[PHILOS-L] Culinary Mind/Gastronomica Lecture: Emma Hardy on "We Are What We Eat: Alice Waters, Slow Food, and Moral Agency" -- Thursday March 12, 10pm (Milan time) / 5pm CET
Andrea Borghini
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Dear All,
Please join us for the inaugural Culinary Mind/Gastronomica Lecture on Thursday March 12, 2026, 10pm (Milan time) / 5pm (CET).
The lecture, which is part of our 2025-2026 Online Event Series, follows a call for papers designed for junior scholars, in collaboration with Gastronomica: (https://www.culinarymind.org/culinarymind-gastronomica-lecture).
Emma Hardy (University of of Michigan)
“We Are What We Eat: Alice Waters, Slow Food, and Moral Agency”
Abstract. This lecture explores the ways in which our food practices shape our identity and moral agency, using Alice Waters’s 2021 book We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto as the jumping off point. In this lecture I reconstruct Waters’s position and evaluate three commitments at its core: (1) that eating practices are tightly linked to moral agency and identity; (2) that food culture underwrites our major social and political ills; and (3) that adopting slow-food practices offers a remedy for those ills. Drawing on the work of food philosophers such as Paul Thompson, Lisa Heldke, and Megan Dean, I defend a qualified version of the first claim—food is indeed a site of ethical self-formation—while rejecting the strong etiological account in the second and considerably narrowing the prescriptive ambition of the third. My aim is not to dismiss Waters’s manifesto but to refine it: to show how we can take seriously the idea that “we are what we eat” without succumbing to moralism or monocausal explanation. Finally, I explore the resources which Carlo Petrini’s original articulation of the Slow Food philosophy has to resolve some of the limitations of Waters’s work—in stark contrast to Waters, Petrini emphasizes not the responsibility of the average consumer, but of self-identified “foodies” and of powerful agents in the food system, and acknowledges that Slow Food is not a panacea for all the world’s ills, yet can still be vital in individual, cultural, and environmental resilience. I conclude with a positive proposal: we should make sure to hold on to the ways our food practices–including slow food practices–can positively shape our moral identities, but we should shift our views of moral accountability away from individual actors into the food system and onto agents with power–whether that is food regulatory agencies, large corporations, or foodies.
To attend, please register at the link below (we will circulate a Zoom link shortly before the event):
For the full programme of the 2025-2026 (Part II) Online Events Series:
https://www.culinarymind.org/online-events-series-ii-2025-2026
Please direct questions to: <andrea....@unimi.it>.
All the best,
Andrea-
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