Philosophy of Food

Philosophy Here & Now! Symposium #1
Philosophy of Food

June 7-8-9, 2023

Ankara University, Faculty of Languages, History and Geography

Ankara, Turkey

We have to eat to survive. This necessity is common to all human beings, in fact, to all living things. We eat multiple times a day, gobble up a snack when we do not have enough time, or force down whatever is on the table if we lose our appetite. Dietitians advise in unison that we should eat well, but we cannot agree on a single menu when it comes to specifying what eating well involves. There are dozens of differences at stake that cannot be reduced to purely individual taste: we eat or avoid certain foods for traditional, cultural, moral reasons or sometimes discard them as inedible because of religious taboos. How the food looks and how it is presented might whet our appetite or sicken us. Sometimes it is tastier to talk about food or photograph it than to eat it. 

Food has been an essential food for thought for centuries. From the discussion of the ideal diet in the second book of Plato’s Republic to the Stoics, then to Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, and Mill to more recent philosophers such as Singer, Regan, Derrida, Latour, Diamond, and Haraway, the complicated relationship between food and the human has been formulated time and again. Ethical and political debates around the significance of animal rights or animal welfare for agricultural and husbandry practices and the possibility of justice in food production and distribution has gained a new momentum since the 1970s. The questioning of the anthropocentric worldview has disrupted the habit of regarding various non-human animals as a natural source of food and highlighted the environmental cost of the food industry. To crown it all, as much as the human species faces the moral and geological costs of the food industry globally, the problem of inequality in access to food products seems only to worsen with time. Although recent technological developments in food production promise partial solutions to existing problems, they also elicit many new ethical, cultural, and religious complications. After all, changing what we eat means redefining who we are. In response to all of these developments, “philosophy of food” has begun to institutionalize as a new field of study, systematically scrutinizing the problems associated with food and eating while traversing different branches of philosophy.

Posing a bundle of philosophical problems with interwoven ethical, political, environmental, social, cultural, and aesthetic layers, food is hard to swallow. With the object of exploring these intricate philosophical problems in depth, we are looking forward to receiving your contributions that preferably put in dialogue the perspectives of natural and engineering sciences with those of philosophy and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The first of the annual Philosophy Here & Now! Symposium will take place in Ankara, Türkiye on July 7–9th, 2023 with the collaboration of the Department of Philosophy at Ankara University and SANART Association of Aesthetics and Visual Culture, under the patronage of International Association for Aesthetics. The symposium is supported by Posseible: Journal of Philosophy.