Philosophy has only recently begun the formal study of food, although philosophers have been discussing food since Plato. The philosophical study of food can be understood to take up four separate but related tasks ranging from least to most transformative. They are: (1) applying received philosophical categories to new or uncustomary topics in food; (2) reconceptualizing an existing philosophical discussion as a discussion in the philosophy of food; (3) reclaiming or recovering previous philosophical work relevant to the study of food; and (4) recasting familiar philosophical problems by way of analyses of food, thereby revealing new categories of philosophical understanding.
Philosophy has come to the food studies table rather more reluctantly than some other humanities disciplines. But while it has been slow to embrace the formal study of food, Western philosophy has always been concerned, in peripheral ways, with matters of eating and drinking. From Plato to Hume to Nietzsche, philosophers have reflected upon humans’ relationships to food and drink, even if only to dismiss these concerns as inconsequential or base. As contemporary philosophers have begun to make food a topic of serious and concentrated study, they have also begun to revisit these earlier thinkers, in order to ask: how does our understanding of historic philosophers deepen when we consider their discussions of food as something more or other than casually chosen illustrations, examples and metaphors? Some contemporary philosophers of food believe that such work can fundamentally reshape the discipline; that beginning philosophy with questions about humans’ relations to food not only will bring us to new understandings of historic figures, but also will invite us to reconsider the most fundamental, perennial problems of philosophy. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to know? What are our obligations to others? If we begin with the unavoidable fact of our being as eaters, and not just as thinkers, such fundamental rethinking inevitably follows.
Contemporary philosophers have come to study food for reasons both internal and external to the discipline. Internally, questions of humans’ relations to food have arisen quite naturally, even necessarily, for theorists challenging a certain historical prejudice against the body, practice, ordinary everydayness, and temporality. It has come to seem odd, even unthinkable, that philosophy—the discipline that, more than any other, concerns itself with questions of meaning and value in human life—would be silent about food, a primary source of meaning and value. Philosophers working in this framework have, for instance, explored the aesthetic significance of food—showing how food reveals the impoverishment of the notion of “art,” and the need for a more expansive definition of “the aesthetic” (see Korsmeyer, 1999). Others have used the model of the parasite (the “co-eater” or “table mate”) to reconceptualize a fundamental ontological concept: substance (see Serres, 2007; Boisvert, Parasite). Still others have found in recipes an instance of theory making that resists arbitrary and invidious distinctions between reason and emotion, theory and practice (see, e.g., Heldke, “Recipes”). And others, acknowledging the presence of culture in agriculture, have looked to it as a way to revisit notions of community (see, e.g., Thompson 2010, 2007, 1994; Kirschenmann 2010).
One significant external reason for the rise in philosophical interest in food is the surge of public interest in, and attention to, food. Philosophers in the classroom have found in the subject an important lens through which to examine philosophical problems, particularly in ethics and environmental philosophy. Several anthologies have been created, partly in an effort to address the needs of such courses; examples include works by Fritz Allhoff and Dave Munroe; Ben Mepham; Gregory Pence; and David Kaplan.
Philosophers committed to public philosophy, and to expanding its role in public life, have found their insights valued in public debates about the safety of our food, the future of our food system, and the cultural meanings of our foods. However, while philosophy is welcomed into public conversations, it is the task of philosophers to push these conversations beyond formulaic moral dichotomies (“organic foods: yes or no?” “are genetically engineered seeds good or bad?”). Arguably, the chief contribution philosophy can make to discussions of food—in the public sphere and the academy—is to reveal underlying assumptions that bind and limit those discussions. Philosophy best contributes to public conversations about food not by solving or resolving ethical or aesthetic conundrums, but by problematizing the terms of those conundrums.
