Dr. Lisa Heldke teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies Program at Gustavus Adolphus College, where she holds the Sponberg Chair in Ethics. Much of her scholarly work has been devoted to the explication and exploration of the philosophical significance of food, foodmaking and agriculture. She will be co-teaching the John Dewey Kitchen Institute at UVM this summer with UVM’s Dr. Cynthia Belliveau on the pedagogical power of the kitchen to teach any topic, within a frame of collaboration and cooperation.
As a Philosophy professor, how did you arrive at this fascinating area of study?
I was always interested in cooking and food, since I was a very little girl. However, when I entered philosophy, I felt very acutely like I must keep this part of my life separate from my “serious, academic” part. Then, at the end of my dissertation (on the nature of objectivity), an offhand analogy I made between theory making and recipe construction led a friend to say, “You know, you should write about that.” I sort of fell down a rabbit hole at that point and began to write about food with some regularity. I must say that it was, at the time, career suicide.
