Nicola Piras

This chapter surveys the most philosophically pressing issues associated with food and climate change. It highlights the main scholarly accomplishments and suggests avenues for further research, drawing from a cross-disciplinary body of literature as well as from recent scholarship in philosophy of food. The discussion follows two intertwined yet distinct directions of investigation: how climate change impacts food; and how the production, distribution, and consumption of food affect climate patterns. More specifically, section “Introduction” offers an introduction to the study of food and climate change in a philosophical perspective; section “Climate Change and the Future of Food: Three Frameworks” showcases three intuitive frameworks that form the backdrops of current discourses about the future of food in light of climate change; section “The Impact of Climate Change on Food: a Philosophical Analysis” discusses the influence of climate change on humans through three case studies: geographical indications, global hunger, and food biodiversity finally, section “The Impact of Food on Climate Change: a Philosophical Analysis” deals with the influence of our practices of food production and consumption on climate change by looking at three case studies: food waste, sustainable diets, and food sovereignty.

In this paper, we establish gastrospaces as a subject of philosophical inquiry and an item for policy agendas. We first explain their political value, as key sites where members of liberal democratic societies can develop the capacity for a sense of justice and the capacity to form, revise, and pursue a conception of the good. Integrating political philosophy with analytic ontology, we then unfold a theoretical framework for gastrospaces: first, we show the limits of the concept of “third place;” second, we lay out the foundations for an ontological model of gastrospaces; third, we introduce five features of gastrospaces that connect their ontology with their political value and with the realization of justice goals. We conclude by briefly illustrating three potential levels of intervention concerning the design, use, and modification of gastrospaces: institutions, keepers, and users.

In this paper we provide a framework for studying the ways in which food endures the passage of time. Central to our inquiry is the following Duration Question: when is it that the predicate-schema “Is an X-Food,” where “X-Food” stands for a certain type of food (e.g., Champagne, yoghurt) ceases to apply to an entity? We show that the answer depends on two independent theoretical aspects: the underlying conception of food and the kinds of change that a specific food can undergo. We then argue that specific answers to the duration question should take the form of conceptual rethinking among different stakeholders (e.g., producers, consumers, institutions), where philosophers would feature among the experts guiding the negotiation.

Eating local food has become a mainstream proxy for virtue and a reliable model of sustainable dieting. It suffers, nonetheless, from genuine criticisms and limitations. In this paper, we suggest theoretical amendments to reorient the local food movement and turn eating local into a robust concept—comprehensive, coherent, and inclusive, affording a firm grip over structural aspects of the food chain. We develop our argument in three parts. The first contends that ‘local’ can be said of lots of entities (e.g. whole or multi-ingredient foods, recipes, menus) and that its meaning varies depending on which entities are under consideration. The second examines three dimensions of being local: the distance from the place of production; the geographical origins; the social links to consumers and producers. The third presents our robust conception of eating local, grounded on a more realistic model that accommodates for heterogeneous and complex actors.

Our aim in this paper is to employ conceptual negotiation to inform a method of rethinking defective food concepts, that is concepts that fail to suitably represent a certain food-related domain or that offer representations that run counter to the interests of their users. We begin by sorting out four dimensions of a food concept: the data upon which it rests and the methodology by which those data are gathered; the ontology that sustains it; the social acts that serve to negotiate and establish the concept; and the aims and values that it fosters. We then discuss the conditions that make a food concept defective, pointing out four types of defects—fragility, polarization, incoherence, and schizophrenia—which we illustrate by means of two specific examples: local food and healthy food.

World food production is facing exorbitant challenges like climate change, use of resources, population growth, and dietary changes. These, in turn, raise major ethical and political questions, such as how to uphold the right to adequate nutrition, or the right to enact a gastronomic culture and to preserve the conditions to do so. Proposals for utopic solutions vary from vertical farming and lab meat to diets filled with the most fanciful insects and seaweeds. Common to all proposals is a polarized understanding of food and diets, famously captured by Warren Belasco in the contraposition between technological fixes and anthropological fixes. According to the first, technology will deliver clean, just, pleasurable, affordable food; future generations will not need to adjust much of their dietary cultures. According to the second, future generations should dramatically change their dietary habits (what they eat and how they eat it) to achieve a sustainable diet. The two fixes found remarkably distinct perspectives over dietary politics and the ethics of food production and consumption. In this paper we argue that such polarized thinking rests on a misrepresentation of the ontological status of food, which in turn affects the underlying ethical and political issues. Food is a socially constructed object that draws in specific ways on habits, norms, traditions, geographical, and climatic conditions. Although this thesis seems somewhat obvious, its consequences on the ethical and political perspectives on the future of food have not been derived properly. After introducing the issue at stake (¤1), we point out the polarities that characterize food utopias (¤2) and their ontological faults (¤3). We hence suggest that a socio-ontological analysis of food can better deliver the principles for a foundation of food utopias (¤4).

