There’s lots of buzz going around the internet about David Kaplan’s Philosophy of Food Project at University of North Texas, Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies. The variety of topics that intertwine with food is endlessly fascinating and I’m sure I’ll be visiting this site again and again. Thinking about food is just one more way to understand how we are all part of an intricate web where events that seem far away in time (history) or space (geography) still have an effect on our everyday beliefs and actions.

This passage immediately aroused my interest, as it did for many other readers:

Food is vexing. It is not even clear what it is. It belongs simultaneously to the worlds of economics, ecology, and culture. It involves vegetables, chemists, and wholesalers; livestock, refrigerators, and cooks; fertilizer, fish, and grocers. The subject quickly becomes tied up in countless empirical and practical matters that frustrate attempts to think about its essential properties. It is very difficult to disentangle food from its web of production, distribution, and consumption. Or when it is considered in its various use and meaning contexts, it is too often stripped of its unique food qualities and instead seen as, for example, any contextualized object, social good, or part of nature. It is much easier to treat food as a mere case study of applied ethics than to analyze it as something that poses unique philosophical challenges.

On a slightly different note, I wish it was not the case that the departments of Religion Studies and Philosophy were so often combined these days. I understand the relationship but prefer more of a Dewey Decimal style where they are next to each other on the shelf but possess their own classifications.