In this paper we present philosophical methods and perspectives that we designed to improve extant food ontologies or to develop future ones. The scope of our inquiry covers the space where folk food ontologies inspired by common sense interact with scientific ones in shaping individual and collective representation of the food domain and in which the defectiveness of food concepts-i.e., their failure in providing proper representations-reveals a plural, sometimes conflicting, ontological layout. To solve such conflicts and clarify those representations, we build conceptual frameworks that extend (and sometimes also revise) everyday usage and practices. Food ontology, in this sense, should be understood as the study of everyday, legal, and scientific taxonomies and more or less formal classificatory practices, in order to facilitate the negotiation among diferent positions. In this paper we show our approach to conceptual clarification of the food domain by ofering three examples of philosophical analysis, placed at diferent levels of generality: “what is food?”; the four dimensions of food concepts; the analysis of “eating local.”
Recent years saw a growing interest in the philosophy of food as witnessed by an increasing
upto-date literature [
To begin with, we should place our approach methodologically. The scope of our inquiry
covers the space where folk food ontologies inspired by common sense interact with scientific
ones in shaping individual and collective representation of the food domain. We start with
everyday situations (including those related to legal and normative aspects) in which the
defectiveness of food concepts—i.e., their failure in providing proper representations—reveals a
plural, sometimes conflicting, ontological layout. For instance, what is wild food depends on
how we classify foods and, often, diferent perspectives, say a western approach to wilderness
as opposed to an indigenous one, end up in a dispute or, when awkwardly combined, in
misrepresentations [
Our approach crucially relies on the conceptual tools proper of social ontology [
Why is it important to understand, reveal, and build food ontologies? Given a domain,
profiling possible scenarios and their interconnected features in a systematic fashion, bringing
to light the tangled web of relations between material objects, concepts, and agents involved in
our everyday life provides empowering knowledge; can reveal hidden injustices (e.g., gendered
foods); a better foundation for institutional acts (e.g., geographical indications [
Drawing on this research field, our philosophical work is about building conceptual tools for rethinking, ameliorating and negotiating food concepts. In this paper we show our approach to the task of conceptual clarification of the food domain by ofering three examples of philosophical analysis, placed at diferent levels of generality. It is worth noting that the paper does not assume a specific minimal definition of what is food nor it focuses on a specific food concept or term (e.g., 24-hour dietary recall). Instead, the paper aims at providing a brief guide to the core philosophical tools for addressing food definitory issues in the widest variety of contexts.
The first level of analysis is about the “what is food?” question and the ontological mapping we are able to build assessing the diferent answers to it. The second concerns the four dimensions of food concepts involved in building or negotiating those concepts, especially when they fail to suitably represent a food-related domain or ofer representations that run counter to the interests of their users, taken individually or collectively. The third is an example of how to create a conceptual framework for a specific food concept: we are presenting our analysis for “eating local.”
Answering the question “what is food?” is a complex issue which requires a specific methodology
interlocked with biology, medicine, anthropology, history, cultural and food studies, and other
disciplines. Diferent answers to such a question can correspond to diferent cultures (e.g., horse
meat is food only for some cultures), domains of inquiry (e.g., from a microbiological standpoint
each nutritious item may be a food, while a cultural approach could be narrower), or existential
conditions (e.g., a lactose intolerant may regard milk as non-food). All these definitions of
food may entertain a variety of links: sharing similar “ingredients” across diferent contexts
while difering in some other respects. For instance, they may overlap (e.g., a medical definition
of food shares a number of conceptual parts with a biological one as long as both rely on a
biochemical analysis of food); they may have a dependence relation (e.g., according to [
Each of these definitions, cultures, and domains of inquiry has its own food ontology, populated by a variety of categories: physical objects (e.g., dishes, meals), artifacts (e.g., recipes, restaurants), events (e.g., cooking, farming), conditions (e.g., hunger, appetite), processes (e.g., metabolism, foraging), perceptual states (e.g., bitter food, excellent food). These material, conceptual, and social aspects of ontologies are inextricably entrenched in everyday life.
With this in mind, the research that we have carried out so far focuses on the development
of a systematic model representing the very entities we consume. In [
In [
Siding with any of these opposing categories—although seemingly justifiable—yields a
misleading picture of it. We argued in [23] that food is a sui generis social entity and we try to
properly derive the ontological consequences of such a thesis and their relevance for the research
and implementation of efective solutions for a sustainable food future. In [
This interpretative stance on the ontological status of food paves the way for a mapping work of the main food ontologies, setting them according to their answers. We think that the creation of an inventory of the ontological inventories—following the renowned Quinean metaphor [24]—may be a useful tool for philosophers who want to spell out what are the main conceptualizations of food.
