the “conversion of the mind” and “conversion of the heart.” This third conversion is evident in Augustine’s reversal of the traditional hierarchy of the senses by giving primacy to touch, in his use of the parable of the prodigal son to emphasize the flesh, and in extended use of language associated with hunger, eating, and feasting.

Epicurus declared it all starts with the "pleasure of the stomach", and yet twentieth-century rationalist philosophy found him dis-interested in epicureanism in the small-e sense. Wrong! Epicurus made a diner's sense of the world.

This is Chapter 1, ‘Epicurus – the foodies’ philosopher’, pp. 13-30, in Fritz Allhoff and Dave Monroe, eds, Food & Philosophy: Eat, Think, and Be Merry, Malden (MA, USA): Blackwell Publishing, 2007

Original abstract:Conventional academic wisdom detaches the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus from the love of eating and drinking that bears his name. He should not be associated with ‘epicureanism’ in the sense of either irreligion and debauchery or, more positively, the display of refined sensibilities. According to principal interpreters (including Bailey, Diano and DeWitt), the hedonism of Epicurus was altogether more abstract.
Yet the popular usage for more than two millennia is closer to the mark. Epicurus’s contemporaries took his to be a meal-centred philosophy, and some notable contributors to the Western tradition have identified with it. The available evidence is that his school, the Garden (meaning kitchen garden), held regular banquets and, according to a neglected ancient passage, kept notes of the food, drink and guests. Although most of his writings are lost, several surviving statements make the ‘pleasure of the stomach’ central. His claim that he could be content with just a good piece of cheese might have come from a modern gourmet. Generally, a meal-centred philosophy, such as Brillat-Savarin’s in the Physiology of Taste, looks like Epicurus’s. Foodies, too, value the material world, the senses, empiricism over ideology, pleasure within limits, friendship and ‘living unknown’.
The modern scholarly purging belongs to the platonic dismissal of eating and drinking, a long-running campaign faced by Epicurus himself. With the restoration of foodism over the past two decades, an ancient social revolution has been resumed.

The ontology of recipes is by and large unexplored. In this paper, I offer a three-steps account. After introducing some key terminology, I distinguish four main options for a theory of recipes: realism, constructivism, existentialism, and the na ̈ıve approach. Hence, I first argue that recipes are social entities whose identity depends (also) on a process of identification, typically performed by means of a performative utterance on the part of a cook (e.g. ‘‘This is fettuccine Alfredo,’’ ‘‘This is falafel’’); thus, the best theoretical framework for a theory of recipes is a constructivist. Secondly, I argue that the identity of recipes can be grasped only by being suitably acquainted with the dishes that instantiate them, because of the impossibility to spell out recipes in details that would match a full-fledged dish; hence, the authority to establish the identity of a recipe rests on a process of apprenticeship. Finally, I argue that the identity of recipes and—vicariously—of the dishes that instantiate them, rest on three factors: the expertise required on the part of the cook; authenticity (in turn based on the fit and approval rate of any purported rendering); and the open-ended character of recipes.

Common wisdom includes expressions such as “there is no accounting for taste'’ that express a widely-accepted subjectivism about taste. We commonly say things like “I can’t stand anything with onions in it'’ or “Oh, I’d never eat sushi,'’ and we accept such from our friends and associates. It is the position of this essay that much of this language is actually quite unacceptable. Without appealing to complete objectivism about taste, I will argue that there are good reasons to think that there will be fairly wide agreement between experienced palates on aesthetic preferences, and that this result will not necessarily agree with unexperienced and unreflective opinions on the matter. Subjectivism about aesthetic preference can be taken to justify the practice of picking eating (after all, who is better to say what I’ll enjoy than me?), while the position of this paper is that such picky eating is a moral failing. To be a picky eater is to have a significant lack of openness to new experiences. It involves an irresponsible level of fallibilism with respect to taste. Never venturing into new aesthetic landscapes leads to a sort of repetitiveness, which in turn leads to a life full of blandness and banality.

Indigenous peoples often embrace different versions of the concept of food sovereignty. Yet some of these concepts are seemingly based on impossible ideals of food self-sufficiency. I will suggest in this essay that for at least some North American Indigenous peoples, food sovereignty movements are not based on such ideals, even though they invoke concepts of cultural revitalization and political sovereignty. Instead, food sovereignty is a strategy of Indigenous resurgence that negotiates structures of settler colonialism that erase the ecological value of certain foods for Indigenous peoples.

