That food plays a special role in every culture is a platitude. Ditto for the idea that space shapes us as individuals and as members of different communities. Far less explored, however, is food in space. Not only what we eat, but also where we eat plays a special role in defining ourselves, individually and socially.
The relationship between food and space has been so far overlooked by scholars, both inside and outside philosophy (with some notable exceptions). That is not surprising, as such relationships might come to the fore mainly during critical times. Indeed, we ourselves began to think more systematically about the importance of the spaces where we eat in 2020, during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, due to COVID-19, governments worldwide enforced restrictive measures necessary to contain the virus, thus affecting the opportunity to share meals and engage in social interactions. Those measures transformed also the material structures of places and tools central to commensal practices. In our first article, we emphasized the need to account for the sociopolitical significance of the practices of eating out targeted by the restrictions: what values, we asked, are realized when we have access to specific spaces and practices revolving around eating, and how are those values undermined when those spaces and practices become less accessible? The answer, of course, depends on the specific practices at stake. Consider, for instance, how solo dining, which is more or less common in different cultures, was less affected by COVID-19 restrictions than more commensal practices; or how some dishes are ill-suited for delivery and their consumption was particularly affected by those restrictions; or how coffee-drinking habits were barely affected in some cases (e.g., consuming a take-away coffee in isolation at home) but radically transformed in others (e.g., drinking espresso in a china cup standing at the counter in a cafe).
Gradually, the idea that the spaces where we eat are key sites for enacting moral and political values took on an even clearer form in our reflections. During the pandemic, and in its aftermath, we became increasingly aware of how everyday practices of eating and drinking alone or together, both in public and private spaces, help shape our self-representation and the way in which we embrace or contest social identities, access new forms of knowledge, and foster our and our fellow diners’ social awareness and moral empowerment. By examining the material and spatial configurations of different eating spaces, as well as the social norms embedded in and reinforced by them, we became mindful of their significance.
In a subsequent essay, we coined the neologism gastrospaces to highlight the neglected category of spaces where people can consume food. These ideas were further refined and developed in our latest book Gastrospaces: A Philosophical Study of Where We Eat, where we bring together political philosophy and ontology to explore this theme in greater depth.
“Gastrospace” dubs and identifies those spaces where people (can) eat, bringing out their common ontological features as well as shared justice issues. Those spaces, we argue, have been so far overlooked precisely because of their ubiquity and familiarity, thus preventing critical examination. The neologism serves as a theoretical device to unite diverse food consumption practices under one methodological lens. While the theoretical task of studying this kind of spaces has been so far mostly overlooked, as said, some notable exceptions emerge from the literature, but all of them are somehow less satisfactory than our gastrospaces framework when assessed through a philosophical lens. For instance, unlike the well-known term “third place,” “gastrospace” refers to a wider range of spaces, not only those that exist in public and that have primarily a commercial purpose, such as a restaurant or a cafe; and, unlike “foodscape,” it does not include all elements of a built environment that are linked to food (e.g., a food distribution facility), but it does include spaces whose primary function is not only tied to food (e.g., a beach, a refugee camp, a sidewalk). In short, unlike those narrower concepts—which, incidentally, are often mainly associated with Western culture—our gastrospace neologism encompasses practices across linguistic communities, social groups, and historical contexts. This new concept, that is, applies to both public and private domains, capturing food consumption in domestic settings, during travel, in casual spots, and traditional dining venues. This provides us with a richer theoretical framework than other ones that have been put forward, enabling us to follow food through all spaces where it accompanies human practices, and to examine the sociopolitical dimensions of all the spaces where we eat.
The opportunity offered by the emergency situation that initially triggered our reflections led us to also consider other kinds of critical events and contexts where the role of gastrospaces has social and political relevance. Think about, for instance, the ban on botellones (i.e., public gatherings during which people socialize while drinking alcohol) in Barcelona, Spain, that sparked intense debates among city dwellers: who chooses where food and drinks can be consumed in an urban setting? And which individuals and groups are particularly affected by these choices? Or consider dining spaces whose design makes them inaccessible to vulnerable or oppressed categories, like people with large-sized bodies. Why are the discriminatory effects of certain design practices so often neglected, perhaps unwillingly, and how can we avoid them?
