The 0 km Movement: Everyday Eaters Enjoying Edible Environments

Abstract

Despite somaesthetics’ primary focus on producers’ roles, we’ve notice that when it comes to food, somaesthetics tends to jump sides, shifting its loyalties to consumers, as they discuss eaters, while neglecting farmers. Since most of the world’s citizens, as well as its philosophers, inhabit cities, we thus propose urban farming as a somaesthetics case study. To analyze whether urban farming suits somaesthetics, we begin with a discussion of urban farming’s absence from Aesthetics, even as food remains de rigeur. We next demonstrate how aesthetic experiences associated with urban farming collapse artistic and esthetic distinctions. After debating whether somaesthetics should be considered a subset of everyday aesthetic practice, we finish by analyzing whether urban farming’s capacity for well-being makes it a potential somaesthetic enterprise. One explanation for urban farming’s absence from somaesthetics is that its success is due more to luck than the disciplined will that guides successful somaesthetic practices.  For urban farming to work as a somaesthetic practice, we believe it would require raising the “foodies’ bar”! That is, for fields like farming, which are largely unpredictable, yet are no less somaesthetically dynamic, somaesthetic practitioners must adopt unconventional ways to reward their penchant for hedonic highs, so that they can continue to push themselves higher and higher.