The University of North Texas has recently launched a new comprehensive site on the topic. From David Kaplan's introduction:
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.
But things are starting to change.
(Photo via Flickr user TowerGirl)