In [
For instance, a diet based on nutritional intake typically rests on nutritional science. The entities posited (i.e., nutrients) crucially depend on the experimental method, which is also used to link food components with human metabolism. This ontology is artlessly undertaken with a realistic or naturalistic stance and finds its place at quadrant 3. By contrast, consider a classic approach of structuralist anthropologists, that sees food as a socially constructed entity to the extent that anything can turn into food, if a community believes that it is such. This ontology would be placed in quadrant 2, since its domain is delivered by common sense and it is taken as constructed or relative to some situated beliefs. There are, of course, many diferent ways to fill each of the quadrants and many nuanced positions which sit in diferent positions between the four quadrants.
Diferent ontological commitments about food can be more or less explicitly expressed. One way to detect them is by looking at the food concepts in use in a certain context. However, our food concepts are complex representational devices whose ontology accounts for only one of their multifarious dimensions, which are suggested by a conceptual analysis of the diferent sorts of propositions that govern our systems for representation (e.g., desires, beliefs, labels): (1) propositions on data and empirical observations (e.g., biochemical composition, nutritional intake, biological function); (2) propositions that depend upon ontological categories imposed by cognitive and semantic constraints (e.g., being meat, vegetable or a fruit); (3) speech acts that “make things with words” [25] in a way that is peculiar to food domain (e.g., laws, consortia, health requirements); (4) and propositions that express value judgments (e.g., the identification of local or healthy food with valuable entities).
These four kinds of propositions underlie four diferent dimensions of our food concepts
which, jointly taken, compose their meanings and guide their uses [
1. Data and methodologies, that establish the empirical validity of a food concept. Thus, in a given context of agency, we may primarily rely on empirical data—from microbiological to evolutionary, from nutritional to metabolic, gathered following science-specific methodologies. 2. Ontological categories, through which we impose certain structures onto our experiences, as when we regard a certain food (e.g., a croissant with a cappuccino) as a breakfast item. Such categories are not arbitrarily introduced nor are they full fledged parts of the structure of reality: they rather emerge from the interplay between reality, culture, cognition, and semantics. 3. Fiat acts, that ground the existence of the concept in specific actors and their agencies, such as the decision of a committee of experts to regard a certain food as a threat for a certain people. 4. Aims and Values, as food is connected to identity, emotions, life plans, heritage, and many other value-laden domains of life.
If a food concept provides a satisfactory account for all the four dimensions, it can successfully represent a region of the food domain (at least under a certain perspective). As stressed in §2 with respect to the concept “food”, each specific portion of the food domain is best represented when concepts are properly structured along the four dimensions. One important exercise, when assessing the ability of a food concept to grasp the reality that it is trying to describe, is to make the boundaries of the target domain clear: food concepts span from describing overarching, folk, commonsensical domains to technical, sector- or culture-specific ones, and each domain requires diferent representations. However, given the fluid and complex nature of the subject-matter—spanning from practice to theory, across disciplines, cultures and ecosystems—overlappings, similarities and linkages between food concepts are the norm. Identifying the content of the four dimension of two or more connected concepts represent the ifrst step of a comparative conceptual work.
A food concept, however, may fail to provide a fair representation by filling with wrong or incomplete contents one or more dimensions, e.g., if it fosters undesirable consequences for the agents involved in their usage, then it has provided undesired content for 4. Hence, a food concept may be defective.
We pinpoint four types of defects that may afect a food concept that—we contend—cover the most common sources of conceptual failures when it comes to food, though of course they do not pretend to exhaust all the possible conceptual failures that have and will emerge in food cultures. They typically arise when diferent stakeholders buy into diferent and conflated versions of the same concept, without negotiating a common content and structure for the four dimensions: 1. Fragility, that occurs when a concept does not deliver definite or informative contents with respect to the four dimensions. A fragile concept may fail to include suficient information for representing what it is supposed to refer to, or feasible indications for the aims it strives for. 2. Polarization, that occurs when the concept can stand a plurality of mutually inconsistent interpretations leading up to some clashes (e.g. over ethical, political, or cultural values). 3. Incoherence, that occurs when there is a mismatch between the first three dimensions of the concept and its aims. 4. Schizophrenia, that occurs when there is a combined endorsement of dimensions pertaining to diferent instantiations of a concept. A schizophrenic concept represents disparate non-mutually related states of afairs, resulting in being practically useless since it is unclear what are its contents and aims.
