PANEL 5 / AN EPISTEMOLOGY FOR FOOD WASTE. INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES
CONVENOR: NICOLA PIRAS
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
This panel is the kick-off event of the FCT Exploratory Project 2023.12085.PEX.
Try asking someone whether wasting food is morally acceptable and, most likely, they will express the view that no, wasting food is morally wrong, and that it should be avoided or, failing that, morally condemned. However, approximately one-third of the food produced is wasted, amounting to about 930 million tons annually. This wastage plays a significant role in climate change, with some estimates suggesting that if food waste were a country, it would rank as the third-largest global emitter of greenhouse gases. Indeed, reducing and effectively managing food waste stands as a crucial objective within the framework of the UN 2030 Agenda (Goal 12.3). Still, interdisciplinary literature remarks two notable obstacles to accomplish that goal: flawed extant definitions that fall short to really identify food waste and the absence of a universally applicable and consistent set of criteria for defining food waste. Such a definition would play a crucial role in underpinning measurements of the economic and environmental impacts of food waste. Additionally, if consumers and agencies adopt, as often happen, different definitions of food waste that might undermine attempts to reduce or revise wasteful behaviors. But how can such a definition be established? Who possesses the suitable knowledge? Who should have the epistemic authority and how to ascertain their expertise? While these questions have sparked debate among scholars across various disciplines, it is somewhat surprising that philosophy has only played a marginal role in addressing them. This limited interest is puzzling, given that addressing the epistemological foundation of relevant piece of knowledge should arguably be one of philosophy fundamental missions.
This FCT Exploratory Research Project endeavors to fill this gap deploying philosophical tools for grounding and assessing the epistemology of food waste. However, philosophers may still think that defining food waste
requires only a trivial expertise. This is because answering questions like “what is food waste?” and “is this food waste?” could appear to demand basic skills. However, these questions conceal a host of complexities that warrant deeper exploration: should the disposal of food to increase its market value be considered wasteful?, does overconsumption or overprovisioning qualify as food waste?, what properties does an observer detect when categorizing an item as wasted?, are these properties intrinsic or relational? To offer consistent and robust answers to these and cognate questions, this project aims at laying down a comprehensive food waste epistemology, by pursuing three objectives.
Objective 1. Defining the Expertise on Food Waste. This part will explore what skills and expertise should be required to define food waste, following the guiding hypothesis that this expertise does not rest only on quantitative and scientific kind of knowledge, but it requires also everyday experiences and traditional ecological knowledge.
Objective 2. Integrating the Normative Dimensions in Food Waste Epistemology. Empirical surveys offer substantial evidence that people tend to condemn food waste. Asking “what is food waste,” thus, not only requires a descriptive account of its scope, but also involves a normative inquiry, which still deserves to be pursued.
Objective 3. Assessing the Relation between Political Authority and the Epistemology of Food Waste: Debates concerning the definition of food waste tend to be highly specialized, while the management and the social and economic consequences of wasting food usually involve ordinary people’s daily lives. This, arguably, raises different kinds of political questions. On the one hand, how to assess whether a definition of food waste complies with the political principles that the community at stake endorses and, on the other hand, whether stakeholders should actively participate in negotiating the definition, for example, through citizen science or deliberative democracy. These three objectives are pursued by scholars, inside and outside philosophy, who rarely interact with each other and this kick-off event aims to bring them together to initiate the discussion.
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
This panel is the kick-off event of the FCT Exploratory Project 2023.12085.PEX.
Try asking someone whether wasting food is morally acceptable and, most likely, they will express the view that no, wasting food is morally wrong, and that it should be avoided or, failing that, morally condemned. However, approximately one-third of the food produced is wasted, amounting to about 930 million tons annually. This wastage plays a significant role in climate change, with some estimates suggesting that if food waste were a country, it would rank as the third-largest global emitter of greenhouse gases. Indeed, reducing and effectively managing food waste stands as a crucial objective within the framework of the UN 2030 Agenda (Goal 12.3). Still, interdisciplinary literature remarks two notable obstacles to accomplish that goal: flawed extant definitions that fall short to really identify food waste and the absence of a universally applicable and consistent set of criteria for defining food waste. Such a definition would play a crucial role in underpinning measurements of the economic and environmental impacts of food waste. Additionally, if consumers and agencies adopt, as often happen, different definitions of food waste that might undermine attempts to reduce or revise wasteful behaviors. But how can such a definition be established? Who possesses the suitable knowledge? Who should have the epistemic authority and how to ascertain their expertise? While these questions have sparked debate among scholars across various disciplines, it is somewhat surprising that philosophy has only played a marginal role in addressing them. This limited interest is puzzling, given that addressing the epistemological foundation of relevant piece of knowledge should arguably be one of philosophy fundamental missions.
This FCT Exploratory Research Project endeavors to fill this gap deploying philosophical tools for grounding and assessing the epistemology of food waste. However, philosophers may still think that defining food waste
requires only a trivial expertise. This is because answering questions like “what is food waste?” and “is this food waste?” could appear to demand basic skills. However, these questions conceal a host of complexities that warrant deeper exploration: should the disposal of food to increase its market value be considered wasteful?, does overconsumption or overprovisioning qualify as food waste?, what properties does an observer detect when categorizing an item as wasted?, are these properties intrinsic or relational? To offer consistent and robust answers to these and cognate questions, this project aims at laying down a comprehensive food waste epistemology, by pursuing three objectives.
Objective 1. Defining the Expertise on Food Waste. This part will explore what skills and expertise should be required to define food waste, following the guiding hypothesis that this expertise does not rest only on quantitative and scientific kind of knowledge, but it requires also everyday experiences and traditional ecological knowledge.
Objective 2. Integrating the Normative Dimensions in Food Waste Epistemology. Empirical surveys offer substantial evidence that people tend to condemn food waste. Asking “what is food waste,” thus, not only requires a descriptive account of its scope, but also involves a normative inquiry, which still deserves to be pursued.
Objective 3. Assessing the Relation between Political Authority and the Epistemology of Food Waste: Debates concerning the definition of food waste tend to be highly specialized, while the management and the social and economic consequences of wasting food usually involve ordinary people’s daily lives. This, arguably, raises different kinds of political questions. On the one hand, how to assess whether a definition of food waste complies with the political principles that the community at stake endorses and, on the other hand, whether stakeholders should actively participate in negotiating the definition, for example, through citizen science or deliberative democracy. These three objectives are pursued by scholars, inside and outside philosophy, who rarely interact with each other and this kick-off event aims to bring them together to initiate the discussion.
