Food Ethics

The final readings for this class question conventional beliefs about the best way to consume food ethically. The fraught aspects of most people’s knowledge of farm practices are addressed in the pieces “An Open Letter From a Farmer to Angry Vegetarians” and “The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against Agri-intellectuals” by Jenna Woginrich and Blake Hurst respectively. In the first of these pieces, Woginrich attacks the rational consistency underlying the belief that vegan and vegetarian diets are morally superior to conventional diets for the premium they place on protecting sovereign animal life. She makes this point by appealing to the fact that “blood, bone, [and] fish” are necessary to fertilize the fields of soybeans that vegans and vegetarians subsist off of. Therefore, she concludes, that even animal free diets come at some cost to animal life. The second article, by author Blake Hurst, blasts so called “agri-intellectuals” for their conflated sense of moral superiority. To this end, he argues that their beliefs about the ethical superiority of their food choices are based on a lack of knowledge about what farming truly entails. Farming, Hurst argues, is “more… than a simple morality play” (206) and involves pragmatic, albeit messy elements that in their execution  produce greater happiness for farmers and consumers than their cleaner looking alternatives. In defending farm practices against mainstream beliefs, both authors challenge readers to reconsider their understanding of the intersection between ethics and food.

The pieces “Will Organic Food Fail to Feed the World?” “Eat Food: Food Defined” and “Real Food, Real Farming” by authors David Biello, Michael Pollan, and Eliot Coleman respectively draw attention to the role scientific institutions play in food morality. David Biello notes that “organic yields [being] considerably lower than conventional yields” (232) ought not represent a problem for the ubiquitous implementation of organic farming practices. He makes this point by arguing that food scarcity is not a problem inhering in production, but in faulty “distribution and waste” (234). Pollan argues that the dubious health claims on the labels of what he calls “foodish products (9) are supported by “erroneous science” (14) and a dysfunctional FDA.  Drawing attention to the process of qualifying health claims allows Pollan to use science in order to condemn certain foods while elevating others. Furthermore, Coleman comments on the “biological quality of food” (237) in order to base his primary point, that the “highest quality food” (237) is not adequately represented by the word organic, in a scientific context. Each of the authors mentioned in this paragraph use their knowledge of scientific institutions to promote an aspect of how various food practices ought to be carried out.

The last three pieces I will discuss impact reader’s notions about food ethics by drawing attention to the social justice aspect of food consciousness. In her piece “Biotechnology Isn’t the Key to Feeding the World” Frances Moore Lappe argues that “hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but by a scarcity of democracy” (250). In so doing, she draws attention to the fact that there is a human cost associated with the way individuals choose to eat. On a similar note, authors Sally Kohn and Natasha Bowens emphasize the workers rights violations undergirding alternative food. Kohn does this through drawing attention to the fact that “ask[ing] for a side of worker justice” (215) is not a priority for those who typically identify with alternative food movements. Bowens draws attention to workers rights violations in the food industry by arguing that the current “food system is rooted in… economic injustice” (254).  Each of these pieces draws attention to a social justice concern in the field of food ethics.

In this piece, I have called upon the work of several authors to examine the ways in which food intersects with ethics. I have discussed farming, and how it is commonly misunderstood, and therefore demonized by foodies with good intentions. I then made mention of several authors who rely on science to discuss what ought to change within the food industry. Finally, I discussed the workers rights aspect of food ethics, introducing a social justice aspect into my work. All of this was done in an attempt to explain why and how food matters through the lense of ethical inquiry.