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<p>The deceptively simple question ‘What is food?’ opens profound biological, cultural and semiotic considerations. Posed in a Warm Data workshop convened by Nora Bateson and colleagues at the 2025 Gatherings in Biosemiotics, it invited reflection on food as a knot of relations. Pursuing that question, this article undertakes a biosemiotic inquiry into food’s definitional aspects, showing how existing formulations lean either towards food as physical matter sustaining metabolism (‘hard’ definitions) or as an interpreted bearer of meaning (‘soft’ definitions), while arguing that any satisfactory characterisation must regard these stances as complementary. To render this complementarity commensurable, the article grounds its analysis in the biological factuality that living systems inescapably persist through selective uptake and transformation of environmental matter, framing feeding as structurally bound up with life itself. On this basis, it draws on biosemiotic resources—including semiotic realism, metabolism-as-semiosis and semiotic threshold zones—to dissolve the matter/meaning split, establish nourishment as both physically real (hard-leaning definitions, the <i>bio</i>-) and semiotically constituted (soft-leaning definitions, the -<i>semiotic</i>) and cast living systems as nested semiotic-metabolic organisations vulnerable to socio-ecological distortion. Material substances become nutritively relevant only through sign relations that are efficient yet fallible—a fallibility that may prove detrimental under metabolic requirements. The inquiry culminates in a conciliatory biosemiotic definition of food as environmental matter that, upon incorporation, realises metabolic fulfilment and that, within an organism’s Umwelt, is reliably identified as edible, offering a new lens for contemporary pressures on food recognition.</p>

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What is Food? Towards a Biosemiotic Definition

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年6月19日

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  • Emanuela Bove

摘要

The deceptively simple question ‘What is food?’ opens profound biological, cultural and semiotic considerations. Posed in a Warm Data workshop convened by Nora Bateson and colleagues at the 2025 Gatherings in Biosemiotics, it invited reflection on food as a knot of relations. Pursuing that question, this article undertakes a biosemiotic inquiry into food’s definitional aspects, showing how existing formulations lean either towards food as physical matter sustaining metabolism (‘hard’ definitions) or as an interpreted bearer of meaning (‘soft’ definitions), while arguing that any satisfactory characterisation must regard these stances as complementary. To render this complementarity commensurable, the article grounds its analysis in the biological factuality that living systems inescapably persist through selective uptake and transformation of environmental matter, framing feeding as structurally bound up with life itself. On this basis, it draws on biosemiotic resources—including semiotic realism, metabolism-as-semiosis and semiotic threshold zones—to dissolve the matter/meaning split, establish nourishment as both physically real (hard-leaning definitions, the bio-) and semiotically constituted (soft-leaning definitions, the -semiotic) and cast living systems as nested semiotic-metabolic organisations vulnerable to socio-ecological distortion. Material substances become nutritively relevant only through sign relations that are efficient yet fallible—a fallibility that may prove detrimental under metabolic requirements. The inquiry culminates in a conciliatory biosemiotic definition of food as environmental matter that, upon incorporation, realises metabolic fulfilment and that, within an organism’s Umwelt, is reliably identified as edible, offering a new lens for contemporary pressures on food recognition.