Early in Book II of The Republic, Plato begins the foundation of the just city with food. “Come then,” Socrates says, “let us create a city from the beginning. And it is our needs, it seems, that will create it. Surely our first and greatest need is to provide food to sustain life” (369d). Twenty-five hundred years later, popular culture in North America and Western Europe seems preoccupied with food. Bookstores display hundreds of cookbooks representing every imaginable cuisine. Countless websites, food apps, and television channels are devoted to food. Chefs have become household names and media stars, many are known simply by their first names: Emeril, Mario, Alton, Bobby, Alice, Rachel, Wolfgang, Jamie, Nigella, Ina, Padma.
Beyond popular culture, scholarly attention to food has also been increasing. Obesity and its attendant health problems, characterized by the World Health Organization as a “growing epidemic,” affect more than one billion people worldwide. Malnutrition plagues another billion people and accounts for fully one-third of infant deaths worldwide. Food production and distribution, food safety, and food security have become the focus of serious scientific, governmental, and social attention.
Yet the topic of food has been mostly disregarded by modern and contemporary philosophers. Despite some work on hunger and famine, and some work in environmental ethics, food is almost totally absent from philosophical circles. Paul Thompson has written a book to address what he describes as this “long eclipse of food ethics” (22).
From Field to Fork provides a comprehensive introduction to the ethics of food that is both broad and deep. The book is a comprehensive enough introduction that it could serve as a text for a semester-long introductory course on food ethics. But Thompson, a philosopher who holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agriculture, Food, and Community Ethics at Michigan State University, does not shy away from advancing his own well reasoned, sometimes controversial and oftentimes subtle, conclusions. The book deserves to be read by scholars from any field related to food.
Thompson’s work is in the best tradition of applied ethics, writing with the knowledge and experience of an insider, while maintaining his perspective as a philosophical outsider. Thompson describes his task as “hybridizing some basic philosophy with some basic food and agricultural science,” and he succeeds admirably (xi-xii).
Food ethics is an incredibly diverse field, ranging from questions of personal virtue (what and how should I eat?) to social justice (how ought food be produced and distributed?), and from epistemology (how to assess reasonable risk?) to metaphysics (what is “natural”?). Thompson’s method is broadly pragmatic, as is appropriate for thinking through a diverse and complicated field. He tells us that he is not writing “to peddle theoretical constructs,” but to engage in a process of “inquiry” by which he hopes to help resolve “disturbance and disruption” in how we live our lives (16). He relies on standard ethical theories such as rights, utilitarianism, or feminist ethics (with which he is most sympathetic) as useful argument forms to clarify or frame issues in pursuit of “better and more correct answers,” if not final and conclusive ones. But there is an implicit framework here and, in my opinion, what that framework misses is a call to action for business ethicists (16).
In the broadest terms, Thompson approaches food ethics at two levels. First, there are ethical issues at the individual level of dietary choice: what, how, why, in which circumstances we eat and what consequences follow from these choices. Second, at the level of social, political, and economic policy, there are systemic issues of food production and distribution. Thompson’s explanation for why modern philosophy has virtually ignored food ethics cites two assumptions embedded in philosophical liberalism’s approach to these two levels. First, individual dietary choice was assumed to be a matter of personal preference and therefore, like any self-regarding choice, is best treated as a private matter of personal liberty. Second, food was assumed to be just another economic good, and therefore food justice could be subsumed under more general theories of social and economic justice. In making the case for why each of these assumptions is unwarranted, Thompson opens the door to the future of food ethics.
But what is missing in this framework is systematic attention to a mediating level between individuals and society and, in particular, to the role played by business institutions in affecting dietary choice and in creating, facilitating, or hindering food policy. To be fair, Thompson mentions business activity at multiple points throughout the book, but the business of food is never made a focus of his inquiry, never subjected to a detailed and methodical analysis. While Thompson has not written a book in business ethics, his survey of the field would be a helpful guide to what that book should address. Consider some of the more important elements of this book and how they call out for a more systematic analysis from business ethics.
First, Thompson offers three arguments for why dietary choice should not be treated merely as a matter of personal preference. Modern global societies “have created dense networks of social causality” that prevent the separation of individual food choice from worldwide consequences (52). Further, our individual food choices have broad environmental implications ranging from habitat loss and pollution to the ethical treatment of animals. Finally, food choices not only involve personal health risks, but also affect broad social issues of cultural traditions and identity.
