Sourcing Food
What is good food? How should we think ethically about where food comes from? We explored these questions in a recent podcast, drawing on Julian Baginni's book Virtues of the Table...
Food occupies a place in every type of human thought and behaviour. From animalistic desires to social habits and the highest parts of culture, food both informs civilisation and is shaped by it. It encompasses creativity, sensations, raw emotion and the intellectual. Food also grounds us and bridges the chasm between extremes of class and intellectual ability; we all eat food and tackle the issues that come with it. After all, one of history's greatest minds, Immauel Kant, died eating cheese sandwiches. The dude loved cheese - couldn't get enough of it! His last words were apparently "it is good" as he scranned a cheese sarnie. Food is inarguably one of the most important aspects of the human experience and one of the most overlooked when it comes to philosophy, usually occupying the most neglected dimensions in aesthetics and the philosophy of art.
There's no such thing as bad food, just bad diet. Diets are also not universal, they can be tailored for different results depending on the intention, whether it be nutritional health, weight, sports or anything else. Understanding them may be the key to mental health. More importantly, working on personal health, making ethical choices and cultivating intellectual virtues are all interconnected. We may even benefit from ceasing to talk about them in separating terms. Eating well is the first step to living well. Self care and the care of others don’t need to be separated, as part of self-care is cultivating wisdom and empathy to others. Its all one holistic project. This interrelationship is a common theme in the things we chat about. Recognising it and equipping ourselves with less stringent and unwieldy thinking tools requires us to lose dogma and be willing to accept nuance. Nuances like... Big commercial chains aren't always bad given that they have more resources and job security, homemade isn’t always tastier, small-scale doesn’t mean you have to start making your own marmite. Underdogs are attractive and resonate with people but we want a Goliath when it comes to issues like animal welfare, not a David.
There is more choice than ever before but this often means we think less about food than ever before and hide from plurality and the burden of choice. Some that do think seriously about food are purely interested in it as a craving or fashionable product rather than part of heritage and community or are overly pretentious. Others are almost quasi-religious, desperately filling the void in a now godless universe and elevate their position on meat-eating to a level of cosmic importance. In building their entire outlook around the issues they create absolute and binary rules, chastising others as "sinful" and being themselves, ignorant to many contradictions. Often this manifests as dogma in the false reassurance of labels...
For example, shopping "local" has become a cult that, at times, makes no economic, ethical or aesthetic sense. Local is generally a good idea when it comes to certain foods as there's a value in homemade and you get to support small business around the corner. However, Local isn’t an excuse for shite quality and local tea or potatoes in London is obviously ridiculous. Food miles, import economy and yields are more complicated than one simple rule of thumb can express. You can’t grow everything in your back garden and neither should you. "There's no need for a fisherman to start farming" as Baginni points out. Bulk and the yield of a harvest are just as important as geography. Fertile land can produce bulk speciality crop ready for large single shipments which is better than sourcing hundreds of smaller yields closer by. We don't need less food miles on bananas but give me a farmer's market sausage roll any day. Upon deeper contemplation, the appeal of local is found in mutual interdependence, transparency and sharing, not geography, isolation or hoarding. This is the true appeal of allotments - we are let behind the curtain and our social bonds grow stronger. Emotionally, we want to feel connected to something, part of the story and soul of food.
Half caff skinny caramel macchiatos is one of many foodie inconstancies. Refusing to help bee populations by protecting their "dignity" and not consuming honey is another. So is buying large free range eggs that are painful to hatch and making your own bread to get back to "nature's roots" and then grabbing a McDonald's drive through when you're done. You find pretension in everything from ale-drinking and visual art to music and clothes design but this doesn't mean that being passionate about food is always snobbery. Usually it can be put down to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a cognitive bias whereby people who are incompetent at something are unable to recognise their own incompetence once they gain a little knowledge in the subject. Only once they get to expert level does this curve start to level out. We all do it, its a case of recognising it. Often, people confuse gatekeeping and an expensive climate for the whole thing being a scam - take whiskey tasting for example. These are two separate issues. Snobby people are attracted to opera, they're not snobby because they like opera. How charitable does one have to be be before they are allowed to spend surplus cash on caviar? A high price tag or niche acquired taste does not necessitate pretension. Often this is just ignorance or poor-self esteem lashing out or a separate socio-economic point.
