From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone by Paul B. Thompson

by Paul B. Thompson

After centuries of neglect, the ethics of food are back with a vengeance. Justice for food workers and small farmers has joined the rising tide of concern over the impact of industrial agriculture on food animals and the broader environment, all while a global epidemic of obesity-related diseases threatens to overwhelm modern health systems. An emerging worldwide social movement has turned to local and organic foods, and struggles to exploit widespread concern over the next wave of genetic engineering or nanotechnologies applied to food. Paul B. Thompson's book applies the rigor of philosophy to key topics in the first comprehensive study explore interconnections hidden deep within this welter of issues. Bringing more than thirty years of experience working closely with farmers, agricultural researchers and food system activists to the topic, he explores the eclipse of food ethics during the rise of nutritional science, and examines the reasons for its sudden re-emergence in the era of diet-based disease. Thompson discusses social injustice in the food systems of developed economies and shows how we have missed the key insights for understanding food ethics in the developing world. His discussions of animal production and the environmental impact of agriculture breaks new ground where most philosophers would least expect it. By emphasizing the integration of these issues, Thompson not only brings a comprehensive philosophical approach to moral issues in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food -- he introduces a fresh way to think about practical ethics that will have implications in other areas of applied philosophy.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Environment

Paperback

First published April 18, 2015

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Modern debates about food, ranging from food and social justice issues to GMO, are complicated issues. The problem is that for most people, they are seen as relatively simple, because modern pedagogy is taught in isolated silos of subjects and because people generally don't make decisions based on strictly rational thought.

In From Field to Fork Paul Thompson discusses the primary debates going on today, not merely as issues of food, but as debates of social norms, history, philosophy, ethics, economics, politics, psychology, and yes, even the hard sciences. He shows how these debates cut through, across, and involve all these disciplines and how a single discipline simply is inadequate to inform any of these debates.

Even though the book itself is about food, the methods and principles that Thompson utilizes can be extended and applied to just about any contentious topic. He demonstrates why a liberal arts education is still valuable and necessary, and gives evidence of why a good philosophical foundation is vital, even in a modern, data-driven and science-heavy society.

Whatever your views of food in relation to economics, social justice, politics, and scientific innovations, this book will give you something to think about and in ways that you probably hadn't thought to think. It is a very philosophical work, referencing a number of key philosophers and their schools. It is not a light and easy book to read.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone by Paul B. Thompson is a different look at food ethics. Thompson is a philosopher currently teaching at Michigan State University, where he holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural Food and Community Ethics. He earned his B.A. at Emory University before going on to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Thompson is a philosopher and his arguments follow a philosophical reasoning. I took plenty of political philosophy in graduate school and was familiar with his references. His three "M"s of philosophy are Marx, Mill, and Malthus. Mine were Marx, Mill, and Morgenthau so it was not a far leap for me. Mill and Kant, however, make up most of the European philosophy Utilitarianism and reason and perception. Amartya Sen is used in some modern thinking, and Vandana Shiva is used in some of the GMO discussion.

This might be a complex book for average American thinking because in general Americans look only at the surface and like their arguments simple. "It's wrong to kill an animal for culinary enjoyment," vs "We have canine teeth to tear meat." "Farm subsidies support farmers," vs "Majority of the subsidies go to Con-Agra." We like clear cut, one or the other choices, like our two party system of government. Thompson does not take sides but examines reason and utility to form arguments and then checks it against itself. Utilitarianism can be quite brutal in itself.

The arguments and ideas are interesting and people, including myself, miss some of the points. By not eating that piece of meat on the plate in front of me, I am not preventing that animal from suffering. I could not want to eat meat for very selfish reasons, like my health. Does a food donation from "Big Tobacco" nullify its benefits because of its source? Is obesity an individual's problem or it a public problem. If my insurance rates go up to cover the cost of obesity related medical conditions, doesn't that make it my problem or society's problem? What happens if what you do for one purpose becomes a benefit for another? Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle" to bring about changes in labor. People losing limbs and falling into bins to become part of the sausage were his concerns. Instead, the book is known for what it did for food safety. Sinclair said he aimed for the people's heart and hit their stomach.

I picked this book up because as a strict vegetarian I thought it would be about animal rights. I was only right in a very limited sense. Thompson covers food ethics in an all-encompassing way. He looks at the history, the arguments, what helps and hurts farmers, what works for some people and what doesn't for others -- indigenous people in the arctic can not develop a plant-based diet. He looks at food as an ethical and moral issue. If people are starving it would seem to be the right thing to send food aid to alleviated the suffering. But then what happens to all the subsistence farmers that sell part of their crops to buy things they need but can't produce? Suddenly their crops lose value with free food flooding the market. What if the starvation is not the result of not enough food, but no infrastructure to transport it? The Soviets had that problem. Food rotted on train cars and people starved. The problem of starvation may be something deeper than what it appears to be.

Perhaps taking his lesson from Sinclair, Thompson aims at the entire food infrastructure. Not taking any chances, instead of aiming with an arrow, he aims with a Claymore and hits everything in his path. This is a deep, comprehensive, and balanced, work that is as much about philosophy as it is about food. We tend to tread very shallowly in today's world. Sound bites took over for news discussions. Game consoles have taken over pick up baseball games. Newspapers have all but disappeared, and all information on the internet must be true. As much as Thompson's book is about food, it also about deeper and fuller thinking of the world around us.

[Blaine Alward · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like calling this book Food Ethics for Everyone is pretty misleading. I found that the points the author was trying to make were clouded by him making sure you know how much he knows about philosophy. He also badly needs an editor, there were so many omissions of words or grammar errors that it actually distracted me from the material. There are some good points made, but I feel like they were difficult to flesh out from some the ramblings.

[Catherine · Rating 1 out of 5]

I HATED this book! It was wordy and nonsensical. I guess there were some good points in here, but they were hard to sort out. If I hadn't had to read this book for class, it would have never been picked up off the shelf.

[Judd Street · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid primer for food ethics. The book reads a little more like a textbook (in terms of organization and content) than I had hoped, but is written in an engaging and enjoyable way. Paul does a good job of giving an overview of the issues facing food ethics without advancing particular agendas. The one exception to that - and my only major criticism of the book - is that his foundational position (that individual's ultimate right is to eat however they want) goes unchallenged and relatively unexamined. Although it seems intuitively true in most day to day cases, the book doesn't engage with the nuance and challenge that such an absolutist rule can come up against in some circumstances (e.g., when labelling for every fad becomes impractical, when such labelling has major impacts on industries, or when that autonomy ends up causing harm to others).

[Elizabeth]

As seen in Science: http://m.sciencemag.org/content/349/6...

[Mills College Library]

178 T4751 2015