Tragic examples include those spaces where people displaced by wars are relocated, like refugee camps, prisoners camps, or migrant hostels. And even when a conflict is geographically distant, the effects of such involvement may be reflected in deep changes in the structure and functioning of domestic gastrospaces. Between WWI and WWII, for instance, women became a stable and large presence within the restaurant industry in many countries, a change that affected menus, design, and waiting styles. Yet another case study is the condition of Iranian students in Britain after the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. These students suddenly found themselves without funding and in an uncertain political status. Many of them therefore began to work in the fast food trade, rapidly creating a concentration of Iranian owners within the take-away business. Or think of those gastrospaces (e.g. restaurants or cafes) which are often designed to host standard-sized bodies, with serious negative implications for certain categories of people. Reading Hunger, by Roxanne Gay, this quote might jump out at you:
“[B]efore I go to a restaurant, I obsessively check the restaurant’s website […] to see what kind of seating it has. Are the seats ultramodern and flimsy? Do they have arms, and if so, what kind? Are there booths, and if so, does the table move or is it one of those tables welded between two benches? […] I do this obsessive research because people tend to assume that everyone moves through the world the way they do. They never think of how I take up space differently than they do.”
The governance of eating spaces like restaurants, especially in view of social and political changes, might often require policy interventions. But such interventions need to be grounded in shared understandings of what gastrospaces are, whether they all belong to the same category, and whether they share similar features and functions.
Furthermore, one might inquire whether governance and analysis should be limited to spaces of eating out. In fact, domestic spaces where food is prepared and consumed, can also become sites of justice and injustice, falling under the same conceptual umbrella of “gastropace.” Think, for example, of the role of the kitchen and other domestic spaces as sites of power (im)balance and contestation for women and domestic workers.
The examples considered so far show that gastrospaces can be, at the same time, sites of moral empowerment and injustice, facilitators of social bonding and discriminatory places, and that they can have a direct and immediate impact on people’s life plans. Do they thus require a complex and yet unified analysis? Or, to put it in other terms, do all these spaces fall under the same ontological category, which can lead to unified and coordinated political regulation efforts?
Our answer is, yes. We need a suitable theoretical and explanatory framework to unveil the network of meanings shaped by food and space in daily life, including those that operate subtly. This is needed in order to address the overlooked discriminatory effects of design and policy in gastrospaces. Achieving these goals requires a broad theoretical notion, adaptable to diverse social, economic, and cultural perspectives, and abstract enough to guide future developments. From here, the concept of gastrospace emerges.
However, once we have established the importance of studying these spaces, and adopted a term to fulfill the specific theoretical function of identifying them, we encounter two fundamental challenges. The first is a complexity challenge resulting from the multiplicity of places devoted to eating, as well as their diverse features. These spaces cannot be identified merely through institutional documentation or official designations. Gastrospaces often manifest informally—in parks, sidewalks, private gardens, or fringe areas—and extend beyond spaces of conviviality to enable prayers, ceremonies, and business meetings. Second, there is a methodological challenge stemming from gastrospace’s multifaceted nature. This requires a multidisciplinary approach guided by nuanced epistemological standards and supported by diverse examples and data. We must carefully consider which data, vocabularies, and principles should be deployed to address these spaces adequately.
Our work engages with these two challenges through a sophisticated ontological framework for understanding gastrospaces, which consists of multiple explanatory levels that capture both the static and dynamic aspects of these spaces.
At the foundational level lies the basic ontology of gastrospaces, comprising three core categories: first, agents (human and non-human participants and their roles); second, norms (formal and informal rules); and, third, material conditions (physical environment, objects, and their relations). We hence introduce the concept of “gastrospace systems”—sets of gastrospaces sharing common membership criteria—where individual gastrospaces function as special cases within larger systems.
