Food Ethics: The Basics


Book Description

Food Ethics: The Basics is a concise yet comprehensive introduction to the ethical dimensions of the production and consumption of food. It offers an impartial exploration of the most prominent ethical questions relating to food and agriculture including: • Should we eat animals? • Are locally produced foods ethically superior to globally sourced foods? • Do people in affluent nations have a responsibility to help reduce global hunger? • Should we embrace bioengineered foods? • What should be the role of government in promoting food safety and public health? Using extensive data and real world examples, as well as providing suggestions for further reading, Food Ethics: The Basics is an ideal introduction for anyone interested in the ethics of food.




From Field to Fork


Book Description

Paul B. Thompson covers diet and health issues, livestock welfare, world hunger, food justice, environmental ethics, Green Revolution technology and GMOs in this concise but comprehensive study. He shows how food can be a nexus for integrating larger social issues in social inequality, scientific reductionism, and the eclipse of morality.




The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics


Book Description

While the history of philosophy has traditionally given scant attention to food and the ethics of eating, in the last few decades the subject of food ethics has emerged as a major topic, encompassing a wide array of issues, including labor justice, public health, social inequity, animal rights and environmental ethics. This handbook provides a much needed philosophical analysis of the ethical implications of the need to eat and the role that food plays in social, cultural and political life. Unlike other books on the topic, this text integrates traditional approaches to the subject with cutting edge research in order to set a new agenda for philosophical discussions of food ethics. The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over 35 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into 7 parts: the phenomenology of food gender and food food and cultural diversity liberty, choice and food policy food and the environment farming and eating other animals food justice Essential reading for students and researchers in food ethics, it is also an invaluable resource for those in related disciplines such as environmental ethics and bioethics.




Before Dinner


Book Description

Both issues refer to the social and cultural aspects of food.




Modern Food, Moral Food


Book Description

American eating changed dramatically in the early twentieth century. As food production became more industrialized, nutritionists, home economists, and so-called racial scientists were all pointing Americans toward a newly scientific approach to diet. Food faddists were rewriting the most basic rules surrounding eating, while reformers were working to reshape the diets of immigrants and the poor. And by the time of World War I, the country's first international aid program was bringing moral advice about food conservation into kitchens around the country. In Modern Food, Moral Food, Helen Zoe Veit argues that the twentieth-century food revolution was fueled by a powerful conviction that Americans had a moral obligation to use self-discipline and reason, rather than taste and tradition, in choosing what to eat. Veit weaves together cultural history and the history of science to bring readers into the strange and complex world of the American Progressive Era. The era's emphasis on science and self-control left a profound mark on American eating, one that remains today in everything from the ubiquity of science-based dietary advice to the tenacious idealization of thinness.




Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics


Book Description

This Encyclopedia offers a definitive source on issues pertaining to the full range of topics in the important new area of food and agricultural ethics. It includes summaries of historical approaches, current scholarship, social movements, and new trends from the standpoint of the ethical notions that have shaped them. It combines detailed analyses of specific topics such as the role of antibiotics in animal production, the Green Revolution, and alternative methods of organic farming, with longer entries that summarize general areas of scholarship and explore ways that they are related. Renewed debate, discussion and inquiry into food and agricultural topics have become a hallmark of the turn toward more sustainable policies and lifestyles in the 21st century. Attention has turned to the goals and ethical rationale behind production, distribution and consumption of food, as well as to non-food uses of cultivated biomass and the products of animal husbandry. These wide-ranging debates encompass questions in human nutrition, animal rights and the environmental impacts of aquaculture and agricultural production. Each of these and related topics is both technically complex and involves an – often implicit – ethical dimension. Other topics include methods for integrating ethics into scientific and technical research programs or development projects, the role of intensive agriculture and biotechnology in addressing persistent world hunger and the role of crops, forests and engineered organisms in making a transition to renewable, carbon-neutral sources of energy. The Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics proves an indispensible reference point for future research and writing on topics in agriculture and food ethics for decades to come.




The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics


Book Description

Academic food ethics incorporates work from philosophy but also anthropology, economics, the environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. Scholars from these fields have been producing work for decades on the food system, and on ethical, social, and policy issues connected to the food system. Yet in the last several years, there has been a notable increase in philosophical work on these issues-work that draws on multiple literatures within practical ethics, normative ethics and political philosophy. This handbook provides a sample of that philosophical work across multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption; food justice; food politics; food workers; and, food and identity.