An illustration of the four defects can be ofered by the case of the concept of healthy food
and its diferent instantiations. As we showed in [
For the sake of brevity we are exposing here just a few examples of how conceptual failure can take place, proceeding from the highest level of the conceptual structure to the lowest. More than one type of defectiveness can be found at each level, and each of the four instantiations of the concept of healthy food we analyzed is afected by more than one defect.
At the highest level, the conceptual failure occurs between diferent instantiations of the given concept. Take for instance the nutritionism take and the nutritional epigenetic take: both instantiations of healthy food focus on molecular interaction, however they endorse two polarized concepts of metabolism and the human body. Clinical research targeting nutritionrelated disease, for instance, would likely encounter some obstacles if both concepts are at play simultaneously within the research teams (polarization). Schizophrenia occurs usually at this level, when contents of dimensions pertaining to diferent instantiations of healthy food are brought up together, ending up mixing them in a concept that is not well-integrated. A good example is ofered by many industrial products available in supermarkets, the packaging of which is often covered by several tags endorsing diferent take on what is healthy, mixing values, ontologies, data from diferent (and sometimes not compatible) versions of the concept.
At an intermediate level, diferent dimensions of a single version of a concept may conflict among each other. The “healthy food as naturalness” instantiation is afected by fragility through all the dimensions, given to the diversity of meanings that could be attributed to “naturalness”. The equation between healthy food and natural food never comes with an explicit reference to the kind of un/naturalness involved— there are multiple meanings of naturalness connected to the healthiness of food, e.g., “natural” as “familiar,” “natural” as “authentic,” “natural” as “what satisfies needs,” “natural” as “lacking human influence” [ 27]—making this conception of healthy food particularly problematic at its internal level. Both data and ontology are indeed dependent on the kind of naturalness taken into consideration: for “natural” as “customary,” for instance, cultural norms would be the data, and the food ontology will be ethnocentric (e.g., insects would not count as healthy food for individuals of a certain culture, because they are considered unnatural/not familiar). The nutritionism take ofers instead a good example of incoherence: although its aim is health the reductionist account of food implied in the concept helps frame human physiology in manageable terms, facilitating its alignment with the dominant agrifood industry. For this reason, the efectiveness of nutritionism for health has been largely disputed. In this case, the declared aim—health— is in conflict with the other dimensions of the concepts.
At the lowest level, the conceptual work concerns one specific dimension. The data and methodologies dimension of the ecological take on healthy food, for instance, is at risk of fragility: many diferent disciplines converge in the nutritional ecology approach, with their own methods, taxa, and concepts. Such interdisciplinarity is a resource only when a methodological integration is at play, granting a coherent and shared framework.
Our approach can be illustrated by showing how to provide a conceptual map of a specific food concept. Conceptual maps seem indeed a promising tool for, first, addressing the challenge of integrating the vast and varied knowledge about food that scholars and practitioners have impressively recorded in recent years and, second, negotiating diferent political, ideological, and philosophical perspectives over the same concept. The map can be also used to track down the similarities and the inconsistencies of highly detailed and yet similar definitions in order to check whether they share the same ontology or not (e.g., the definitions of food endorsed by two diferent healthy diets—e.g., one based on the presence of certain nutrients and one based on the functional role of the items—may be diferent and yet their ontologies may be extensionally equal).
In [28] we analysed the concept of “eating local,” an expression that, used to convey the concepts of local food and locavore diet, has by now become mainstream. Despite their popularity, these concepts are still far from clear in public discourses as well as in the works of scholars. Even trivial questions can raise doubts over their meaning and cast uncertainty on what is required of a well-intentioned producer or consumer.
Our primary goal is therefore to suggest theoretical amendments to the defectiveness of the concept of eating local and turn it into a robust concept. That is, a concept apt to be comprehensive, coherent, and inclusive, afording a firm grip over structural aspects of the food chain and grounded in way able to accommodate for heterogeneous and complex actors. The ifrst problems of the concept of “local food” can be tracked down in the wide range of entities that can be local. In fact, “local” can be said of lots of entities (e.g. whole or multi-ingredient foods, recipes, menus, diets) and that its meaning varies depending on which entities are under consideration. This variety of entities when referred to just one concept, if not well mapped and framed, can elicit at least three problems. First, the problem of proliferation, i.e. the same food entity in diferent contexts can be linked to (too) many places (e.g., a salad may be associated with all the places corresponding to its ingredients). Second, the problem of selectivity, i.e. depending on the context, only some of the foods we consume are relevant to assess the localness of our dining experience (e.g., is the origin of the salt relevant in assessing whether, say, a prosciutto is local?). Third, the problem of independence, i.e. within the same context, the local character of diferent kinds of (possibly related) food entities can be assessed independently from each other (e.g., Swiss chocolate seems to be a local food in Switzerland even if cocoa beans originate from South America).
