Research

Philosophical Research Interests

I work primarily in the philosophy of food and agriculture, social metaphysics, and ethics. Food gathers together many of the philosophical questions I return to: questions about social reality, value, dependence, agency, attention, and what it means to live well. It is ordinary enough that it can look philosophically unremarkable; that, to me, is part of what makes it interesting. Eating, cooking, shopping, farming, and feeding other people are not just practical activities—they are ways of moving through a social world already shaped by concepts, values, histories, dependencies, and forms of life.

Much of my work begins from the thought that ordinary practices are philosophically revealing. I am interested in what becomes visible when philosophers take those practices seriously—not merely as examples to which theory can be applied, but as places where philosophical questions are already being worked out. My work on farmers markets and local food systems, for instance, asks how institutions help shape the meaning and application of “localness” in practice. That question is a piece of social metaphysics with a distinctly normative flavor: it asks how a socially important property is made usable within concrete practices, and why that matters for trust, responsibility, community, environmental concern, economic support, and a sense of place.

My next project turns more directly to local and seasonal food practices as forms of naturalistic, place-based spiritual formation. I am interested in how ordinary practices of attention, dependence, gratitude, restraint, and care can shape agency and selfhood over time. This work connects my interests in food, moral psychology, and philosophy of religion with questions in Indigenous epistemology and spirituality, especially about how knowledge and value are formed through relations with land, community, and more-than-human life.

I have also become increasingly interested in philosophy that is ethnographically informed and publicly engaged. I see this as continuous with conceptual analysis: concepts become clearer when we attend to the practices, institutions, and forms of life in which people actually use, contest, and live with them. In my own work, this has meant thinking alongside food studies, anthropology, public markets, local food organizations, and community-facing food work.

Across these projects, I am drawn to philosophy that remains conceptually careful without becoming detached from ordinary life. I want to understand how our concepts help organize the worlds we inhabit—and how better attention to those concepts might help us participate in those worlds more thoughtfully.

Dissertation Abstract: Cultivating a Fruitful Metaphysics of Food

This dissertation argues that food is philosophically important because it is both material and social. Food has to be available to bodies, but material availability does not by itself determine what counts as food. People learn what food is through the practices that organize how it is grown, prepared, exchanged, valued, and eaten. Food categories emerge where bodily need, material possibility, and organized human life meet. The dissertation’s method follows from that claim: it develops a social metaphysics of food alongside food studies, archival and institutional materials, and situated participation in the food practices it analyzes.

Local Food and Farmers Markets

Local food is the dissertation’s starting point because it makes this structure visible in a familiar case. “Local food” is often treated as if its meaning were obvious, but in practice people use localness to track different relations: nearness to place, directness between producers and consumers, cultural or historical belonging, and sometimes several of these at once. Chapter 1 works from public market rules, archival materials, situated participation, and cases from Florence and Ann Arbor to argue that localness is plural without being arbitrary. Farmers markets, and nearby institutions such as farm stops and co-ops, make localness more determinate by conferring local-food status through practices that settle which relation of localness is operative in a particular setting.

Food Kinds and Huitlacoche

Chapter 2 turns to huitlacoche, or corn smut: the fungus Ustilago maydis infecting corn. In many Mexican culinary contexts, huitlacoche is harvested, cooked, sold, and eaten as food. In many dominant U.S. agricultural contexts, the same fungus is treated as a crop disease: a form of damage rather than something to harvest and eat. I argue that a token counts as a member of a food kind when it is materially suitable and appropriately connected to the organized practice that stabilizes that kind. The case of huitlacoche shows why food ontology must distinguish food uptake from food-kind membership, and why the same material item can occupy different practice-relative roles without making classification arbitrary.

Eating and Ethical Self-Formation

Chapter 3 asks what follows ethically from this practice-based account, focusing on Alice Waters and her Slow Food Manifesto. Waters is right that eating can form people: it can train attention, pleasure, care, and attachment to place. But individual eating practices are a poor guide to moral worth, because people eat under conditions they do not fully choose. Slow food can be ethically formative while still having real moral and political limits.

Taken together, the chapters defend a practice-based account of food’s ontology and ethics. Food practices help determine what counts as food, what particular foods are, and how eating shapes people’s relations to themselves, to others, and to the places they live.

In March 2026 I gave the inaugural Gastronomica / Culinary Mind Lecture in the Philosophy of Food, which is a version of Chapter 3 and which is recorded here:

Check out this blog post by Tracy Isaacs from Western University about the connections between my research and practical veganism!

I get much of my research done in the greenhouse at Argus Farm Stop, a grocery & café where local farmers and food producers are able to sell their products year round. I am fueled by Arbor Teas chai lattes and seasonal baked goods from small local producers such as Beara Bakes and Bird Dog Baking.