Abstract
It is no secret that there have been radical changes in the way we produce and consume food ever since the introduction of industrial methods of production to food. Such changes have raised several ethical concerns about loss of biodiversity, ethical treatment of animals, nutritional quality of industrial food, safety of genetically modified food, and adequate working conditions of people in agricultural sector among many others. Food ethics has recently started to respond to some such concerns. However, a food ethics that is based on individualistic theories and principles such as well-being, and liberty is part of the problem. The shortcoming is that it identifies individuals only in an isolated way without considering their social contexts and relationships. We are tied by our location, cultural values, race, gender, familial traditions, societal norms, and human institutions, along with relationships to environments and animals. In order to highlight the narrow focus of individualistic principles in addressing food debates I have utilized an ethical tool called the ‘ethical matrix’ that analysis food issues with respect to the principles of well-being, autonomy and justice. In this paper, I present the case for a communitarian model of food ethics that can help address the ethical concerns raised by industrial food production and also suggest a possible way to assist in making ethical decisions.
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Notes
A product of the first half of the twentieth century is the concept of ‘nutrition’. Food was reduced to the nutrients it was made up of and health was translated into dietary advice based on the consumption of specific quantities of different nutrients. There are important concerns related to this discovery, such as, an oversimplification of the connection between nutrients and bodily health and adoption of a rather reductive approach in understanding food Scrinis (2015).
Commoditization transforms food into a commodity in the market that can be bought or sold through a monetary exchange. To put it simply, food commoditization is a process by which food gets treated as a commodity in the market and this aspect is given preference over other aspects like ‘sustenance, human rights, and social relations’. See also Baofu (2012).
While scarcity in food production is no longer a primary issue in most industrialized nations food security could still be an issue in industrialized societies. I am not motivated to equate sufficiency in food production with being food secure for a nation or a society as I feel there are other contributing factors like distributional and institutional injustices along with income insecurities that at times make people lack access to food. M.S. Swaminathan(2001) makes an important point regarding this that people need to have jobs or some other source of livelihood in order to ensure they can buy food. There are problems like scarcity in food production, faulty distribution systems, nutritionally deficient food, and affordability of healthy food among many other problems that can be understood as being food insecure.
Access to culturally appropriate food is also an important aspect of food security; food security endowed with cultural implications will go beyond concerns like scarcity and distribution. Some of these concerns relating to food security gain more relevance in industrialized societies. See also Irrera (2016)
‘GM’ is used to refer to the technology of modifying genes of plants and organisms by scientists. This has been possible due to recombinant DNA technique (1973); this has made it possible to transfer genes from one organism to another organism or mute some existing gene in an organism (Singer and Mason 2006).
By arguing this way I am in no way challenging the claim ‘individuals have values’ but it becomes problematic if only individuals are considered to have value.
The table is an adaptation of Ben Mepham’s ethical matrix applied to GM. (Mepham 1996, p.106)
I understand that this criticism doesn’t apply to the ethical matrix given by Kaiser et al. (2007) since the matrix there is not fixed and predetermined.
Most of the reasons offered by Virginia Held are made in order to make a case for care ethics. But for my purpose I have borrowed two of them.
I understand that the communitarian approach can prove to be promising in making ethical decisions with respect to other types of applied ethics (business ethics, medical ethics, environmental ethics, etc.). But I will not be dwelling on this in my paper. The focus of this paper will be on the relevance of communitarian values in food ethics.
In this paper, Werkheiser and Noll understand communitarianism in terms of activism as a community focused sub-movement that suggests that people are member of communities, where food is co-constituted and locality becomes an important factor in moving towards more just communities.
Food Ethics Council UK is a charity organization that is aimed at creating a food system that is fair and that is focused on the health of people, animals and the environment. It is an organization that understands that decisions about food are made without enough ethical deliberation and consideration and want to put ethics at the center of making decisions about food. Food Ethics Council utilizes the ethical matrix in order to analyze the complexity of ethical issues relating to food without restricting decision making to single ethical theory. The criticisms of the ethical matrix discussed in the previous section also apply to its application by the Food Ethics Council.
Local Food movements recognize people as members of a community and locality to be an important aspect of safeguarding relationships and furthering just and fair communities. See Werkheiser and Noll (2014)
The concept of food sovereignty was coined in 1996 by La Via Campesina at the World Food Summit.
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Sharma, S. Eating Ethically: Towards a Communitarian Food Model. Food ethics 5, 18 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41055-020-00078-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41055-020-00078-1