Deliberative and pragmatist agriculture

Abstract

It is well known how stimulatingly John Dewey could write about gardens, in particular school gardens ('edible gardens', not flower gardens). Edible gardens provide children opportunities for the full development of social, cognitive and manual skills, which in his view are the most important skills that together bring something like republic attitudes. I will first give a short introduction into Dewey's thoughts about edible gardens and then will try to construct his view on farming and industrial food processing on the basis of the scarce remarks that he made about these activities. Inspired by his thoughts, but also radically transforming them, I will elaborate a pragmatist view on agriculture, by outlining the current challenges on global and regional level. It turns out that edible gardens are important, but in general cannot be seen as an alternative for the food processing and retail sector and they cannot definitively deal with food security. It is therefore necessary to develop a deliberative pragmatist theory of the food processing and retail sector