Megan Dean is an assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University. She works in feminist bioethics with a focus on the ethics of food and eating.
What excites you about philosophy?
What excites me about philosophy is that it encourages and equips us to recognize and critique what we take for granted. Philosophy can help us notice what we have assumed is natural, normal, or expected and problematize and evaluate it. Maybe we then decide that what we’ve taken for granted is just fine, but lots of times it isn’t, and then we have to decide what to do about that. That takes us beyond philosophy. But being empowered and encouraged to do that noticing, questioning, critiquing–that’s exciting to me.
As someone who came to feminism through philosophy, I know firsthand how crucial this ability to recognize and critique the taken for granted can be to living a good life. We have so many assumptions about gender and bodies that are very limiting and disempowering, and I had implicitly accepted so many of them—assumptions about what it means to be feminine, to be attractive, to be valuable, to be normal. Feminist philosophy helped me gain critical distance from these assumptions so I could build a life with more space for joy and connection and authenticity than before. It also helped me recognize the ways I was limiting and harming others with my expectations for or assumptions about them and their bodies. It’s really a joy to be able to teach feminist philosophy to undergrads for this reason. I know it sounds cheesy but I do think it can be life-changing.
That said, it did take me a while to learn that just recognizing and acknowledging some assumption or expectation is wrong doesn’t mean we rid ourselves of it. Knowing better doesn’t necessarily mean doing better, or even feeling better, unfortunately. I was pretty disappointed to learn that (my MA thesis was largely motivated by this disappointment). Doing and feeling better often takes other kinds of work—I’ve learned a lot from Ladelle McWhorter on that point. But that’s fine. Of course philosophy can’t do everything! It is valuable nonetheless.
What are you most proud of in your professional life?
I am most proud of the supportive professional communities I am and have been part of. Philosophical work and academic life can be so isolating and demoralizing at times. I truly believe that community is essential to surviving and flourishing in this profession—it is for me, at least! When I arrived at University of Alberta to do my MA I was welcomed into a group of feminist philosophers, including my supervisor Cressida Heyes and other grad students including Catherine Clune-Taylor and Kristin Rodier. I learned so much about philosophy, the profession, and how to make academia livable from those folks. It was a model for me of how supportive and collaborative philosophy could be and I’ve tried to seek out and cultivate similar communities in the places I’ve been ever since. While I was doing my PhD at Georgetown, for instance, I was part of a graduate student group called the Climate Coalition, founded by Nabina Liebow; we would hold professionalization workshops, social events, and we also started the Diversifying Syllabi Reading Group as a way to support each other as graduate instructors.
I started my current job at MSU during the pandemic, and given the circumstances, it has been challenging to create in-person community. So, lately I’ve been focusing most of my attention on virtual connections. I have a few weekly Zoom writing groups and regularly participate in NFCDD writing challenges. (I learned about the importance of writing groups from Alexis Shotwell’s workshop on “suffering-free academic writing.” I really can’t recommend that workshop enough, especially for grad students!)
One virtual community I’m really proud to be part of is Culinary Mind, a group based at the University of Milan who are doing excellent work connecting philosophers of food from around the world. I’ve been helping organize some virtual events with them, including a speaker series for junior researchers called “Half-Baked.” It’s such a great group of people interested in innovative, interdisciplinary work on food and eating.
What are you working on right now?
My current research is focused on the ethics of eating. I’ll say a bit more about that in my answer to the next question, but in general, I’m trying to draw out some of the ethical implications of how we eat and understand eating. So rather than focus on food or what is eaten, as much of food ethics does, I’m focusing on the ethics of the activity of eating itself.
One of my current projects explores the relevance of hospitality to being a “good eater.” A lot of times, good eating gets conflated with healthy eating, whatever we mean by that. But good eating is much more normatively complex than that, and I think that hospitality norms inform our judgments about good eating/good eaters in ways that have been largely unexplored. I’m currently thinking through how eaters with food allergies, intolerances, and other food “issues” are often perceived as bad eaters (and more generally, bad guests) because they violate hospitality norms in order to avoid foods that make them sick. There are issues of ableism here, as well as epistemic injustice insofar as some people aren’t given appropriate credibility when they say they have a food allergy or intolerance. At the same time, I think there are good moral reasons to want to hang on to some hospitality norms. So I’m working through that. I’m drawing from my former professor Karen Stohr’s work on etiquette, as well as critical disability work on food, like Kim Q Hall’s paper “Toward a Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food.” Jane Dryden has a new paper about eating with “gut issues” that I’m learning a lot from too.
Another new project I’m excited about is with one of my regular collaborators, Laura Guidry-Grimes. We’re looking at ethical issues arising when families bring food to patients in hospital settings, particularly when that food contravenes the patient’s care plan. When people do this, it can really undermine trust between providers and families, and in some cases, put patient recovery at risk. At the same time, though, feeding is a central moral function of families as an important means of providing care and—to draw on Hilde Lindemann’s work—of holding family members in their identities. This function can take on particular importance when a family member is in hospital, partly due to the limitations of hospital cafeterias in accommodating patient food preferences and values. So, it’s actually an ethically complex situation. We’re putting together an ethical analysis and some recommendations for clinicians on navigating these situations in productive and ethically-sound ways.
What topic do you think is under explored in philosophy?