The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, vol. 2, 2021, pp. 218-242.
This paper studies how Ishida Sui's Tokyo Ghoul creates its typical sense of "tragedy," by stressing the injustice inherent in every act of eating, and by generalizing the model of nutrition to every ethically laden act. Ishida undermines the Kantian principle that "ought implies can," depicting a twisted world which forces us into wrongdoing: we have to eat, but there is no Other we can eat with moral impunity. Still, his characters provide some ethical models which could be implemented in our everyday food ethics, given that the tragicality spotted by Ishida is not that alien to our food system: food aesthetics, nihilism, amor fati, living with the tragedy, and letting ourselves be eaten are the options Ishida offers to cope with the tragedy, to approach the devastation our need for food brings into the world in a more aware and charitable way. The examination of Ishida's narrative device, conducted with the mediation of thinkers such as Lévinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, and other contemporary moral philosophers, shall turn the question: "how to become worthy of eating?" into the core problem for food ethics.

The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was developing into a radical ontology when he died prematurely in 1961. Merleau-Ponty identified this nascent ontol- ogy as a philosophy of incarnation that carries us beyond entrenched dualisms in philosophical thinking about perception, the body, animality, nature, and God.
What does this ontology have to do with the Catholic language of incarnation, sacrament, and logos on which it draws? In this book, Orion Edgar argues that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is dependent upon a logic of incarnation that finds its roots and fulfillment in theology, and that Merleau-Ponty drew from the Catholic faith of his youth. Merleau-Ponty’s final abandonment of Christianity
was based on an understanding of God that was ultimately Kantian rather than orthodox, and this misunderstanding is shared by many thinkers, both Christian and not. As such, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy suggests a new kind of natural theology, one that grounds an account of God as ipsum esse subsistens in the questions produced by a phenomenological account of the world. This philosophical ontology also offers to Christian theology a route away from dualistic compromises and back to its own deepest insight.

This paper examines and discuss the fundamental issue associated with philosophy of food by looking at what food stands for in some parts of the world and the need for us to look critically into the concept of food by looking at the conceptual clarification of food, what philosophy of food is? The philosophical implications attached to food like the metaphysical and epistemological implications of food along with the economic and political ideology associated with the conception of food in our contemporary world. Then a critical view will be given about the Yoruba perspective on food. Keywords: Philosophy of Food, Conceptual clarification of food, and the philosophical implications of food, economic and political ideology associated with food, Yoruba perspective on food.

What is the philosophy about food?

A good philosophic question can appear from anywhere and anything. Have you ever considered that sitting down at the dinner table or just walk around in the supermarket can be an excellent trigger for a good introduction to a philosophic consideration?

And there you have it – the main philosophy of food.

New omnivorism is a term coined by Andy Lamey to refer to arguments that-paradoxically-our duties towards animals require us to eat some animal products. Lamey's claim to have identified a new, distinctive position in food ethics is problematic, however, for some of his interlocutors are not new (e.g., Leslie Stephen in the nineteenth century), not distinctive (e.g., animal welfarists), and not obviously concerned with eating animals (e.g., plant neurobiologists). It is the aim of this paper to bolster Lamey's argument that he has identified a novel, unified, and intriguing position (or set of positions) in animal ethics and the philosophy of food. We distinguish new omnivorism from four other non-vegan positions and then differentiate three versions of new omnivorism based on the kinds of animal products they propose we consume. We conclude by exploring a range of argumentative strategies that could be deployed in response to the new omnivore.

A short study of philosophical approaches to food, asceticism and pleasure in the ancient world.

Published in J. Wilkins and R. Nadeau (Eds.), 2015, A Companion to Food in the Ancient World, Blackwells.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118878255.ch6/summary

By focusing on the hunger drive and the act of eating as existential dimensions, this essay considers the possibility to extend Paul Ricoeur's thought in the direction of food philosophy. By conceiving his hermeneutic phenomenology as a model for food existentialism, this paper aims to discuss hunger and eating as interrelated aspects of human beings' embodied existence that are involved in the social world. I will begin with a phenomenological description of hunger and eating referring to Ricoeur's analysis of the corporeal involuntary as offering the base features to develop what I will call an "interpretive existential philosophy of being hungry and eating". Then, I will turn to hunger and eating as involved in the real complexity of temporal experience. These reflections will lead to examining the interplay of cosmic time and lived time in relation to hunger and eating, opening up the discussion of the gustatory time through the intersection of the objective time of the clock and the subjective time of the stomach.

