Taking value-landscapes seriously

This is a conceptual paper around the concepts of values and food identities. As such it is by necessity embracing value pluralism, recognizing the diversity in democratic societies. It is based on the metaphor of value-landscapes, introduced by the author in an EU project in 2009. It is furthermore based on the idea that our study of values and food identities should connect the conceptual analysis of values and food identities to the empirical study of these concepts as they are to be detected in society. Admittedly, there is a plethora of theories and studies of values both in philosophy and in the social sciences, with the conception of Schwartz appearing as the dominant one. The author is critical of these attempts and argues that they apparently fail on conceptual and empirical grounds. There is no definite list of (describing) all possible values held by people; all lists are in an important sense incomplete, but some lists are sufficient given a context and the people. The paper proposes an approach based on the multi-dimensionality of values. The following insights are crucial: (1) values relate to each other in terms of proximity; (2) different values may exhibit different intensity (defining peaks in the landscape); (3) each value acquires various meanings dependent on from where it is perceived (contextuality); and (4) values have an inertia but are malleable over time, particularly in interaction with belief states. It is argued that such a multi-dimensional approach offers a better foundation to regional food identities. These, in turn, are then viewed as cornerstones in an empirically anchored food ethics. Here the author recalls his definition of food ethics, as: the empirical study and normative reflection of pro-social attitudes and value trade-offs pertaining to all kinds of food (animal, terrestrial, aquatic food, etc.) and held by various stakeholders and citizens all along the global value chain (from producer to consumer). Food identities provide the link between these value-landscapes and the normative commitments associated with them.