One might argue, without irony, that Western philosophy began in considerations of food, and has never stopped. Plato, I noted, examines food with considerable regularity in his dialogues; in the Republic, the desire to consume meat and other luxuries leads the state to annex new territory—a move which necessitates war—and the Timaeus explains that the human digestive tract is long in order to enable us to think for long periods of time, uninterrupted by a growling stomach. (Plato is also one of those figures whose veneration of thinking led him to dismiss our stomachy nature as something that should be ignored whenever possible.) On the other end of that history, the contemporary French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida argues that the central ethical question is not “whether or not to eat but how to eat,” a question that “comes back to determining the best, most respectful, most grateful, and also most giving way of relating to the other and of relating the other to the self” (quoted in Oliver, 2009: 105). And ethicists such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan answer that question by asserting what we ought not to eat: animals. Between these centuries, we find Michel de Montaigne’s confession that he bites his fingers when he eats, so greedy is he; David Hume’s discussions of literal tasting, in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste”; and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous proclamation “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are,” in his Physiology of Taste. (Indeed, philosophy seems particularly rich in food-related aphorisms; consider also Feuerbach’s related assertion—much cleverer in the original German—that one is what one eats: “man ist was er isst”; and young Novalis’s observation—now flung by parents with painful frequency at offspring declaring their intention to major in the subject: “Philosophy bakes no bread.”)
But is Brillat-Savarin really a philosopher? Or is Montaigne, for that matter? And would either Plato or Peter Singer call himself a philosopher of food? The answer to that last question is undoubtedly “no,” and debates over the pedigrees of the first two figures are likely to go on forever. Part of the reason for the dispute over the philosophical credentials of Montaigne and Brillat-Savarin is, of course, precisely the fact that both figures take up subjects considered too menial, ordinary, or commonplace to be proper to so lofty a discipline as philosophy. Philosophy has, for the most part, displayed a neglect, even an abhorrence, of all things bodily; food, unavoidably, draws attention to our bodily being: we hunger, gobble, defecate, and eventually die, to be set upon by hungry worms. Who would wish to be reminded of these painful facts, when we could instead turn our attentions to the beauty of timeless truths?
Exceptions exist. Some food-related topics—the ethics of eating animals and the politics of famine—have been perennial staples of ethics and socio-political philosophy, and since the 1980s, eating disorders have been a topic of research for feminist philosophers. (Notably, all three of these topics concern themselves primarily with what one shouldn’t, can’t, or won’t eat.) Much contemporary work on vegetarianism and animals pays homage to the work begun by Tom Regan and Peter Singer in the 1970s. In the 1980s, Amartya Sen, Susan George, Joseph Collins, and Frances Moore Lappe produced pathbreaking work (now considered to be the standard view) on the causes and consequences of hunger and of famine. And Susan Bordo’s work on anorexia as a “crystallization of popular culture” opened new possibilities for feminist philosophical work on food, body, and personhood.
Work on philosophy of food that self-consciously identifies itself with the emerging discipline of food studies might be said to have begun in 1987, the year philosopher Richard Haynes founded the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society. Five years later, Deane Curtin and Lisa Heldke published Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, which examined the question “how might fundamental philosophical problems be reshaped, were we to take seriously humans’ relationships to food?” At about that time, Paul Thompson began to make agriculture a serious subject for environmental philosophers; his work The Spirit of the Soil was published in 1994. Five years after that, Carolyn Korsmeyer produced Making Sense of Taste, the first major work to treat food as a topic of aesthetic consideration.
Scholarly works in the philosophy of food produced since 1990 can be grouped according to a rough taxonomy that sorts them according to the kinds of philosophical tasks they undertake. I’ve identified four such tasks, arranged in order of “disruptiveness,” from those that leave the philosophical terrain most undisturbed, to those that have the potential to effect the most profound changes to it.
While these four tasks vary in their potential to affect philosophical thinking, even the least disruptive of them still disrupts; you can’t ask whether cuisine is art without producing some boomerang effects upon future aesthetic discussions of the nature of painting or music, triggering a Task 4 discussion. Work of all four types plays important roles in developing philosophy of food and contributing to food studies. Here, I briefly discuss some of the significant works produced since 1990, using the taxonomy from above and grouping them by philosophical subdiscipline.