The first step to provide a robust concept of local food is then to take these problems at face value, clearly indicating how the concept of local food should be used in diferent contexts, which may include diferent local food items.
In fact, diferent contexts may need a diferent concept of local food and at least three diferent conceptual dimensions may be nailed down: (1) the Relative Spatial Dimension (i.e., being local depends on the distance from between the place of production and the place of consumption); (2) the Absolute Spatial Dimension (i.e., being local depends on the geographical origins); (3) the Social Dimension (i.e., being local depends on the social links between consumers and producers). All the three dimensions sufer from what we regard as decisive criticisms [28].
In order to tackle these problems, we propose a positive ontological account of the concept “eating local,” which should fulfill four desiderata: gradability (that allows to say that some local foods are more local than others avoiding all-or-nothing categories), width (encompassing as many types of food entities as possible), negotiability (i.e., what counts as local should emerge in each instance from a negotiation of values, in the light of the ontological mapping of the entities to which they applies), and fallibility (the principles on which a conception of local food is based should be assessable in a public and nonpartisan way, on empirical and theoretical grounds).
It should be clear that how the concept of eating local should abide by the four requirements depends on the specific context of use as well as the goals it aims to reach and the value (ethical, political, aesthetical) it is meant to promote.
The conceptual work on eating local is part of a more general philosophical endeavour oriented towards the clarification as well as the revision of what is what makes up the food domain, what kind of relations occurs within it, and what kind of conceptual tools might be useful to make it more comprehensive, transparent and manageable.
While we took here eating local as representative of our work, as Culinary Mind we
investigated many other concepts related to the food domain and the conundrums they come up
with, e.g., a viable ontology of wild food which took into consideration indigenous knowledge
alongside scientific inquiry [
Given the endless number of contemporary challenges and complexities related to food production, consumption and representation, we aim at extending our research to other issues. Here below we briefly go through some topics that we regard as crucial part of the food domain, in need for some conceptual work: (1) the concept of “food system” and the concept of “food waste”; (2) the integration of the research on microbiome with other existing food ontologies, e.g. ontology of recipes or of healthy food; (3) the study of food spaces, from paradigmatic establishment like restaurant to broader classes like “third spaces.”
This research was funded by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan under the Project “Department of Excellence 2018-2022” awarded by the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR). [23] A. Borghini, N. Piras, B. Serini, Ontological Frameworks for Food Utopias, Rivista di
Estetica 1 (2020) 120–142. doi:https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.7375. [24] W. V. O. Quine, On What There Is, Review of Metaphysics 2 (1948) 21–38.
doi:revmetaph19482115, publisher: Philosophy Education Society. [25] B. Smith, Fiat Objects, Topoi 20 (2001) 131–148. doi:10.1023/A:1017948522031. [26] G. Scrinis, Nutritionism: The Science and Politics of Dietary Advice, Columbia University
Press, 2013. [27] H. Siipi, Dimensions of Naturalness, Ethics & the Environment 13 (2008) 71–103. doi:10.
1353/een.0.0001. [28] A. Borghini, N. Piras, B. Serini, Eating Local. A Philosophical Toolbox, The Philosophical
Quarterly. (2021). doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqab039. [29] A. Borghini, Metaphysics of Natural Food, in: P. B. Thompson, D. M. Kaplan (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, Springer, Dordrecht, 2014, pp. 1378–1381. URL: https: //doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0929-4_306. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-0929-4_306. [30] A. Borghini, Hunger, in: P. B. Thompson, D. M. Kaplan (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Food and
Agricultural Ethics, Springer, Dordrecht, 2017, pp. 1560–1567. [31] A. Borghini, What Is a Recipe?, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28 (2015) 719–738. doi:10.1007/s10806-015-9556-9, publisher: Springer Verlag. [32] P. Engisch, Recipes, Tradition, and Representation, in: A. Borghini, P. Engisch (Eds.), A Philosophy of Recipes. Making, Experiencing, and Valuing, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.