From Philosophy to Ontology: Rethinking Food Concepts

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 different positions. In this paper we show our approach to conceptual clarification of the food domain by offering three examples of philosophical analysis, placed at different levels of generality: "what is food?"; the four dimensions of food concepts; the analysis of "eating local.".