The organic food philosophy. A qualitative exploration of the practices, values, and beliefs of Dutch organic consumers within a cultural-historical frame

Food consumption has been identified as a realm of key importance for progressing the world towards more sustainable consumption overall. Consumers have the option to choose organic food as a visible product of more ecologically integrated farming methods and, in general, more carefully produced food. This study aims to investigate the choice for organic from a cultural-historical perspective and aims to reveal the food philosophy of current organic consumers in The Netherlands. A concise history of the organic food movement is provided going back to the German Lebensreform and the American Natural Foods Movement. We discuss themes such as the wish to return to a more natural lifestyle, distancing from materialistic lifestyles, and reverting to a more meaningful moral life. Based on a number of in-depth interviews, the study illustrates that these themes are still of influence among current organic consumers who additionally raised the importance of connectedness to nature, awareness, and purity. We argue that their values are shared by a much larger part of Dutch society than those currently shopping for organic food. Strengthening these cultural values in the context of more sustainable food choices may help to expand the amount of organic consumers and hereby aid a transition towards more sustainable consumption. © 2012 The Author(s)

Attractors/Basin of Attraction

It is a controversial issue to decide who first coined the term “attractor”. According to Peter Tsatsanis, the editor of the English version of Prédire n’est pas expliquer, it was René Thom who first introduced such a term. It is necessary, however, to remember that Thom thought that it was first introduced by the American mathe- matician Steven Smale, “although Smale says it was Thom that coined the neolo- gism “attractor”“(Tsatsanis 2010: 63–64 n. 20). From this point of view, Bob Williams expressed a more cautious opinion by saying that “the word “attractor” was invented by these guys, Thom and Smale” (Cucker and Wong 2000: 183). But other mathematicians are of the opinion that the term “attractor” was introduced neither by René Thom nor by Steve Smale (cf. at least Milnor 1985: 177– 178). In short, the “authorship” of such a word cannot be easily established. Despite this, the etymology of “attractor” is transparent: this word comes from the Latin attrahere, a verb which literally means “to pull” or “to drawn to” (de Vries 2012: 541). Indeed, an attractor is generally a mathematical object “that represents a steady stable state adopted by a dynamic system” (Kim et al. 2013: 1): such a state “attracts the dynamics of the system” (Bernal and Gomez 2014: 61), or, in other words, it is a stable state towards which the behaviour of the system is moving over time (see dynamic system)