Recognizing that this basic ontology cannot fully capture the dynamic and layered structure of gastrospaces, we propose three additional explanatory levels: first, features, which are abstract qualities that emerge from particular configurations of agents, norms, and material conditions (e.g., the versatility of a bar, which can be peaceful gathering for elderly people during the afternoon and a club for youngsters later in the night); second, functions, which are the social roles and purposes that gastrospaces fulfill based on their features (e.g., a bar intentionally designed to foster business); and, third, values, which are the normative dimensions realized through these functions (e.g., equality or distinction).
Our framework aims to accomplish three representational goals: identifying similarities between gastrospaces, highlighting their uniqueness, and precisely representing their composition. Unlike narrower theoretical approaches, our multilayered framework connects ontological foundations to value realization through the mediating concepts of features and functions.
The distinctive aspect of our approach to gastrospaces is the combination of analytic political philosophy and analytic ontology.
Our chosen normative framework of political philosophy is centered around two fundamental moral powers, what John Rawls (2005: 19) calls the “capacity for a sense of justice” (i.e., the capacity to understand and act according to the moral duties we owe one another) and “the capacity to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of one’s rational advantage or good.” These moral powers provide an ideal foundation for three reasons: first, they have the necessary thinness and flexibility to accommodate diverse conceptions of the good; second, they apply to all members of society regardless of legal status; third, they can be exercised in both public and private spheres. Gastrospaces, we argue, are necessary for people’s ability to exercise the two Rawlsian moral powers. Thus, when those spaces are designed and operate in ways that systematically hinder the exercise of these two moral powers, we contend that we are in the presence of an injustice that must be addressed via policy interventions.
It is important to stress that one could approach gastrospaces from a variety of normative perspectives, ranging from libertarian and conservative ones to Marxist or feminist ones. We take a different route. Conscious of the diversity of worldviews that characterizes contemporary liberal democracies, we embrace a non-perfectionist, political liberal perspective and, following Rawls, we reject grounding policy in controversial perfectionist values or conceptions of the good.
We therefore advance the theoretical conjecture that access to gastrospaces is necessary for exercising the two Rawlsian moral powers in democratic societies. Even so, the connection between gastrospaces and the two moral powers remains a “black box,” so to speak, unless we better understand the internal workings of gastrospaces. In our work, we try to “open” this black box by integrating our political philosophical framework with our ontological analysis, revealing how gastrospaces function as sites where justice can be realized or hindered.
This approach allows for a philosophical analysis that explains how values emerge through complex interactions between agents, norms, and material conditions in spaces centered around food consumption.
We distinguish two ways in which gastrospaces have political relevance: vertically, through institutional governance (health regulations, operating hours, etc.), and horizontally, through sociocultural identities and ethical ideals (like third-wave coffee shops or vegan restaurants). While both matter, our focus is primarily on vertical relevance—specifically, how gastrospaces relate to justice debates as primary goods warranting governmental concern.
In short, as philosophers, we see our role as providing guidance on the theoretical and ethical standards needed to support those who study and design gastrospaces more specifically and from more empirical perspectives. Philosophizing about gastrospaces helps to provide other scholars and stakeholders with a shared, theoretically perspicuous tool for studying, designing, debating and reimagining them. We need policy guidelines that are supportive of (or, at least, do not fail to recognize) the culinary practices of the specific groups inhabiting a place, and their broader social and cultural habits. We need to effectively guide dining out venues—as well as domestic gastrospaces, where relevant—to foster selected societal values, such as certain standards of inclusivity. We need effective measures to assess processes of gentrification. To develop a theory of gastrospaces is to offer a tool to address these and cognate issues.
Furthermore, the complex nature of gastrospaces requires a multidisciplinary approach that must include not only philosophers and social scientists but also architects and architectural historians and theorists. In fact, we do see our philosophical work as complementary to that conducted in fields that study the built environment, including architecture, planning, geography, anthropology, and sociology, as well as business and marketing, as we raise principled and general questions that would otherwise lay unaddressed in those disciplines’ analysis of specific instances of gastrospaces. Finally, theoretical work on gastrospaces cannot be conducted without engaging those who inhabit, design, manage, and work in these spaces daily. These individuals—dwellers, workers, and owners—must be recognized as epistemic authorities in determining and addressing issues of justice and injustice.
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