Ethics. Ethical questions are among the first and most likely questions to which philosophers have turned, as they have come to the study of food (just as they have been the questions philosophers in history have most often considered). Michiel Korthals’s Before Dinner is a densely packed volume that undertakes both Tasks 1 and 3, to consider such issues as: Can we justify eating other animals? What are the responsibilities of consumers in a consumer society? How can we reconcile the promise and the peril of “high-tech” foods, such as those produced using sophisticated biotechnology? How does the just society adjudicate the matter of the nutrition of its citizens? In the spirit of Task 1, Korthals explicitly considers the concrete consequences of abstract ethical positions; in fact a central plank of his own ethical position is “applicationism,” which acknowledges that “philosophical ethics has been overly concerned with the justification of principles … and far too little with the altogether different issue of their application” (Korthals, 2004: 51). This book—and a subsequent article, “The Birth of Philosophy and the Contempt for Food,” also take up Task 3, cataloguing historical philosophers’ observations about food production and consumption. In the latter work, he expresses hope that attention to the ethics of food “will change the philosophers’ historical neglect” (p. 68).
Ethics and agriculture. Philosophers working on ethical issues in agriculture are perhaps the most active and prolific group of philosophers working on food, and have made the clearest marks on both philosophy and food studies. Agriculture in the twentieth century presents a host of pressing issues, including where and how our food will be grown, and even what will be grown. Among the most challenging issues are the nature of the present industrial agricultural system, and the promise and problems of the genetic engineering of our food supply. While they possess no specialized or unique body of agricultural knowledge, philosophers can and do bring to the debates on these issues an ability to excavate and interrogate the presuppositions on which they are founded.
Paul Thompson’s Food Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective well exemplifies the contributions philosophy can make to this technical field. Thompson draws upon his sophisticated lay understanding of the science of biotechnology to consider ethical issues that arise for both animals and plants; consent, unintended consequences, trust, property. The work is an example of a Task 4 work, pressing, as it does, the limits of how we understand these philosophical concepts. It is also an instance of Task 2, insofar as Thompson is exploring issues that are often considered as philosophy of technology issues, but is framing them within a discussion that is explicitly about food.
Another, very different sort of project in ethics and agriculture situates itself in the tradition of agrarianism, and draws upon earlier agrarians, including Virgil, Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau. This is Task 3 work, reminding us of the role previous philosophers have assigned to agriculture, and rejuvenating that role for the present context. The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism, a suggestively titled anthology edited by Paul Thompson and Thomas Hilde, makes explicit some of the ways pragmatism, the quintessentially American species of philosophy, emerged out of a context in which agriculture held a defining role in the culture.
At present, philosophy of agriculture often finds itself in conversation with philosophies of the environment—conversations that can minimize the degree to which agriculture is understood to involve growing food. Its conversations will certainly change and expand, as philosophy of agriculture comes to be more frequently cross-fertilized with philosophy of food. Such projects will likely be of the Task 2 variety.
Ethical vegetarianism. Feminist theorists have been particularly interested in the significance of meat eating for women; Carol Adams’s work The Sexual Politics of Meat draws links between the oppression of women and the exploitation of animals to argue for vegetarianism, while Animal, Vegetable or Woman, by Kathryn Paxton George challenges arguments for vegetarianism from a feminist perspective. Deane Curtin works to develop what he calls a “contextual moral vegetarianism.” His work slants toward Task 4, in that it upends received conceptions of person-hood, putting in their place relational models that take seriously the adage “you are what you eat.” Social and political philosophy: hunger. Existing philosophical works that explore hunger often do so within the framework of distributive justice—by what means do we make decisions about how goods are distributed in a society or in the world? Significant bodies of work on hunger exist within both the literature of development ethics and the literature of environmental philosophy. In the former category is a collection of essays edited by William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette entitled World Hunger and Morality. Tom Regan’s edited collection Earthbound couches issues of hunger in terms of environmental consequences. Regan suggests that all of environmental philosophy might be considered by way of the contents of one’s dinner plate—a move that frames this work as a Task 2 kind of project.
Social and political philosophy: food, race/ethnicity and culture. Ethnic cuisines present an interesting terrain on which to explore questions about race, ethnicity, and culture. My own work Exotic Appetites explores “cultural colonialism,” an attitude with which persons of racial privilege approach the food of the “ethnic” Other, and characterized by an obsession with novelty, a view of the Other as a resource for one’s own use and adornment, and a passion for “authenticity.” It is a kind of Task 1 work that shows the way to Task 4 projects.