Eating! There is plenty of philosophical and ethical work on food: how food should be produced, which ethical concerns are pertinent to our food production, whether non-human animals should be food at all, how to ensure food is justly distributed, and so on. These are all important topics but eating well or being a “good eater” is about much more than what food is eaten. Eating is a means for expressing and (as I argue in various places) shaping our identities, agency, self-understandings, and capacities. We regularly make judgments about others’ moral character based on how they eat or presumably eat. Eating can also be an important aesthetic practice, and it’s clearly a central social and cultural activity, a way we care for and connect to (or distance ourselves from) others.
So, eating is incredibly normatively rich and complex, which warrants philosophical attention in itself. But there are also many problematic normative assumptions about eating that need excavation and critical evaluation. For example, good eating is regularly conflated with healthy eating. It’s just taken for granted that if we’re not eating healthily, we’re failing in some way. But why exactly should we prioritize health over everything else in our eating? What even is healthy eating and who has the authority to decide what it is? Another example that’s particularly relevant to the pandemic-context is “emotional” or “mindless” eating. Apparently many of us have been doing more of it since the pandemic started. Mindless eating is almost universally assumed to be a bad thing. But why? I have a paper where I argue that it’s partly because of the assumption that good agency must be deliberate, conscious, and controlled. I’m convinced that this isn’t how agency actually works and that it’s disempowering to believe that it is.
There are a few philosophers doing excellent work focused on eating. Raymond Boisvert’s got a book called I Eat, Therefore I Think, which I’ve learned a lot from. Annemarie Mol has a new book called Eating in Theory, which is very exciting. But there’s so much more to explore!
Name a trait, skill or characteristic that you have that others may not know about.
Thanks to various summer jobs I had during undergrad, I can drive a Bobcat and dig a grave.
What do you like to do outside work?
I’m a bit hesitant about this question because discussions about how we spend our time tend to feel either a bit preachy or scolding; there’s an unavoidable normative bent to them, I suspect because of an implicit assumption that we should all be maximizing our time doing the most valuable, most productive, most fulfilling things always. Then people who don’t do that (which is everyone) can get defensive about why they don’t live up to that impossible standard and the conversation becomes a shame-filled mess. I’ve seen this happen a few times on Facebook when someone’s asked other academics about taking weekends off, for instance.
So, I will answer the question with the caveat that my answer shouldn’t be taken as prescriptive! It’s really important to me to carve out free time. (This is my current personal theme song by Austin Archer.) I take Saturdays off of work religiously and I have since grad school. This has made academia sustainable and liveable for me, and it serves as a weekly reminder that I am more than my job. I really need that reminder sometimes. It took a while to be able to take a day off without feeling guilty but luckily my emotions have caught up to my commitments.
In my free time I enjoy watching tv–right now I am rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space 9. I’m taking a French class. During the pandemic I revisited some hobbies from when I was younger—drawing and playing piano. I really enjoy getting together with friends for happy hour or a meal and visiting art shows or museums, but since the pandemic I’ve done less of those things. It’s dark and cold here in Michigan already, so lately I have been doing a lot of lying on the couch with my cat, Mr. P. Mr. P is an expert snuggler.
I do work out regularly, partly to manage chronic pain. I’ve been doing online classes with Anatomy in Motion throughout the pandemic and I really love them. One of the major benefits of having a stable job is that I can afford to do exercise classes and other things that help with my pain management. While I was doing my PhD at Georgetown I really struggled with not being able to afford the care I needed. Now they have a union, thanks to the hard work of grad students there. So I hope things are better for folks there in that respect. The sedentary and physically-repetitive nature of academic work can be really taxing on the body, and of course so many people experience chronic pain or disabilities that are exacerbated by academic life. A lot of academic events seem to ignore the fact that people have bodies at all, let alone differently-sized and -abled bodies—there are uncomfortable chairs, no break or breaks that are way too short, no substantial refreshments for hours on end. That needs to change. And professional help managing our bodies really should be available and accessible to everyone. I’ve learned so much about ableism in philosophy and academia from Shelley Tremain. I really recommend the Dialogues on Disability series, but all of Shelley’s work is incredibly valuable.
What would your childhood self say if someone told you that you would grow up to be a philosopher?
She would say “what is a philosopher?” I never heard of philosophy until I went to university. I went to a public high school that didn’t offer philosophy courses or many advanced courses in anything. I didn’t have any family members who worked in academia either, so I didn’t really think of working in academia as an option.
I went to University of King’s College for undergrad and did the Foundation Year Program (FYP). FYP is a “great books” program, and I chose it because I really loved history and literature. But along with The Epic of Gilgamesh and Dante’s Inferno we also read the pre-Socratics, Nietzsche, and Kirkegaard, which got me interested in philosophy. Most of my philosophy classes were at Dalhousie University (the relationship between King’s and Dal is a long and complicated one, but all King’s students attend Dalhousie too). Some of those classes I loved, especially my feminist philosophy courses with Sue Campbell and Letitia Meynell. Some I very much did not. I did try to jump ship to a French major at one point. But near the end of my degree I found Cressida Heyes’ Self-Transformations in the library and realized I could do philosophy about bodies, dieting, and eating disorders—things I deeply cared about and which really impacted my own life. And here I am, doing that!
It wasn’t an obvious path for me into philosophy or academia, and I was only able to perceive it as a possibility for myself because of generous mentorship from people like Letitia and one of my King’s professors, Dorota Glowacka. I’m very grateful to them and now that I’m in the profession, I take my role as a mentor to undergrads and graduate students very seriously. It’s so important!
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
