Abstract
The food system impacts many issues of public interests and hence requires that we participate in the governance of it; not only should we act responsibly for our own food purchases, but for the system that produces, manufactures, transports, and disposes of food. This means that society needs to stop treating food choices as merely private ones and not open to democratic governance. We need to stop acting as passive consumers assuming that the system puts out safe, culturally appropriate, and quality products with proper protections for actors in the system and the environment. Instead, we should take responsibility to understand and control the food system through the democratic process and our consumer habits to ensure that the food system is just, supports environmental integrity, is humane to animals, and provides nutritious and delicious food for society.
There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.
(Wendell Berry 1990)
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Notes
- 1.
“Food sovereignty” is a term coined by an international peasant-farmer movement called La Via Campesina which is focused on local control, sustainability, self-determination of culturally appropriate healthy foods. The organization grew up in reaction to the control of the food system by multinational corporations and trade arrangements facilitated by the WTO. I am appropriating that term and arguing that all citizens, whether in the developed or developing world, should have agency and control over their food system.
- 2.
Notice that abortion is not thought in the U.S. to be a private matter but one for public deliberation and control, whereas child bearing and childcare are private matters and ones which don’t receive public consideration and support.
- 3.
See Weber and Matthews’ (2008) analysis, which determined that the transportation, the final delivery of food, only represented 4 % of the total greenhouse gases for food. They found that 83 % of the emissions for agricultural products occur before the food leaves the farm.
- 4.
See, for example, Moss (2013), which discusses the food industry’s use of scientists to develop food that is “irresistible” with the combination of, for example, certain amounts of salt and fat.
- 5.
Definition from La Via Campesinaat the World Food Summit 1996 in Rome.
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McGregor, J. (2016). Public Interests and the Duty of Food Citizenship. In: Cudd, A., Lee, Wc. (eds) Citizenship and Immigration - Borders, Migration and Political Membership in a Global Age. AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32786-0_6
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