While this analysis is surely correct as far as it goes, what remains is to provide a full accounting of the role of business at each of these points. What roles are played by business in creating those “dense networks of social causality”? What are the responsibilities of business in mediating the environmental, health, and cultural impact of individual food choices? Perhaps most importantly, what is the role of business in shaping, promoting, and constraining consumer food choice?
A second topic is that food is not just one commodity among others that can be subsumed into standard accounts of economic justice. This book makes the case that food is a unique human good and that standard philosophical ethics must “shake off its reductionists tendencies” in order to appropriately address this fact (79). Thompson argues that food is a distinctive human good in that, unlike most other economic commodities, it is a need not a mere preference. Importantly, it is also a need that can be satiated. There is also a qualitative dimension of food security, such that not all available food is equally nutritious and healthy and therefore food justice involves more than merely the allocation of a sufficient quantity of food. Finally, the production of food and issues of food sovereignty often involve broad issues of social and cultural identity and integrity.
These arguments also have implications for business ethics. Given the dominant role that liberal economic models and theories of justice play in debates about CSR, a wide range of questions follow from Thompson’s claims. For example, if food is not of a kind with other consumer demands, what social responsibilities does the food industry have regarding the nutritional quality of food? What responsibilities does business have for obesity? How might food production, distribution, and international trade be regulated to protect food sovereignty, especially for food producers in the developing world?
A third element of Thompson’s analysis is what he calls the “fundamental problem” of food ethics (106). Thompson argues that philosophers have tended to treat food ethics as raising either questions of production (think Malthus to Paul Erhlich), or distribution (think Peter Singer’s 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”). Given the immense productivity increases of the last century, many have now concluded that distribution is the only remaining food security issue. But this analysis fails to appreciate the complex relationship between urban poor and the farming, rural poor. As a result, direct food aid can “actually undercut the livelihood” of the rural poor whose ability to sell their agricultural products is destabilized by the input of free or highly subsidized food (124). Thompson details the economic, social, cultural, and ethical problems that can result, especially in areas like Africa where as much as 80 percent of the population is involved in agriculture. Like Thomas Jefferson, Thompson thinks that farmers, as farmers, matter morally and that models of economic development that result in fewer farmers are ethically problematic even if they also result in more efficient agricultural productivity.
This aspect of Thompson’s work has implications for business ethics. Thompson provides an original ethical perspective on agribusiness and the industrial model of food production that is missing from many contemporary critiques. Business ethicists might also find Thompson’s analysis of the value of farming, and his reliance on the value of agency as a human good, as a useful contribution to debates about meaningful work and employee participation rights, especially as these apply to farm workers.
A fourth element involves his perspective on animal welfare, and particularly his analysis to show that ethical questions concerning the treatment of livestock are not reducible to the more general questions concerning the ethical status of animals or of eating animals. Thompson argues that while vegetarianism is an ethically respectable choice, it is not an imperative for all. Perhaps no section of this book benefits more from Thompson’s status as an agricultural science insider than his account of a range of ethical issues involved in raising animals for food and his sensitivity to the basic ethical decency of many (but not all) people involved in animal agriculture. There is much here that would contribute to work in business ethics, especially to help tease out the responsibilities of both food producers and food retailers.
Finally, a fifth important element of this book is the analyses of biotechnology, including genetically modified (GM) foods. Thompson’s integrity as a philosophical “outsider” is demonstrated in his survey of the ethical objections to agricultural biotechnology. He acknowledges serious concerns with both agricultural research and the technology-driven industrial agriculture that it supports. Ultimately, Thompson concludes that the responsibility to address hunger through the productivity of agricultural biotechnology override these concerns, but that these concerns nevertheless should function as “side constraints” on modern agricultural technologies (225). There are numerous arguments and important material in this section of the book that business ethicists will find relevant to their analyses of the practices of the food industry.
There is much more in this book that is worth study both in its own right and for its relevance to business ethics. One hopes next for a complementary book on the ethics of the food industry that will follow Thompson’s lead by integrating the outside perspective of ethics with the insider knowledge of the food industry.