Social and political philosophy: justice. Abby Wilkerson’s work begins in Task 1, by extending the reach of the concept of justice to consider the matter of size and weight. It emerges into a Task 4 project of reconceptualizing justice in a way that renders the body an essential element of it. Situated in recent efforts in political philosophy to bring attention to the neglected significance of the body for the social contract, her forthcoming book demonstrates that the notion of obesity plays an extensive role in cultural politics, influencing social roles and relationships from the most intimate levels of personal identity to interactions between social groups and even nations.
Aesthetics. Elizabeth Telfer’s Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food is a Task 1 work. It addresses the question “Is cuisine an art form?” Telfer concludes that it is, though a minor art form not capable of producing the highest, most profound sorts of aesthetic experiences. Telfer suggests that its pleasures are of a subordinate sort; a fine meal can enhance an evening at the symphony, resulting in an aggregate aesthetic experience more profound than attending the symphony alone. Carolyn Korsmeyer’s Making Sense of Taste, on the other hand, is an example of a Task 4 work. In conducting her analysis of taste-the-sense alongside taste-the-aesthetic-sensibility, Korsmeyer asks why those forms of human creativity associated with sensory taste have been relegated to the aesthetic backwater, and, furthermore, why aesthetic taste has been defined in such a way as to marginalize or exclude them.
Value theory—aesthetics, ethics and social political philosophy—is, not surprisingly, the area of philosophy that has seen the most work on food. Ontology and epistemology, on the other hand, are relatively untapped to date. This is beginning to change. By exploring humans’ relations to food on the most elemental levels (ingestion and elimination, for example), we cannot but come to question received Western notions of being and knowing that conceive of an absolute separation of knower from known, self from other. As Ray Boisvert observes: “Taking seriously our status as embodied and encultured … philosophers could actually begin to grasp philosophizing as a ‘human’ rather than as a ‘mental’ activity” (2001a). Work in these areas almost of necessity takes up Task 4, both transforming fundamental philosophical concepts transforming the fundamental relationships between and among philosophical categories.
Ontology: food and embodiment/body image. Feminist philosophers have often avoided the topic of food. Notable exceptions to this generalization are ecofeminist discussions of vegetarianism and of feminist development theorists’ discussions of hunger. The other important exception involves the body and embodiment. The feminist philosophical literature on embodiment has, over the past two decades, presented a sustained, nuanced, and multi-faceted attack on received philosophical notions of human personhood, a central topic in ontology. According to the prevailing Cartesian model, humans are minds that are only accidentally attached to inferior bodies. Women, in Western thought, have been defined as more fully tied to our bodies and to all things bodily, because of our role in reproduction, our traditional tasks as caretakers of bodies, and our identification with sex and the sexual. As such, we have historically been regarded as incomplete or defective humans. Feminists have been at the forefront of challenging this ontological legacy, and explicating the ways in which it marginalizes and subordinates women.
Some feminists have examined these questions of embodiment specifically in terms of women’s relations to food. The most well known and important of these theorists is Susan Bordo, whose work Unbearable Weight explores the construction of women’s embodiment in contemporary culture, particularly through an examination of women’s eating, both ordered and disordered. Her work “reads” in the bodies of the anorexic, the bulimic, and the “properly thin” woman manifestations of the historical Western disdain for, even hatred of, the body, extending all the way to Plato. Through her examination of contemporary women’s relations to food, Bordo reveals ethical and social ramifications of our ontological commitments, and initiates a reconstitution of a fundamental Western ontological category.
Ontology: subject/object dualism. No philosophers of food have yet developed full-blown critiques of the fundamental ontological division between subject and object—between myself as a perceiver/possessor of the world and the items in the world that enter my vision. But eating profoundly violates this purportedly fundamental dichotomy. One piece that initiates such critique is Deane Curtin’s “Food, Body, Person,” in which he develops a relational model of the self that takes explicit account of the fact that, in eating, the “not-me” very literally becomes me. Epistemology. In the twentieth century, scientific investigation (or an idealized version of it) has come to stand as the model of inquiry and knowing, in terms of which all other knowledge-producing activities are judged—and often found lacking. Science—or our idealized version of it—embodies the very qualities Descartes taught us to seek in our inquiry: Dispassion, disengagement, and an emphasis on abstract principles and timeless certainty. Foodmaking presents an interesting challenge to this model of knowing; my “Recipes for Theory Making,” and “Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice” explore the suggestion.
