Everything is edible at least once: An ethics of eating

Abstract

(in lieu of the Abstract, the introduction is presented) If I could choose where my passion and talents lie, I would choose to be a storyteller—one that can write prose and tell stories that have the power to change lives. But stories have their limits in what they can do, especially if there is no one to hear them. I am not a good storyteller, nor do I know how many people will read my writing. Nevertheless, I choose to write something to make sense of the situation I find myself in. My hope is to use philosophy to navigate my complicated relation with food, and to show readers who share similar concerns a possible ethical eating relation with food. I write in response to the growing concern and awareness around the ethical issues in food production and consumption. Ethical eating practices like veganism and vegetarianism are often presented as the ethical alternative to meat-based diets if we are concerned for the wellbeing of animals. But being vegetarian or vegan in North America still requires us to consider the ecological impact of monocrop agriculture and the wellbeing of laborers. The conundrum in choosing between eating animals or supporting agricultural practices that pollute waterways and threaten biodiversity mean no matter what food choices we make we are still implicated in damage of some sort. Attempting to juggle between environmental considerations and consideration of animals often leads to vegans, vegetarians, and other ethical food eaters being criticized for hypocrisy. Furthermore, ethical food diets are often expensive and inaccessible for poor people and effectively reserves ethical eating for those who are wealthy. With the multiple dimensions of consideration, it is tempting to only focus on one aspect as controlling one thing in response to chaos and build up an ethical response to other dimensions from there. But if all eating involves some kind of suffering or damage to the environment, the workers, or the organisms, this approach can be paralyzing. I think it is possible to do better, and to theorize about ethical eating practices that are not overwhelming and are sensitive to oppression and its legacy along the lines of race, gender, and class. In my thesis, I argue for an ethical eating practice based on a relational ontology of food with the hopes that it provides a good method of thinking through ethical eating practices. I do this by grounding my argument in a theoretical framework that recognizes knowledge and interpretations as situated in social contexts and acquired/developed for social goals. The theoretical framework I engage with and my starting position will be explained in detail in chapter one and exemplified in chapters two and three. Using the idea of generating interpretations of the world for the purpose of change and the goals influencing the aspects of reality to emphasize in interpretation, in chapter two I articulate a relational understanding of food. Understanding food relationally emphasizes ethical issues often disregarded as unimportant or only tangential to food ethics. In this conception of food, these issues are central and inseparable from our ethical relations with food. In chapter three, I respond to more dominant views in food ethics that argue for strict vegan or vegetarian diets. I argue their lack of nuanced understanding of food affects their ability to respond to our differentiated access to foods due to our socio-economic positions and our varied responsibilities associated with them. Recognizing that we are not equally responsible in the ills of our current food consumption practices, I propose a method of developing ethical eating relations that prescribe dimensions of consideration for how we and what we ought to eat. As one possible way of navigating the relations embedded in foods, I suggest treating the food we eat as the body of a friend. Through that interpretation of our eating relations, I aim to show how our individual relations with food can be more ethical, and how managing our eating relations can incite responses to change the social structures that gave rise to the ethical issues in food production. I cannot un-witness the impacts of climate change, institutional racism, the fact that we live on stolen lands, that my friends continue to fight against misogyny and sexism because they have no choice, and the racist undertones that sometimes appear in moral vegetarianism, veganism, and climate change activism. There is a need for food ethics for reasons from the connection between food production and climate change to issues of who can access food and what foods we should and should not eat. But trying to eat ethically while knowing there are other issues like poverty and water pollution is troubling because deciding which ethical issues to emphasize is and will remain a dilemma. We are in a pickle when it comes to eating ethically. Vegans and vegetarians are often criticized by non-vegans and non-vegetarians as being hypocritical because vegan diets sometimes are complicit in cultural appropriation—I used to be one among vegan denouncers. What I failed to recognize is that those who are vegans and vegetarians for moral (especially environmental) reasons are at least trying to make change for the better. If being ethically pure is not an ideal we strive toward, as I discuss more in chapter one, then recognizing the contradictions of our eating habits might not be as bad since it provides avenues for change. Living in a pickle may be good if we recognize the goal is not to separate ourselves from the vegetable and spice mix, but to put the pickles to good use. So, I start my theorizing from the problems in eating.