The 0 km Movement: Everyday Eaters Enjoying Edible Environments

Urban Farm DB summary

This philosophical essay observes that somaesthetics — the philosophy of embodied aesthetic experience — has tended to shift its focus from producers to consumers when discussing food, neglecting farmers, and proposes urban farming as a somaesthetics case study. It begins by examining urban farming's absence from Aesthetics, then discusses how the aesthetic experiences associated with urban farming collapse artistic and aesthetic distinctions, debates whether somaesthetics can be considered a subset of everyday aesthetic practice, and analyzes whether urban farming's capacity to contribute to well-being makes it a potential somaesthetic enterprise. One explanation offered for urban farming's absence from somaesthetics is that its success owes more to luck than to the disciplined will that guides successful somaesthetic practices, and the essay argues that for it to function as a somaesthetic practice, cultivators would need to adopt unconventional approaches that raise "the foodies' bar."