Orthorexia, Pollan and fear of food

Originally published in The Daily Maverick.

As that master epistemologist (and occasional US defence secretary) Donald Rumsfeld reminded us in 2002, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Some of these unknown unknowns are probably harmful to us, but seeing as we don’t know what they are, there’s little we can do to safeguard ourselves against them. But as my earlier treatment of the moral panic relating to DStv and porn implied, a known unknown (in this case, the harmfulness of porn) can be treated in two entirely different ways.

Preliminary thoughts

Much of what I’ve been interested in over the last decade or so has revolved around epistemology, and in particular virtue epistemology – in other words, questions around what it is that we should believe, and how we should form our beliefs. These are normative questions, and raise a whole bunch of issues relating to the extent to which we are in fact able to be rational epistemic agents; what such agents would look like; and whether we would want to be disposed in this way at all.