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If you ate today, thank a farmer…and…?
Surely you’ve seen this bumper sticker: “If you ate today, thank a farmer.” That’s fine advice — farmers (of various kinds) play a key role in food production. But it’s also pretty narrow advice. It...
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Is Smaller More Ethical, or Less?
The food world’s fascination with small-scale production of bespoke edibles shows no sign of waning. See, for example, this piece by Emma Sturgess, for The Guardian: From small seeds grow big ideas...
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Store Does End-Run Around Egg Safety
Here’s a chuckle, and a caution: Store sells cartons, gives away eggs A health food store in eastern P.E.I. is looking for a way around health regulations after provincial officials told them to stop...
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The Ethics of the Cost of Ethical Food
It’s bad if high prices get in the way of eating a) well or b) ethically, and there are plenty of myths about both. And today alone I’ve read two interesting pieces on the price of food. First, the...
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Horse Meat Controversy
CTV News reported yesterday that a hidden-camera video has spurred new calls for a ban on horse meat in Canada: Animal rights groups are calling for a ban on the sale of horse meat after disturbing...
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Pricing Whales
Is it a good idea, or a bad idea, for whale advocates to put their money where their mouths are? From Wired: A Market Proposal for Saving Whales Despite the best efforts of activists, more whales are...
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Paula Deen’s Ethics
Paula Deen is under fire for failing to announce promptly enough that she has Type 2 diabetes. My first impression: The kind of food Deen promoted was unhealthy 5 years ago. It was unhealthy the day...
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Sources of Calories and Diet-Industry Ethics
This is interesting, and confirms my non-scientist’s suspicion. It turns out that (at least according to this one study) calories count, but not where they come from. The basic finding is that if...
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The Complex Politics of Food Ethics
Here’s a useful short piece by James McWilliams, writing for The Atlantic: Meat: What Big Agriculture and the Ethical Butcher Have in Common I’ve repeatedly argued that supporting alternatives to the...
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Ethics of Small Choices
Yesterday, on my Business Ethics Blog, I published a short blog entry about an ethical dilemma faced by a coffee shop. The dilemma — and disagreement between co-owners — was whether to offer the...
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Ethics of the World’s First Synthetic Burger
So, the world’s first synthetic burger has been cultured, minced, fried and consumed. (Mark Post, the scientist who conceived of and grew the synthetic burger, had announced a year and a half ago his...
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Starbucks, Monsanto, and the Right to Know What’s in My Latté
A piece I published over at my other blog (the Business Ethics Blog) has been earning me some push-back, to put it mildly, from fans of GMO labelling. The piece I wrote is called “Why Neil Young is...
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Abusing Chickens on a Massive Scale
You won’t like it, but you should read Abusing Chickens We Eat, by Nicholas Kristof for the New York Times. It’s the story of the conditions under which chickens are raised (at one farm in North...
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Labour in the Food Industry
Check out this piece by Stephen Lurie, writing for Vox: You care about where your food comes from. Shouldn’t you care about who grew and picked it? Lurie is arguing that the food you consume embodies a...
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Synthetic Meat Gets Cheap(er)
Check out: Cost of lab-grown burger patty drops from $325,000 to $11.36. As this blog entry from Science Alert reminds us, the notion of synthetic meat made the news in a big way back in 2013. (See my:...
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Culinary Modernism: A Defence of Processed Foods
This excellent article by Rachel Laudan is an argument in favour of culinary modernism, and against Luddism. It is, in effect, a defence of processed foods. Laudan is an historian, by the way, as well...
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Testing GMO Foods
This piece is terrific. It’s about the testing that genetically modified foods go through in Canada, and the misconceptions people continue to have in that regard. It should be considered required...
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The Moral Hierarchy of Food
This piece focuses on the way in which an obsession with food is in some sense replacing (or parodying?) religion, for some people. The new religion: How the emphasis on ‘clean eating’ has created a...
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Guide to Food Labelling
Food labelling is a very. big. issue. Some labels matter a lot. Some matter less. Some labels are required by law. Some are not. Some labels have clear, precise, even regulated meanings. Others are...
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You Say You Want Ethical Food, But Really You Want Cheap Food
People today are increasingly demanding restaurant food that is ethical, interesting, and of high quality. Or at least, that’s what they say they want. True demand, in the economic sense (which is the...
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