A Food Philosophy for Our Time?

It is clear that in much of the so-called developed world, food has largely lost its meaning beyond nourishment.  Julian Baggini has written about this, ten years ago in The Virtues of the Table, which is especially useful in considering how and why we eat.  More recently Baggini has expanded his range in How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy (2025).  From his Introduction, it is common to speak of the “food system” when a better term is the “food world”:

Using the concept of the food world subtly but importantly reframes our thinking.  The food system is something outside ourselves that we sometimes participate in as consumers and workers.  But as people who eat daily, we are always within the food world.  Whereas the “food system” evokes associations of a massive global machine, controlled by pulleys and levers, the idea of the food world invites us the think of an organic ecosystem in which every part is connected to every other.  And while asking how our food system should operate sounds technocratic, thinking about how our food world should be managed foregrounds the ethical and existential import of how we feed ourselves.  We have to think about values as well as processes.

This, of course, applies to the world of work, and all of human life.  Still:

There is no shortage of people offering solutions.  Unfortunately, most proposals are far too simplistic: use technology to fix everything, return to traditional practices, go organic, let the market decide.  All such prescriptions defy the incredible complexity or our food world, which can only be fully understood with a mastery of agronomy, ecology, biology, geography, sociology, anthropology, psychology, politics, history, economics, meteorology, chemistry, nutrition, business, cookery, and more.

Yes, this is quite a list of disciplines, one that calls for a wide-ranging, even philosophical, approach.  Baggini meets the challenge in How the World Eats.  He begins with the hunter-gatherer Hadza of Tanzania, covered previously here regarding their robust microbiome that makes them healthy from their dentition to their gut and everything else in between.  It will be no surprise to find that with the Hadza, a healthy diet “comprises diverse, fresh, whole, and seasonal food.”  Although the Hadza are under stress from the outside world, how they live and how they eat remain inseparable.  The primary lesson the Hadza have to teach us is that living sustainably in a finite world requires a profound appreciation of the interdependence of all things.

This is true of other hunter-gatherer cultures, from the Inuit to the Maasai.  It is also true for those of us who exist while trying to live in this modern world.  The folk wisdom of the Hadza is true wisdom, whatever we may think.  While this wisdom may not be “scientific,” it is the glue that holds a human culture together and makes it sustainable.  This is as true of us as the Hadza.  When the ties that bind between the human world and the natural world are broken, cultural dissolution is the result. [1]  Look around.

So, the first, and obvious, lesson of How the World Eats is:

Humans have subsisted on an incredible range of diets, but their differences mask some key commonalities…healthy diets are based on whole foods.  The ability of human beings to stay healthy as long as they eat whole grains, seeds, plants, milk, and the different parts of animals [2] is extraordinary.  One key reason why the nutritional transition of traditional societies towards industrialized diets invariably leads to worse health seems to be that they start to eat more refined and processed foods. [3]

These refined and processed foods are the industrial products of Big Ag and Big Food.  Their production, delivery, and consumption are not sustainable even though a food world must also be sustainable while satisfying “our present needs without compromising the needs of the future.  This was the major focus of Herman Daly’s work for fifty years and is still true.  Here Baggini writes that the overall system need not be sustainable (he uses the term “circular”) because “we have the unprecedented option of not having to close the loop completely, since some inputs, such as synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, could be produced indefinitely using renewable energy.”  “Could be” and “will be” are poles apart and will remain so despite this apparent technophilia.

The commoditization of food is illustrated in How the World Eats by the production of chocolate, which has been an imperial project since the nineteenth century that has resulted in the immiseration of those who do the actual work of producing cacao in what has been derisively called the Global South.  That story is enough to make one consider giving up chocolate altogether:

The fact that people have been enslaved and exploited to feed us across millennia and continents suggests an uncomfortable explanation for why change is so difficult: labour abuses in the supply chain are a feature, not a bug.  They are not flaws that crop up despite people’s best efforts to avoid them, but are structural features of the system itself that have still not been designed out…Any person, company, or nation that could get away with mistreating food producers got more and cheaper food, satisfying themselves, their customers or their citizens.  Any individual or entity that wants to break this dependence on exploited labour increases the cost of life’s most basic necessity.