Ray Boisvert presents a related proposal in his call for “convivial epistemology,” which begins with the notion of humans as beings living with their surroundings—not subjects studying objects external to themselves. Such an understanding of knowing uproots a whole variety of received philosophical problems and preconditions, including, for instance, the problem of skepticism and the separation of fact and value. Boisvert’s work—the essay “Convivial Epistemology” as well as other of his writings—stands as the clearest example of work that takes on the fourth task. His ways of examining food unearth the profound potential that it possesses to transform the very ways in which we ask the most basic questions of philosophy.
Ray Boisvert notes: “At the intersection of food and philosophy, the key methodological consideration is flexibility. There must be a sensitivity to, and place for, empirical investigations, for hermeneutical strategies, for historical and sociological contextualization of positions … Philosophical texts cannot now be [approached as if] ideas exist independently of context … [The] history of ideas cannot be examined apart from history of social practices” (private correspondence). In addition to flexibility and contextuality, philosophy of food is motivated by a skepticism or curiosity about received categories, divisions, and hierarchies, and a willingness to rethink, reinvent, and restructure these in light of humans’ profound, multifaceted relationships to food.
Whether or not there exist any such things as identifiable philosophical “methodologies” is a subject of considerable dispute among philosophers. It is more typical to sort philosophers according to schools or traditions of thought, which are characterized more by fealty to particular historical figures and questions than by particular methods of inquiry or analysis. It is, however, possible to make some meaningful methodological distinctions among these traditions, and to identify those that promise to be most useful and rewarding for philosophers.
Arguably, the school of philosophy that has been the most productive of, involved in, and influential upon, food studies is American pragmatism. The connection is unsurprising, given that pragmatist philosophy has traditionally rejected many of the traditional hierarchical dichotomies upon which other schools of philosophy have rested—dichotomies that have rendered the study of food unimportant, irrelevant, or impossible: mind versus body, theory versus practice and even reason versus emotion. Pragmatist philosophy begins from the understanding that philosophical questions begin in, and return to, the concerns of everyday human life. Thus, for example, the historical pragmatist John Dewey recognized the value of activities such as cooking and gardening for educating children in ways that do not reproduce the theory/practice dichotomy, while the contemporary pragmatist-inspired Ray Boisvert creatively draws upon bouillabaisse to conceive of a philosophy that replaces purity with complicated admixtures, and strict reasoning with “fuzzy logic;” and feminist pragmatist Heldke conceives of cooking as a “thoughtful practice” that resists the theory/practice division. Furthermore, pragmatist philosophy has significant connections to the tradition of agrarianism that has influenced the thinking of prominent philosophers of agriculture such as Paul Thompson and Fred Kirschenmann.
Continental philosophy has also shown a readiness to embrace some food-related themes. This, too is unsurprising; phenomenology, one influential strand of Continental thought, has concerned itself centrally with matters of bodily being, and existentialism, another important strand, has focused on conditions of human existence—both clearly approaches in which the matter of humans’ relations to food bears considerable importance. The nineteenth-century Nietzsche devotes a considerable section of his work Ecce Homo to the matter of his own diet (“Why I Am So Clever), while in the twenty-first century, Kelly Oliver draws upon the work of deconstructionist Jacques Derrida to develop an “ethics of sustaining relationships” vis à vis other animals—an ethics that inevitably must address the matter of whether or not we eat them.
Philosophers interested in food might pursue one of two trajectories, one more focused on disciplinary interests and the other more directed toward participation in the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work of food studies. The opportunities to make meaningful contributions to both nascent projects are vast.
The most important disciplinary projects are Task 4 projects that use humans’ profound, non-optional relationships to food to instigate rethinking of philosophical conceptions such as personhood, knowing, ethical agency, and aesthetic expression. A metaphilosophical question asks about the usual hierarchy that is presumed among philosophical subdisciplines: If we begin philosophy from humans’ relations to food, do metaphysics and epistemology remain the foundational philosophical projects? Does aesthetics remain a secondary or even tertiary field? And do relations and dependencies among these subdisciplines remain unchanged?
