Food, hunger and phenomenology: on the possibility of a phenomenology of food

Abstract

In the last decades, we have seen the arise of a new niche of research, namely, one which studies philosophically the food and all that it implies. Nowadays, in the anglo-saxon countries the researches on food focus only in the sociological and aesthetics dimensions of it. However, they neglect the question about the essence of the food itself. For this, we can see that this niche have a practical philosophy but not yet a theoretical philosophy of food. This paper aims to grasp on the possibility of this philosophy, which must ask about the essential predicates of the food in a phenomenological point of view. The phenomenology can describe the essence of the food as it is given in first person, without reduce it to problems linked with hunger or naturalize it linking it to nutrition problems.