This is all true, but it is not limited to the global food system but is a cold, hard fact of modern world capitalism that has grown large through imperialism and colonialism.  In today’s modern food system, as opposed to a food world, colonization remains a fact of life.  In the periphery, commodities, agricultural and otherwise, are produced as cheaply as possible through the abuse of the people and the land only to make those in the metropole rich.  Big Ag produces inputs for Big Food to use industrial processes to produce ultraprocessed foods that are then sold to the public at great profit, with deleterious consequences for human health.  And they all aim for the lowest common denominator.

Baggino covers the technology of food well.  Regarding genetically modified organisms (GMO) as food for livestock and humans, there is no evidence that plants or animals containing genes from other organisms are dangerous or unhealthy.  But, there is little recognition that GMOs are scientific-bordering-on-scientistic technical fixes for problems that do not have to exist.  Yields of GMO commodity crops resistant to glyphosate and dicamba are not significantly higher than non-GMO crops.  But they have turned soil into dirt that requires chemical fertilizers to produce anything and have selected for herbicide-resistant weeds.  Here Baggino summarizes the technology of Big Ag and Big Food better than I have read before:

Technology is too often seen as a get-out-of-jail-free card that enables us to carry on with an unsustainable system, when reality it is no more than a sticking plaster.  The danger of being too seduced by the opportunities of technology is that other options are left unexplored, in the belief that progress alone can save us.

GM crops have been used as such a sticking plaster.  They have improved yields (not really), but at the price of fields stripped of all biodiversity by the chemicals the GM crops have been engineered to resist.  They have also consolidated corporate power in the food world.  But it did not have to be this way.  None of the downsides have been due to the underlying technology itself…Many kinds of GM crops could have been bred (i.e., produced in the laboratory), including ones that are more drought- and pest-resistant, better yielding and more nutritious.

“Sticking plaster” is the perfect description of current hypertrophied agricultural technology that is becoming unstuck.  This brings us to one of the founding faults of modern agribusiness in all its parts, including the science of nutrition.  When I was first learned biochemistry, nutrition was a big part of the subject.  Certain dietary components are “essential,” so the natural conclusion of the scientists who studied vitamin and protein requirements was that the components mattered more than the food.

This is correctly called “nutritionism” by Baggini.  But food is more than the sum of its parts, chemically and culturally.  The calcium in milk is absorbed differently than calcium in a calcium carbonate dietary supplement (or antacid).  Fish are good for you, neglecting mercury contamination, but omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil by themselves, not so much.  According to Baggini, Golden Rice never got a chance to prove its worth because it was not a product of Big Ag.  This is generally true, but Golden Rice is apparently difficult to grow and it has never been demonstrated that beta-carotene from Golden Rice (the compound that makes carrots orange and is a precursor to vitamin A) is efficiently transformed into vitamin A in the human body (humans vary widely in the levels of the enzyme required).  Vitamin A deficiency causes considerable morbidity (blindness) and mortality (immune insufficiency) in areas where diets are low in vitamin A, but a more holistic approach to diet can solve this problem, as well as inexpensive vitamin A doses.

Overall, Baggini’s ideal of a “Food World” presents a much better perspective on the food that all of us eat than “Food System,” the products of too many of us consume of necessity [4] Throughout the book he makes it clear that food is cultural as well as biological.  Food and diet and nutrition must be considered from a broad systems perspective if we are to improve our ways of eating and living.  But it is also very clear that the system must be small enough to be understandable and manageable.  Therefore, a food world must be local and regional.  If the food world gets any larger it falls apart, as illustrated by the cul de sac that Big Ag and Big Food have led us into.