Also intriguing are Task 2 projects that refocus existing conversations inside new contexts. I have mentioned revisiting vegetarianism as a philosophy of food, placing philosophy of agriculture in the context of philosophy of food, and reconsidering questions in philosophy of technology as questions about food. Many more such projects are possible.
Moving on to the second trajectory, there is important work for philosophers to do within food studies itself, by contributing to work on such crucial issues as: The perils and promises of genetically modified foods, and of organic foods; the future of the (alternative) food system(s); the “obesity epidemic”; food and authenticity; sustainability; food security and food sovereignty; food and identity; agrarianism; nationalism and cosmopolitanism; the food voice; food and disability; food and racial identity. While philosophy does not produce bodies of qualitative or quantitative data, nor is it the aggregator of historical knowledge, the discipline’s capacities for drawing distinctions, teasing out assumptions, making conceptual connections, and posing critical questions are arguably important tools to include in the interdisciplinary research projects that the study of food, by its very nature, requires.
For philosophers, as for food scholars in many disciplines, the most important academic organizations are the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS), and the aforementioned Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society (AFHV). Philosophers make up a small but significant percentage of members in both organizations. Philosophical organizations friendly to the study of food include the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP), the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), and the Society for the Philosophy of Creativity. Convivium: The Philosophy and Food Roundtable, a small organization, holds occasional sessions at meetings of the American Philosophical Association.
Food studies journals that publish significant numbers of philosophical articles include Agriculture and Human Values (the journal of the AFHV), The Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, and Food, Culture and Society (the journal of the ASFS).
The largest—indeed, perhaps the only—repository of food philosophy on the internet is housed at the University of North Texas, and is the work of David Kaplan. It can be found at www.food.unt.edu (accessed on April 2, 2012). The site is most valuable for its extensive and wide-ranging bibliography of food-related philosophy and philosophy-related food writing. It also features an introductory essay about philosophy of food. The ambitious site promises in the future to feature book reviews and arguments in significant food debates.
At the time of this writing, the publisher Springer is overseeing the production of a multi-volume encyclopedia, The Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, which will be available in both print and electronic forms. Edited by P. B. Thompson, R. Bawden, D. M. Kaplan, and K. Millar, it will serve as an invaluable resource, especially but not exclusively for persons interested in ethical, socio-political, and cultural aspects of food and agricultural production.
Students interested in graduate study in philosophy of food should consider whether they are primarily philosophers interested in the study of food, or food scholars who wish to take a philosophical perspective on their study. The latter would be best served by graduate programs in food studies that have a strong humanities focus, such as Boston University’s Gastronomy Program. Students of philosophy who seek to write a dissertation on a food-related theme should consider philosophy programs strong in American pragmatism or Continental philosophy, or that describe themselves as pluralistic, since these departments are most likely to find the study of food legitimate, for reasons discussed above. It is wise to remember that the study of food is still relatively odd in philosophy departments, and will be genuinely unwelcome in some.
Adams, Carol J. (1990) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum.
Aiken, William and Hugh LaFollette (1996) World Hunger and Morality. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Allhoff, Fritz and Dave Monroe (2007) Food and Philosophy: Eat, Think and Be Merry. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Boisvert, Raymond D. (2006) “Hungry Being: The Parasite.” Unpublished manuscript.
——(2001a) “Food Transforms Philosophy.” The Maine Scholar 14: 1–14.
——(2001b) “Philosophy Regains its Senses.” Food for Thought. Special issue of Philosophy Now 31: www.pdcnet.org/collection/show?id=philnow_2001_0031_0000_0009_0011&file_type=pdf (accessed June 26, 2011).
Boisvert, Raymond D. and Lisa Heldke (forthcoming) Philosophers at Table. London: Reaktion.
Bordo, Susan (1995) Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme (2000) The Physiology of Taste, Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. Trans. M. F. K. Fisher. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.
Curtin, Deane (1992) “Food, Body, Person.” In Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food. Deane Curtin and Lisa Heldke, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Curtin, Deane and Lisa Heldke (1992) Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (2000) Of Hospitality: Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
——(1995) “Eating Well, Or the Calculation of the Subject” in Points …: Interviews, 1974–1994. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Dewey, John (1988) Experience and Nature. 1925. The Later Works of John Dewey. Volume 1. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Garrison, Jim, and Bruce W. Watson (2005) “Food From Thought.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.4: 242–56.