"When did the left lose its senses? Ever since the Jacobins saw an act of treason in the sharing of food, the main ingredient of activism has remained a fateful kind of so- berness. According to Mikhail Bakunin, a true revolution- attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion – the revolution." Similarly, in Lenin's favorite novel, Nikolai Chernyshevsky's 'What Is to Be Done?' (1863), the protagonist Lopukhov is presented as a revolutionary hero for giving up sensual pleasure in the name of The Cause. All too often, any allegedly excessive enjoyment of art, music, sex or food has been measured against a standard of pure revolutionary dedication, an austere form of activism that condemns the world of the senses as a ‘bourgeois decadence.’ But the Archive of Leftism still contains traces of its erased desires. A look at kitchens of the 19th century, and today’s social movements will show us that sharing a meal is wholly compatible with the revolution.
[...]
The history of social and political struggles is also a story of communal meals, of micro-politics that transform our desires in a new encounter: from French revolutionary banquets to soup kitchens in the squats of New York, Berlin or Athens. Such encounters, of activists who cook together, eat together and get to know each other as people beyond their mere functions in a socio-economic machinery, can represent considerable acts of contestation in and of themselves. The repression that civic banquets have undergone in the past is one illustration of this capacity. Encounters with strangers around a bowl of soup in the street can serve to interrupt the logic of rule that otherwise structures our lives. In that sense, 19th century American anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews spoke of the dinner party as the model for a new society in the shell of the old, while Hakim Bey regards "banquets" and "old-time libertarian picnics" as "already 'liberated zones' of a sort." Anyone who flatly ridicules communal meals as the self-important activity of privileged foodies does injustice to the specific ways in which the enjoyment of food—and any bodily pleasure more generally– can be transformed and politicized."

Books and articles supporting a local food movement have become commonplace, with popular authors such as Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and Michael Pollan espousing the virtues of eating locally. At the same time, others have critiqued the local food movement as failing to achieve its stated ends or as having negative unintended consequences. In this chapter, we provide a general analysis of local food movements, specifically separating this complex phenomenon into three distinct sub-movements. During this analysis, we pay particular attention to how sub-movements conceptualize people, food, and the roles that individuals, communities, and political institutions play when trying to bring about change. We argue that understanding these sub-movements is necessary for understanding and interacting with both local food’s supporters and its detractors.

Oggetto di questa analisi è il menù degustazione dei ristoranti di fine dining. L’analisi comparativa di diversi menù ci porterà non solo a constatarne la sua funzione simulacrale, ma anche a evidenziare come alcune delle sue specificità di testo più tradizionalmente inteso possano traslare sul pasto, così da permettere il riconoscimento di un vero e proprio status di testo all’esperienza del pasto e agevolarne così l’analisi narrativa.

In this paper, I examine the philosophical foundations of the regulation of edible things with particular emphasis on interpretations of the ontological relationship between the categories of 'food' and 'drugs.' To illustrate the diversity of possible approaches to the regulation of food and drugs and their correlative ontological commitments, I focus on two different examples: the United States Food and Drug Administration's Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) and the development of India's Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy (AYUSH).

In my examination of these two regulatory bodies, my goal is not to provide a universal or absolute answer as to how the food-drug relationship ought to be interpreted or codified within regulatory policy. Rather, I aim to provide support for the following claims: (1) these regulatory policies are undergirded by philosophical assumptions regarding the ontological relationship between the categories of food and drugs, (2) the regulatory structure of the US Food & Drug Administration rests on a dichotomous interpretation of the food-drug relationship, (3) India's Ministry of AYUSH rests on an interpretation of the food-drug relationship that understands the categories of 'food' and 'drugs' as overlapping with one another, and (4) each of these approaches to the regulation of edible things has unique advantages and disadvantages that ought to be recognized and evaluated in developing and revising policy for the regulation of edible things.

In this paper, we discuss the conceptual structure of cocktail recipes. This topic involves engaging questions for philosophers and food theorists due to some peculiar characteristics of cocktail recipes, such as the fact that they are standardised by international associations but, nonetheless, vagueness in some elements of the recipes introduces a degree of variability between cocktails of the same type. Our proposal is that a classical theory of concepts is unable to account for such peculiar features. Thus, only a hybrid theoretical approach, combining definitional and prototypical aspects, can capture how cocktail recipes are usually conceptualised among bartenders and mixologists: while the spirit is usually a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for establishing whether an individual cocktail falls under a specific cocktail concept, all the other ingredients and procedures listed in recipes may vary to a certain extent. In order to assess whether variability in prototy...

Do recipes and their instances, i.e. dishes, have any representational power? This is vexed question in the philosophy of food. In this paper, I take a fresh look on the issue by means of a theory of recipes. I argue that once a certain conception of recipes is in place, complemented by a certain conception of traditions, it becomes plausible that certain recipes, traditional ones, and their instances, traditional dishes, can be said to represent past living conditions. Hence, at some some food items experiences could be said to genuinely possess a representational dimension.

Assumptions regarding the relationship between the ontological categories of "food" and "drug" undergird a substantial amount of academic discourse, and also function as key components in worldviews beyond the academy. Despite the prevalence of these ontological assumptions, little work has been done in foregrounding them to allow for critique and consideration of alternative perspectives. This entry provides an overview of this emerging discussion within food ontology, as well as various perspectives on the food-drug relationship and ethical implications of these views. The term "drug" is employed to refer to a broader category of substances which encompasses "medicine" while also including substances used for recreational, religious, and other non-medical purposes (e.g. drugs in the detrimental/addictive sense).