It is worthwhile to note that the underlying themes in How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy seem inconsistent with the idea that a global food philosophy is even possible, aside from “Eat whole foods in season from where you live if you want to remain healthy along with the ecosphere.”  As Baggini astutely explains, a local food culture will not as readily permit the negative externalities that are natural concomitants of Big Ag and Big Food (e.g., commodity crop production instead of food production, soil destruction, nitrogen and phosphate runoff pollution, the abject cruelty of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations).  When people see where their food is coming from, they pay attention.  Farmers, in the true sense of the word as members of a community instead of cogs in giant machine, are also reluctant to be bad actors in public.  I wonder if the author and publisher have also had second thoughts about the subtitle.  My copy of the book is a signed first edition with a completely different cover from the current Granta paperback entitled How the World Eats: Where Our Food Comes From and Why It Matters.  No mention here of philosophy, but a better description of the content.

Finally, Baggini sums up our conundrum in his epigraph, which is taken from Farmers of Forty Centuries, or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan (1911, subtitle “Organic Farming in China, Korea and Japan in this Dover Edition):

It is high time for each nation to study others and by mutual agreement and co-operative efforts, the results of such studies should become available to all concerned, made so in the spirit that each should become coordinate and mutually helpful component factors in the world’s progress.

I first read F.H. King during my sojourn in historical anthropology.  Many of the farms he observed are still farms.  His work and my teacher led me to, Wendell Berry, Liberty Hyde Bailey’s The Holy Earth, Sir Albert Howard, and more recently Chris Smaje and Barbara Kingsolver.  And for food to be cultural, it should be slow, as the irreplaceable Carlo Petrini taught us so well:

He did not promote food as a luxury item, nor did he agree with those who fetishized, say, heirloom arugula for its own sake.  But he was a pioneering voice in calling for an end to the worldwide conveyor belt of cheap, low-nutrient foods, which dealt an enormous cost to the planet, human culture and our bodies.  Instead, he urged people at all points in the supply chain to embrace food that was, he said, “good, clean and fair.”

These men and women profess a food philosophy that is local and sustainable.  Local and slow will be necessary in the coming smaller and sustainable, or else, world.  Buon appetito!

Notes

[1] It will remain beyond the scope of this discussion, but Baggini notes that ethics is rooted in material culture.  This could have come straight out of the work of Marvin Harris in his Cultural Materialism, but there is no mention of Harris in How the World Eats.  From what I can tell from my very limited contact with current anthropologists, Harris is anathema.  He was not reluctant to mix it up with fellow anthropologists.  While base does not determine superstructure, the superstructure can exist only on its base.  If the superstructure ignores its base, it will necessarily be rickety.  To my mind, based on a sojourn in the Anthropology Department during a not misspent youth, a close reading of Marvin Harris, Claude Levi-Strauss (structuralism) and E.O. Wilson (biological determinism) gives the epistemological nod to Harris.

[2] For example, despite eating no natural food high in vitamin C, the Inuit do not suffer from vitamin C deficiency because they eat the whole animal rather than the “select cuts” favored by us “moderns.”

[3] Perhaps the most outrageous and well-studied case of this in North America is illustrated by the Tohono Oʼodham people of the Sonoran desert: “Beginning in the 1960s, government intervention in the tribe’s agricultural cultivation caused the Tohono Oʼodham tribal citizens to shift from a traditional plant-based diet to one that favored foods high in fat and calories. The government began to close off the tribe’s water source, preventing the Indigenous group from being able to produce traditional crops.  This resulted in the widespread trend of type 2 diabetes among citizens of the tribe. The adaptation of a processed food diet caused the presence of type 2 diabetes to rise at alarming rates, with nearly 60 percent of the adult population in the tribe facing this disease and 75 percent of children expected to contract this disease in their lifetime.  Children are also at risk for childhood obesity.”  Doctors of the Indian Health Service sounded the alarm, but given current government priorities this is unlikely to happen again.

[4] Ultraprocessed foods are not covered well in How the World Eats, which was somewhat surprising.  Chris Van Tulleken’s book Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food was published in 2023 and is not mentioned.  At one point Baggini lumps UPFs with “treats.”  They can be this, and there is nothing wrong with treats .  But UPFs are much more than a minor non-dietary component that people eat sometimes (Oreos, for example; but they are vegan so they have that going for them, which is nice).