From Silo to Spoon

Abstract

Key questions in food ethics—food aid, local diets, food labeling, sustainability and agricultural pollution—have been understood through a lens that takes production, processing, and distribution to be general features of the industrial economy. Challenging these fundamental assumptions calls for an approach that goes beyond dietary advice. A deep inquiry into the nature of food and farming, and into the institutions that structure food purchases and environmental regulation, shows how a place-based agrarian outlook reveals unappreciated philosophical complexity, opening to a more satisfactory ethos for contemporary food practices. At the same time, the promise of an alternative food ethics requires uncovering the way that traditional agrarian norms continue to be implicated in structural racism and oppression. Thompson’s “agrarian pragmatism” counters mainstream applied ethics with a line of argument contrasting ethical inquiry with discourses of persuasion and social control. The book concludes with a study of how food ethics provides an entry into dialog between themes in environmental philosophy and the philosophy of race.