Feeling food: The rationality of perception

The dominant reception among regulatory bodies of people's emotional responses towards foods is that these responses are a nuisance for rational opinion-formation and decisionmaking in the field of agricultural and food politics. This position is thought to be supported by such evidence as 1) people showing negative emotional responses to the idea of eating meat products from vaccinated livestock, although this technology is perfectly safe; and 2) people showing positive emotional responses to Magnum's 7 sins, although this 'mood food' surely does not contribute to a healthy diet. Such cases are thought to support the idea that regulatory communication about foods should abstract from people's emotional perceptions and that corporate marketing of foods should show some restraint in capitalising upon these weaknesses of the heart. Contrary to this dominant position, this chapter would like to argue that people's emotional perceptions of foods are by no means irrational but rather represent valuable sources of (moral) knowledge. This argument will be developed by first making the dominant reception of people's emotions as utterly irrational intelligible by tracing its roots through the history of the Platonist paradigm in understanding emotions (section 3.2). Although this paradigm has dominated much of the philosophical and psychological debate about emotions, recently the idea of emotions as valuable sources of (moral) knowledge gained forces. Therefore, next, the historical roots of this alternative Aristotelian paradigm will be traced (section 3.3). These historical introductions to the contesting Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms in understanding emotions thus serve as an introduction to the so-called cognitivism debate. Whereas Platonists emphasise the non-cognitive or bodily qualities of emotions, Aristotelians focus on the cognitive qualities of emotions. The cognitivism debate in understanding emotions is thus a more specific instantiation of the mind-body controversy in philosophy and psychology. Then, an analysis of the apparently incomparable cases of meat products from vaccinated livestock (section 3.4) and Magnum's 7 sins (section 3.5) in terms of this controversy about the (ir)rationality of emotions will be given. Finally, the chapter will conclude by showing that a neo-Platonist emphasis on the irrationality of emotions does not contribute