AMAMIHE Journal of Applied Philosophy

This paper develops Gastro-Epistemology as a systematic philosophical framework rooted in Igbo cosmology and thought. It argues that food, understood through the Igbo concept of nri and its attendant ritual, cosmogonic, and social structures, functions as an ontological infrastructure: a foundational stratum upon which Igbo categories of being, knowledge, identity, and relational obligation are erected and sustained. The paper contends that the alimentary domain is not incidental to Igbo metaphysics but constitutive of it; food is simultaneously an ontological event, an epistemic mechanism, and a relational performance. Gastro-Epistemology is proposed as a theoretical framework that excavates the conditions under which food mediates knowing, structures reality, and regulates communal life in African philosophical thought. In advancing this framework, the paper challenges the systematic exclusion of the alimentary from the Western philosophical canon, exposes the epistemic violence embedded in that exclusion, and repositions Igbo food philosophy as a self-sufficient epistemological system with its own categories of truth, personhood, and communal obligation. The paper draws on Igbo primary categories including nri (Igbo knowledge of food), mmiri (water-life force), and omenala di na nri (food festivals, rites and rituals) and engages critically with Western food philosophy, African epistemology, and decolonial theory.

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