Abstract
As Paul Thompson has argued, agriculture, and food systems more generally, can be usefully analyzed with tools from the philosophy of technology. Don Ihde’s framework of multistability of possible relationships with technology suggests Thompson is right when he argues for the possibility of societies reforming their food systems to be more sustainable, participatory, and just through a focus on agrarian ideals. Ihde’s framework also suggests that for those of us who interact with food systems as consumers, these technologies are in a “background relationship” with us, in which the technologies of food systems are ignored if they are functioning properly. This background relationship can thus create epistemic deficits which pose a serious impediment to sustainability reforms. I examine this impediment and the opportunities in the disturbance of a system to reduce communities’ and individuals’ epistemic deficit. One recent example of disturbance to the food system this paper will examine is the COVID-19 pandemic. No one would wish for exogenous disruptions like the pandemic, and positive change coming out of them is not inevitable, but this paper will suggest that it is at least possible that we can emerge from disturbance with the resources to make our food systems better.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of what an actual accelerationist argument would look like, see, e.g., Shaviro (2015).
- 2.
Because I will be referring to several ideas of Ihde’s and put them into conversation with Thompson’s, and because this chapter will appear in a book dedicated to Thompson’s work, I would be remiss not to point out that Ihde was Thompson’s dissertation supervisor at SUNY Stony Brook.
- 3.
The rapid-response laws were a later alternative in places where the first two kinds of laws were running into political or legal difficulties. The idea is that mandating rapid response prevents organizations from using the recordings for maximum effect after amassing a number of them over a longer period of time.
- 4.
For a look at opacity in supply chains and production in contexts other than food, see, e.g., (Brun et al. 2020).
- 5.
- 6.
In a related sense to our use of Ihde’s framework of mediated relations, Thompson uses Borgmann’s concept of well-understood and meaningful focal things and focal practices on the one hand, as opposed to easy but opaque and ultimately alienating devices on the other, to capture the difference in how agricultural technology and food systems technology generally can be engaged with or ignored in the background. See (Thompson 2010, p. 111–135).
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Werkheiser, I. (2023). The Promise in Disasters: Reducing Epistemic Deficits of Food Systems for Sustainability. In: Noll, S., Piso, Z. (eds) Paul B. Thompson's Philosophy of Agriculture. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 34. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37484-5_7
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