People also have similar misconceptions about how food is made. For instance, hand milking is an out-dated and often uncomfortable practice in comparison to safe, efficient machines which generally only look scary to non-farmers. Rough hands and a bucket is not better despite being "more natural". Indoor rearing is also necessary to protect the health and quality of life for livestock (which believe it or not is a prime concern for many businesses and farmers that deal with animals). "Small numbers & big open fields" seem great from a romanticised perspective but can lead to distress from weather, disease and unavoidable accidents, especially during certain times of year. Crowding and exercise don't have the same psychological impact on cattle as they do in humans, the reality is more complicated than appearance and often farmers genuinely know best. This is another case of the fetishisation of nature from an armchair perspective that goes all the way to the abattoir.
We could all benefit from paying attention to the seasonality of food, something we miss hidden away from the natural world in the artificial environment of the office and home. An appreciation for the flow of time and of the seasons requires us to cultivate the virtue of patience. Holding off on immediate gratification means there's both moral and aesthetic reasons to wait for those strawberries! Plus seasonal food tastes better, fact.
Organic is another good rule of thumb but certain non-organic chemicals (not to mention medicines) are necessary. This is even more true when it comes to feeding larger populations. We need to be thinking on a larger scale about sustainability (not just at any cost, ie. sticking hundreds of polytunnels in the Wye Valley). Often, the places that are truly organic are dying rural villages that time forgot, cursed to poverty. So issues of access, wealth and affordability are also the start in being true stewards of the planet. Big scary industry can, in theory, take care of the land. We talked a lot about the problem of declining topsoil and the promising future of lab-grown meat as ways to think about our custodianship of future generations.
Vegetarianism imagines a sanctity to life but paradoxically is often complicit in killing bacteria, garden weeds and harmful insects to ultimately promote life. Keepers of domestic cats harm countless birds and mice by doing so and growing vegetables destroys agricultural habitats like scrub and hedgerows. Plus certain land isn't arable and suitable for crop - thus steep hillsides are best suited for cattle. And if we're ruling out fish then there just won't be enough food to go around and you're condemning people to an unliveable reality! Any position like vegetarianism is just a matter of degrees, regardless of how absolute you think it is. Meat eating isn't complete nihilism or a harsh materialism by contrast to the vegetarian's transcendent world of sanctity; it's an affirmation of the value of life and mortality. Veggie without compassion results in things like buying battery hen eggs and begins to make no sense as a label... Consumption of milk and cheese still harm animals, it’s superstition if you think that the action of eating it makes it worse.
Veganism as a blanket rule is the application of the virtue of compassion. However, blanket rules often miss important nuances. It is entirely possible to compassionately eat meat (the unrequested kebab that would otherwise go to waste, for instance; not doing so would arguably be the opposite of compassion). There exists a huge moral ravine between sustainable and reluctant boar-culling and grisly trophy-hunting of an endangered elephant. Shutting down open conversation about this simply creates dogmatic and stagnant character and divides the world into more labels and tribal camps. Suffering, rather than pain is more useful benchmark for thinking about keeping animals. For example, lots of physical discomfort is ultimately good for a cow's health (jabs and health checks) but it is needless suffering we seek to avoid. We're too divorced from the process of meat and moral ignorance / fake sentimentality on both sides of the debate shows a lack of caring or compassion. Farmers could be numb to compassion but they probably understand animals far more than most. Its lazy to think that psychopathy rules in the abattoir - most research shows the opposite. Only a mind that has demonised and dehumanised people with alternate views would be shocked at this. You can't deny animals have sensations, but cannot just understand that abstractly. Rather than project transcendent values, anxieties, temporality and meaning onto animal life we need to understand non-human life for what it is and then begin to care for it.
Time will reframe the debate on FairTrade (and the rest of these issues) and many of us will be on the wrong side of history, complicit in exploitation. We disagreed with Baginni in his point that proximity and detachment from a situation makes no difference to the moral reality. We thought that as far as virtues are concerned, passively and indirectly being associated with an injustice that is not widely understood or noticed is a tad more permissible than knowingly exploiting people in the flesh. It brings different problems of moral courage and ignorance of course and still probably needs to be thought about more than it is.
Many of these debates are traditionally thought of as conversations about how we live in relation to other life; whether it be animals, plants or people. Thinking of these issues as opportunities to work on the self and the virtues we hold is the first step in realising that ethics is as much about a self-to-self relationship as it is interpersonal. Developing virtues is also a classless, universal project but its worth accepting that not everyone can be a moral saint, especially at the expense of mental health and poverty. Tackle these issues little and often and accept that we always have a lot a to learn and are often wrong. Understand both sides of a debate and try to grow. A debate is something to be learned from, not won.
Go follow Julian Baginni and read this book! It contains our current favourite quote: "the moral life is lived in a state of bewildered enquiry between conviction and apathy". Be morally serious but sceptical about certainty; ethics is not a checklist!
The next podcast will cover diet and fasting...