Ronald C. Sandler, 2015, Food Ethics: The Basics, London and New York, Routledge, xiii + 200 p

Abstract

Sandler provides a sharp and concise introductory overview of recent controversies over the structure, management, and consequences of the global food system, including perspectives that challenge the very idea of a global food system. On the one hand, the term Bfood ethics^ refers to Sandler’s focus on goals and rationales for methods and technologies of food production and their systematic organization through global exchange relations. On the other hand, food ethics is an idea promoted by activists who advocate dietary change and moral rationales for food consumption decisions. In this latter sense, food ethics challenges the dominant systems of food production and distribution. BAs the term is used in this book,^ Sandler writes, Ba food issue is any contested aspect of the life cycle of food: agriculture and capture, processing, manufacture, distribution, transportation, preparation, consumption and disposal.^ Food ethics is a review of the various arguments that are put forward to advocate for alternative approaches to food issues. Sandler’s approach takes due notice of the arguments made by critics of the status quo, but also recognizes arguments made by scientists and others who support it. Sandler covers topics such as food security, the diet-health relationship, vegetarianism, the debate over genetically engineered agricultural crops and livestock, and more general questions concerning the relationship between food and culture. The book is organized with separate chapters on each of these subjects. Sandler suggests that readers will find it helpful to think these topics as embedded within a more comprehensive debate over the structure of the global food system. The book thus begins with a thorough discussion of food systems: networks and processes that produce, process, and distribute the food we eat. Sandler notes that while a few regions remain isolated, we now have a global food system characterized by economic integration, large and powerful actors, mechanization and continuous innovation, highly capitalized infrastructure, and commodification: goods are highly fungible within the global system and valued in terms of monetized exchange. Sandler goes on to note that many of the food issues that spark protest and disagreement emphasize practices that have their origins in the global scope of our current food system, and in the way that costs and harms associated with it are externalized or imposed upon economically weak actors who do not have the power or wealth to resist. Sandler notes that arguments supporting the current structure stress the need for continuously increasing the amount of food produced on a global basis in order to compete with population growth. These arguments also recognize imperatives to conserve water and energy and to maintain uncultivated ecosystems for biodiversity conservation and often stress that such goals only make it more important to use resources dedicated to food production as efficiently as possible. In opposition, critics stress the way that putative efficiencies achieved by technological innovation neglect costs that are born by people who do not have the wealth to command adequate supplies of nutritious and culturally appropriate food, or by farmworkers and other food system employees whose wages consign them to poverty. Critics also argue that the global food system emphasizes short run efficiencies that do not fully account for environmental impacts, especially when the full cost of these impacts will not be felt until sometime in the future. He then describes proposed alternatives to the global food system such as emphasizing local or organic production, as well as urban consumer movements such as * Paul B. Thompson thom@anr.msu.edu