Very few things are so important to our lives as food, but most of us don’t think much about it. Sure, we think about what to eat every day and, even more so, what not to eat, but we don’t really think about food. Where does it come from? Who produced it? Who picked these tomatoes or apples? How far has it travelled? Even less do we reflect on other more remote issues, but central to food, such as, hunger, population growth, migration, sustainable agriculture, human rights, animal rights, waste, GMOs, etc. It seems clear that we cannot continue to be ignorant of these issues. I suggest we should make them part of our lives and our food choices.

It is becoming clear that our food system involves massive problems that will take all our ingenuity and resolve to come to terms with, and which cannot be solved unless we change our own habits. Most researchers studying this agree that people in certain parts of the world (foremost North America and Europe) need to eat less and food production overall needs to increase in order to feed a growing world population. But, how do we increase food production without further destroying an already fragile world? At the moment there is no good answer which does not involve major changes to the way we produce food. Things will only improve if more of us start to seriously think about food, develop a better understanding of the food system, and change our behavior accordingly. We need a practical approach and it is as part of such an approach that I would like to introduce a philosophy of food.