Food and Foods. Toward a Definition
Abstract
When I’m hungry, I try to seek some food, namely an object that is edible and that can feed me and preferably it has to be tasty. It seems a very easy task to find it for there is an alleged natural boundary between what counts as food and what does not. I can naturally pinpoint that boundary. Nevertheless, at a closer inspection, such boundary turns out to be suspicious: a roasted human being is both edible and nutritious, and someone may even find it tasty, and yet it can be hardly considered as food. Likewise, a rotten food item is neither edible, nor nutritious and however it can be sometimes considered as food, such as marcescent cheese. Our aim in this paper is to nail down the different conceptions which regulate our conception of what is a food and then come up with a proper definition. We set forth four different stances: a biological one, i.e., food is what holds certain natural properties, an individual one, i.e., food is what can be eaten by at least one person, an authority one, i.e., food is what is considered so by an authority, and a social one. i.e., food is what is institutionally recognized as food.
References
Adams, C.J. (1990), The Sexual Politics of Meat. A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory of Meat, Continuum, New York-London 2010.
Adams, M. (2018), «The Aesthetic Value of Local Food», The Monist, 101, pp. 324-339.
Ankeney, R. A. (2016), «Inviting Everyone to the Table: Strategies for More Effective and Legitimate Food Policy via Deliberative Approaches», Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 47, n. 1, pp. 10-24.
Barnhill, A., King, K.F., Kass, N., Faden, R. (2014), «The Value of Unhealthy Eating and the Ethics of Healthy Eating Policy», Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Vol. 24, n. 3, pp. 187-217.
Belasco, W. (2008), Food. The Key Concepts, Berg, Oxford.
Borghini, A., Piras, N., Serini, B. (2020), «Ontological Framework for Food Utopias», Rivista di Estetica, 3.
Comstock, G. (2012), Ethics and Genetically Modified Food, in Kaplan D.M. (ed.), The Philosophy of Food, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Corrie, E.N. (2012), Food and Religion, in Pilcher, J.M. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Food History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 410-428.
Cosmeyer, K. (1999), Making Sense of Taste. Food and Philosophy, Cornell University Press, Itaha and London.
Fischler, C. (1988), «Food, Self, and Identity», Social Science Information, 27, pp. 275-293.
Højlund, S. (2015), «Taste as a Social Sense: Rethinking Taste as a Social Activity», Flavour, Vol. 4, n. 6.
Korthals, M. (2017), «Ethics of Dietary Guidelines: Nutrients, Processes and Meals», Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Vol. 30, N. 3, pp. 413-421.
Mendelson-Forman, J, Chapple-Sokol, S., (2014) «Conflict Cuisine: Teaching War through Washington’s Ethnic Restaurant Scene», Public Diplomacy Magazine, Vol. 11, pp. 21-26.
Marrone, G. (2016), Semiotica del gusto. Linguaggi della cucina, del cibo della tavola, Mimesis, Milano-Udine.
Montanari, M. (2006), Food Is Culture, Columbia University Press, New York.
Pogge, T. (2016), «The Hunger Games», Food Ethics, Vol. 1, n. 1, pp. 9-27.
Pollan, M. (2006), The Omnivore’s Dilemma. A Natural History of Four Meals, Penguin, New York.
Pollan, M. (2013), Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Penguin, New York.
Searle, J. (2007), Social Ontology and the Philosophy of Society, in Margolis, E., Laurence, S. (eds.), Creations of the Mind. Theories of Artifacts and Their Representation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 3-18.
Spence, C. (2017), Gastrophysics. The New Science of Eating, Penguin, New York.
Stinson, S. (1992), «Nutritional Adaptation», Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 21, pp. 143-170.
Telfer, E. (1996), Food for Thought. Philosophy and Food, Routledge, New York and London.
Thompson, P.B. (2015), From Field to Fork. Food Ethics for Everyone, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Works published in RIFL are released under Creative Commons Licence:Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
