Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Food – serie

Humans must eat, and our eating involves us in a cascade of eating relationships that leave life and death biting into each other.These realities should—but often do not—profoundly shape our understanding of personhood. This book explores “parasitic personhood,” an alternative to atomistic individualism that acknowledges the biological individual as a network of persistent biological relationships (a “holobiont”) and draws insight from the astonishing frequency and variety of parasitic feeding relationships. What happens to our conception of personhood if we consider parasitism as more than just a threat to our health? Parasitism is a remarkably common form of life; however, we tend to think of parasites only as dangerous pestilential organisms that should be eliminated. What if parasitism—in particular, persistent eating relationships that threaten to destabilize host organisms—were instead the model in terms of which we understood what it means to be a person? What if we acknowledged the ineliminability—indeed, the centrality—of parasitism to life and embraced both the persistent eating and the precarity that they entail as central to our understanding of personhood? In advocating for parasitic personhood, this book joins a history of efforts to uproot atomistic individualism, the remarkably durable understanding of personhood that is aptly portrayed by its most well-known eighteenth-century model, the billiard ball: smoothly self-contained, with relationships decidedly external to it. The parasitic alternative conceives persons as collections of organisms in relationships that are, by turns and all at once, essential, precarious, definitive, destabilizing, stable, and shifting. The book asks: in what does parasitic personhood consist? It goes on to examine some implications of this conception of personhood: how is moral agency constituted for the parasitic person, and how does parasitic personhood expand our understanding of aesthetic engagement and appreciation? This book will absorb anyone who is interested in thinking about the metaphysical significance of their need to eat and their reliance on myriad other organisms to enable them to do so.It will engage students and scholars of food and eating, particularly those working on the metaphysics of food, food and personhood, fermentation, and the microbiome, as well as philosophers considering the ontological significance of food and eating.

Humans must eat, and our eating involves us in a cascade of eating relationships that leave life and death biting into each other.These realities should—but often do not—profoundly shape our understanding of personhood. This book explores “parasitic personhood,” an alternative to atomistic individualism that acknowledges the biological individual as a network of persistent biological relationships (a “holobiont”) and draws insight from the astonishing frequency and variety of parasitic feeding relationships. What happens to our conception of personhood if we consider parasitism as more than just a threat to our health? Parasitism is a remarkably common form of life; however, we tend to think of parasites only as dangerous pestilential organisms that should be eliminated. What if parasitism—in particular, persistent eating relationships that threaten to destabilize host organisms—were instead the model in terms of which we understood what it means to be a person? What if we acknowledged the ineliminability—indeed, the centrality—of parasitism to life and embraced both the persistent eating and the precarity that they entail as central to our understanding of personhood? In advocating for parasitic personhood, this book joins a history of efforts to uproot atomistic individualism, the remarkably durable understanding of personhood that is aptly portrayed by its most well-known eighteenth-century model, the billiard ball: smoothly self-contained, with relationships decidedly external to it. The parasitic alternative conceives persons as collections of organisms in relationships that are, by turns and all at once, essential, precarious, definitive, destabilizing, stable, and shifting. The book asks: in what does parasitic personhood consist? It goes on to examine some implications of this conception of personhood: how is moral agency constituted for the parasitic person, and how does parasitic personhood expand our understanding of aesthetic engagement and appreciation? This book will absorb anyone who is interested in thinking about the metaphysical significance of their need to eat and their reliance on myriad other organisms to enable them to do so.It will engage students and scholars of food and eating, particularly those working on the metaphysics of food, food and personhood, fermentation, and the microbiome, as well as philosophers considering the ontological significance of food and eating.

This book examines whether wine can be natural and explores what this means and why it matters.Natural wine is one of the most contested notions in contemporary food and drink culture. Its defenders celebrate it as a return to authenticity; its critics dismiss it as a conceptual contradiction. This book argues that both sides have missed the deeper philosophical significance of the debate. Drawing on metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics, A Philosophy of Natural Wine develops a rigorous account of what it would mean for a human-made object to also be natural. It introduces the concept of naturefactual artifacts—objects intentionally produced so that natural properties become central to their appreciation—and shows that natural wine is a paradigm instance of this broader category. The book examines how such objects ought to be appreciated, what excellences their making requires, and why they represent a genuinely new kind of aesthetic value. Written to be accessible to non-specialists, this book brings much-needed clarity around the topic of natural wine and offers a new and rigorous conceptual toolbox to consumers, producers, and experts to better describe, and ultimately make sense of, their practices.This book will appeal to philosophers working in aesthetics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of food and drink, as well as to researchers in food studies, cultural history, and wine studies. Winemakers, critics, and engaged wine enthusiasts will find in it a precise and illuminating framework for thinking about a practice they care deeply about.

This book offers the first comprehensive philosophical account of what is ethically at stake as AI becomes embedded in agricultural systems, from precision irrigation platforms on the Kansas High Plains to robotic harvesters in the apple orchards of Washington State.In the face of changing weather patterns, droughts, and fewer available resources, modern agricultural practices are evolving, embracing artificial intelligence systems to help increase crop efficiency, production, and yields. However, technological innovation on the farm often comes with environmental and social costs. This book analyses AI and Information Systems through the lens of contemporary challenges in agricultural processes ranging from farm to table. Drawing on field visits across the Pacific Northwest and sustained engagement with agricultural ethics, philosophy of technology, and environmental justice, the book develops three original frameworks for evaluating agricultural AI: the Four Pillars of Agricultural Ethics, which assesses AI across its impacts on society, individuals, the environment, and animals; the SEED Framework, which translates sustainability into design-stage commitments for responsible AI; and a trivalent environmental justice framework that holds distribution, recognition, and intergenerational responsibility together as inseparable governance concerns. Together, these tools make the case for bringing ethics into the design of agricultural AI before costs become embedded in the landscape.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of agricultural and food ethics, agricultural technology and innovation, artificial intelligence and the philosophy of technology.