According to a standard view, architectural works are nothing but material buildings. This paper argues that this is just one of many options, each of which may capture more incisively what architects really produce in different circumstances. Three fundamental splits are examined. First, architectural works can be regarded as either objects or events. Second, they can be understood as mere abstract entities, types, or concrete particulars. Third, they can be identified narrowly or broadly. The resulting combinations are explored and tested against concrete situations. The paper argues that, while adopting the type view in conjunction with the narrow view is simpler when we consider stereotypical, vernacular or modular architecture, when we have to do with more experimental and creative approaches it seems more appropriate to identify the architectural work with a broadly identified concrete particular or, at most, with a broadly identified abstract entity that can hardly coincide with the content of the architectural design. The paper highlights that the same goes—mutatis mutandis—for traditional and stereotypical cooking, on the one hand, and haute cuisine, on the other hand. So the paper is also an investigation of the closeness between architecture and cooking, and of the contingent character of some of their differences.

What is to be done when parents disagree about whether to raise their children as vegans? Three positions have recently emerged. Marcus William Hunt has argued that parents should seek a compromise. I have argued that there should be no compromise on animal rights, but there may be room for compromise over some ‘unusual’ sources of non-vegan, but animal-rights-respecting, food. Carlo Alvaro has argued that both Hunt and I are wrong; veganism is like religion, and there should be no compromise on religion, meaning there should be no compromise on veganism. This means that even my minimal-compromise approach should be rejected. This paper critiques Alvaro’s zero-compromise veganism, demonstrating that his case against Hunt’s position is undermotivated, and his case against my position rests upon misunderstandings. If vegans wish to reject Hunt’s pro-compromise position, they should favour a rightist approach, not Alvaro’s zero-compromise approach.

When investigating the nature of culinary works, it is easy to take for granted that they all share the same ontology. This paper argues that, on the contrary, the ontology of culinary works is really threefold. Some culinary works are edible concrete particulars, or dishes, as many of us may first assume. But others are types, or multiply realisable abstract entities. And, while some of these types are determined by one recipe, others are rather chased after by their indefinitely many recipes. So, there are really three kinds of culinary works; only those belonging to one of the three are edible per se; and, each kind has a very different relationship to recipes. Indeed, it is very doubtful that culinary works consisting in edible concrete particulars are suitable to have one or more recipes: by exploring what are the requirements for being a recipe, the paper also examines under what necessary conditions there is a recipe for preparing a culinary work qua concrete particular.

In this interview, Oscar Farinetti, founder of EATALY, examines Italian excellence in the agribusiness. He discusses how the introduction of the wide-ranging geographical indication “Italia” and a school reform could promote Made in Italy and, more in general, the country’s welfare.

The main aim of this article lies in the comparison of ancient cosmico-natural elements from the Vedic period with their counterparts in the Presocratics, with a focus on food, air, water and fire. By way of an introduction to the ancient elemental world, we first present the concept of food (anna) as an idiosyncratic Vedic teaching of the ancient elements. This is followed by our first comparison-of Raikva's natural philosophy of Vāyu/ prāṇa with Anaximenes's pneûma/aér teaching in the broader context of both the Vedic and Presocratic teachings on the role of air/breath. Secondly, water as brought to us in pañcāgnividyā teaching from Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and Chāndogya Upaniṣad is compared to the teaching of the Greek natural philosopher Thales. Finally, the teaching on fire as heat being present in all beings (agni vaiśvānara) and in relation to cosmic teachings on fire in the ancient Vedic world are compared to Heraclitus' philosophy of fire as an element. Additionally, this article also presents a survey and analysis of some of the key representatives of comparative and intercultural philosophy dealing with the elemental and natural philosophy of ancient India and Greece.

Social categories associated to discrimination have recently become a fertile ground for (analytic) linguistic philosophical reflection because they are strongly associated with the use of human predicates. If social constructionists are right (as characterised in the previous two chapters), how we use social predicates is part of what the correspondign categories are. Discrimination is something we do with words (but not only something we do with words). The study of tis sort of bad words are also of ontological significance for it provides one of the most common arguments for eliminativism.

Our complicated global system of agricultural production and distribution has already made some people vulnerable to hunger and, when disrupted by climate change, may exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and create new ones. Such vulnerability creates an ethical demand, the enormity of which might seem impossible to address given how widely it expands our moral community. However, an adequate conception of vulnerability such as Florencia Luna's layers of vulnerability, coupled with an adequate conception of obligation such as Onora O'Neill's, makes it possible to address even this most transnational and cosmopolitan of demands.  Some people will become hungry because of climate change. It is up to us to determine how many, and how hungry, by addressing layers of vulnerability where we are capable and where we are culpable.