George, Susan (1989) How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger. London: Penguin.
Heldke, Lisa (2003) Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. New York: Routledge.
——(1988) “Recipes for Theory Making.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 3.2: 15–30.
Heldke, Lisa, Kerri Mommer, and Cindy Pineo (2005) The Atkins Diet and Philosophy. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
Hume, David (1965) “Of the Standard of Taste.” Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Iggers, Jeremy, ed. (2001) Philosophy Now Special issue Food for Thought 31: www.pdcnet.org/collection/show?id=philnow_2001_0031_0000_0009_0011&file_type=pdf (accessed on 25 June, 2011).
——(1996) The Garden of Eating: Food, Sex and the Hunger of Meaning. New York: Basic Books.
Jager, Ronald (2004) The Fate of the Family Farm. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.
Kaplan, David, ed. (forthcoming) The Philosophy of Food. Berkeley: University of California Press.
——The Philosophy of Food Project. University of North Texas, food.unt.edu (accessed on 24 June, 2011).
Kass, Leon R. (1994) The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kirschenmann, Fred (2010) Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn (2011) Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——(1999) Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Korthals, Michiel (2008) “The Birth of Philosophy and the Contempt for Food.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 8.3: 62–69.
——(2004) Before Dinner: Philosophy and Ethics of Food. Dordrecht: Springer.
Kuehn, Glenn (2005) “How Can Food Be Art?” In The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Andrew Light and Jonathan Smith, eds., New York: Columbia University Press.
Light, Andrew (1999) “Dining on Fido: The Aesthetic Dilemma of Eating Animals.” In Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human–Nonhuman Relationships. Andrew Light and Erin McKenna, eds., Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Light, Andrew and Erin McKenna (1999) Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human–Nonhuman Relationships. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mepham, Ben T., ed. (1996) Food Ethics (Professional Ethics). New York: Routledge.
Montmarquet, James (1989) The Idea of Agrarianism: From Hunter-Gatherer to Agrarian Radical in Western Culture. Boise: University of Idaho Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (2009) Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. Oxford; Oxford University Press.
Oliver, Kelly (2009) Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. New York: Columbia University Press.
Pence, Gregory E. (2002) The Ethics of Food: A Reader for the Twenty-First Century. Lanham, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield.
Plato (1992) Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Hackett.
——(1952) Timaeus. Trans. F. M. Cornford. New York: Humanities.
Probyn, Elspeth (2000) Carnal Appetites: Foodsexidentities. London and New York: Routledge.
Regan, Tom, ed. (1984) Earthbound: New Introductory Essays in Environmental Ethics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
——(2004) The Case for Animal Rights: Updated with a New Preface. Berkeley: University of California.
Sen, Amartya (1982) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon.
Serres, Michel (2009) The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. New York: Continuum.
——(2007) The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence Schehr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Singer, Peter (1975) Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York: Random House.
Singer, Peter and Jim Mason (2006) The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. New York: Rodale Inc.
Telfer, Elizabeth (1996) Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food. London: Routledge.
Thompson, Paul B. (2010) The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
——(2007) Food Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective, 2nd edn. Dordrecht: Springer.
——(1994) The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics. New York: Routledge.
Thompson, Paul B. and Thomas Hilde, eds. (2000) The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Thompson, Paul B., R. Bawden, D. M. Kaplan, and K. Millar, ed. (forthcoming) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Dordrecht: Springer.
Walters, Kerry S. and Lisa Portmess (1999) Ethical Vegetarianism: From Pythagoras to Peter Singer. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Watson, Richard (1999) The Philosopher’s Diet: How to Lose Weight and Change the World. Rev. ed. Boston, MA: David R. Godine.
Wilkerson, Abby (forthcoming) The Thin Contract: Social Justice and the Political Rhetoric of Obesity. Chicago, IL: Open Court.
——(2011) “Food and Disability Studies: Vulnerable Bodies, Eating or ‘Not Eating.’” Food, Culture & Society 14.1: 17–28.
——“‘Obesity,’ the Transnational Plate, and the Thin Contract.” Radical Philosophy Review 13.1 (2010): 43–67.