The Ethics of What We Eat


Book Description

An investigation of the food choices people make and practices of the food producers who create this food for us leading to a discussion of how we might put more ethics into our shopping carts.




The Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society


Book Description

How is food political? : market, state, and knowledge / Ronald J. Herring -- Science, politics, and the framing of modern agricultural technologies / John Harriss, Drew Stewart -- Genetically improved crops / Martina Newell-McGloughlin -- Agroecological intensification of smallholder farming / Rebecca Nelson, Robert Coe -- The hardest case : what blocks improvements in agriculture in Africa? / Robert L. Paarlberg -- The poor, malnutrition, biofortification, and biotechnology / Alexander J. Stein -- Biofuels : competition for land, resources, and political subsidies / David Pimentel, Michael Burgess -- Alternative paths to food security / Norman Uphoff -- Ethics of food production and consumption / Michiel Korthals -- Food, justice, and land / Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Jennifer C. Franco -- Food security, productivity, and gender inequality / Bina Agarwal -- Delivering food subsidy : the state and the market / Ashok Kotwal, Bharat Ramaswami -- Diets, nutrition, and poverty : lessons from India / Raghav Gaiha, Raghbendra Jha, Vani S. Kulkarni, Nidhi Kaicker -- Food price and trade policy biases : inefficient, inequitable, yet not inevitable / Kym Andersen -- Intellectual property rights and the politics of food / Krishna Ravi Srinivas -- Is food the answer to malnutrition / David E. Sahn -- Fighting mother nature with biotechnology / Alan McHughen -- Climate change and agriculture : countering doomsday scenarios / Derrill D. Watson II -- Wild foods / Jules Pretty, Zareen Bharucha -- Livestock in the food debate / Purvi Mehta-Bhatt, Paulo Ficarelli -- The social vision of the alternative food movement / Siddhartha Shome -- Food values beyond nutrition / Ann Grodzins Gold -- Cultural politics of food safety : genetically modified food in japan, France, and the United States / Kyoko Sato -- Food safety / Bruce M. Chassy -- The politics of food labeling and certification / Emily Clough -- The politics of grocery shopping: eating, voting, and (possibly) transforming the food system / Josée Johnston, Norah MacKendrick -- The political economy of regulation of biotechnology in agriculture / Gregory D. Graff, Gal Hochman, David Zilberman -- Coexistence in the fields? : GM, organic, and conventional food crops / Janice Thies -- Global movements for food justice / M. Jahi Chappell -- The rise of the organic foods movement as a transnational phenomenon / Tomas Larsson -- The dialectic of pro-poor papaya / Sarah Davidson Evanega, Mark Lynas -- Thinking the African food crisis : the Sahel forty years on / Michael J. Watts -- Transformation of the agrifood industry in developing countries / Thomas Reardon, C. Peter Timmer -- The twenty-first century agricultural land rush / Gregory Thaler -- Agricultural futures : the politics of knowledge / Ian Scoones




Food, Animals, and the Environment


Book Description

Food, Animals, and the Environment: An Ethical Approach examines some of the main impacts that agriculture has on humans, nonhumans, and the environment, as well as some of the main questions that these impacts raise for the ethics of food production, consumption, and activism. Agriculture is having a lasting effect on this planet. Some forms of agriculture are especially harmful. For example, industrial animal agriculture kills 100+ billion animals per year; consumes vast amounts of land, water, and energy; and produces vast amounts of waste, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Other forms, such as local, organic, and plant-based food, have many benefits, but they also have many costs, especially at scale. These impacts raise difficult ethical questions. What do we owe animals, plants, species, and ecosystems? What do we owe people in other nations and future generations? What are the ethics of risk, uncertainty, and collective harm? What is the meaning and value of natural food in a world reshaped by human activity? What are the ethics of supporting harmful industries when less harmful alternatives are available? What are the ethics of resisting harmful industries through activism, advocacy, and philanthropy? The discussion ranges over cutting-edge topics such as effective altruism, abolition and regulation, revolution and reform, individual and structural change, single-issue and multi-issue activism, and legal and illegal activism. This unique and accessible text is ideal for teachers, students, and anyone else interested in serious examination of one of the most complex and important moral problems of our time.