Contemporary philosophers have studied food and its consumption from several disciplinary perspectives, including normative ethics, bioethics, environmental ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and aesthetics. Many questions remain, however, underexplored or unaddressed. It is in the spirit of contributing to fill in these scholarly gaps that we designed the current issue, which represents the first collection of papers dedicated to food from a perspective of analytic metaphysics. Before presenting the five papers published in this issue, we shall briefly frame the current research on food linked to analytic metaphysics and point out future directions of research in this area. We begin with the most basic interroga- tive, namely What is food?, and then offer three illustrations of more specific re- search questions. We hope these examples suffice to demonstrate that food is a fertile terrain of inquiry for analytic metaphysics and that it deserves to be devel- oped.

Liberal democracies across the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing measures that significantly curtail the rights and liberties of individual citizens. These measures must receive public justification in order to be politically legitimate. By combining analytical political philosophy with ontology in an original way, in this article we argue that liberal democratic governments have so far failed to adequately justify these measures, since they have not systematically targeted the scholarly study of COVID-19 in everyday environments, consequently implementing rules that are epistemically unsound and not publicly justified, at least not fully.

In this paper we discuss the role that individual and collective acts of interpretation play in shaping a metaphysics of food. Our analysis moves from David Kaplan’s recent contention that food is always open to interpretation, and substantially expands its theoretical underpinnings by drawing on recent scholarship on food and social ontology. After setting up the terms of the discussion (§1), we suggest (§2) that the contention can be read subjectively or structurally, and that the latter can be given three sub-readings. We then lay out (§3) three case studies that, we submit, any viable theory of a metaphysics of food should be able to account for. We show that one structural reading—based on the idea of negotiation—swiftly accommodates for the three case studies. We thus conclude that this reading is most promising for charting a metaphysics of food.

This paper explores the Persistence Question about cities, that is, what is necessary and sufficient for two cities existing at different times to be numerically identical. We first show that we can possibly put an end to the existence of a city in a number of ways other than by physically destroying it, which reveals the metaphysics of cities to be partly different from that of ordinary objects. Then we focus in particular on the commonly perceived vulnerability of cities to imaginary relocation; and we make the hypothesis that cities do have among their essential properties that of being surrounded by a specific geographical context. Finally we investigate the pos- sibility that a city can survive relocation in virtue of the capacity of its geographical context to survive it in the first place. We suggest that city contexts may not be essentially context-dependent in turn, and outline a possible description of the cri- teria for their persistence over time.

Boundaries are the outermost parts of objects, with a twofold function: dividing objects from their environment and allowing objects to touch each other. The task of this paper is to classify and describe the human dependent boundaries, i.e., the so-called fiat boundaries, on the basis of the seminal work by Smith and Varzi. Roughly, a fiat boundary is a marker of discontinuity between two or more objects which relies on a human function assignment, usually called ‘fiat act’. In what follow I outline the different ways in which human beings make fiat boundaries out of nature. Along the way I shall give evidence that a theory of fiat boundaries can be useful to take up as a starting point for doing metaphysics and for giving an account of the ontology of both the material and the social world. The chief goal is to shed light on how some objects depend upon human beings: either in a deliberative or non-deliberative way; either a priori or a posteriori; by means of individual or collective act; by modal strength, namely possible and necessary boundaries.

The concept of wild food does not play a significant role in contemporary nutritional science and it is seldom regarded as a salient feature within standard dietary guidelines. The knowledge systems of wild edible taxa are indeed at risk of disappearing. However, recent scholarship in ethnobotany, field biology, and philosophy demonstrated the crucial role of wild foods for food biodiversity and food security. The knowledge of how to use and consume wild foods is not only a means to deliver high-end culinary offerings, but also a way to foster alternative models of consumption. Our aim in this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for wild foods, which can account for diversified wild food ontologies. In the first section of the paper, we survey the main conception of wild foods provided in the literature, what we call the Nature View. We argue that this view falls short of capturing characteristics that are core to a sound account of wilderness in a culinary sense. In the second part of the paper, we provide the foundation for an improved model of wild food, which can countenance multiple dimensions and degrees connoting wilderness in the culinary world. In the third part of the paper we argue that thanks to a more nuanced ontological analysis, the gradient framework can serve ethnobiologists, philosophers, scientists, and policymakers to represent and negotiate theoretical conflicts on the nature of wild food.