24.03 | Spring 2017 | Undergraduate

Good Food: Ethics and Politics of Food

Additional Resources

Global Justice

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers (issues of our time). WW Norton and Company, 2010. ISBN: 978-0393329339

Brown, Lester. “The New Geopolitics of Food.” Food and Demogracy (2011): 23.

Hardin, Garrett. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science (1968): 168.

Banerjee, Abhijit, and Duflo, Esther. “More Than One Billion People are Hungry in the World: But What if the Experts are Wrong?Foreign Policy 186 (2011): 66-72.

Kuper, Andrew. “Poverty, Facts and Political Philosophies: Response to “More Than Charity”.” Ethics and International Affairs 16, no. 01 (2002): 152-126.

Sen, Amartya. “More than 100 Million Women are Missing.” New York Review of Books (1993).

Social Meaning

 “The Social Status of Vegetables” chapter in Fisher, Mary Frances Kennedy. The Measure of Her Powers: an MFK Fisher Reader. Edited by Dominique Gioia. Counterpoint, 1999. ISBN: 978-1582435565.

Allen, Patricia, and Sachs, Carolyn. “Women and Food Chains: The Gendered Politics of Food.” Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World (2012): 23-40.

Kalcik, Susan. “Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of Identity” Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, 1984. Pages 37-65. ISBN: 978-0870494192.

 “Ecology” chapter in Zizek, Slavoj and Taylor, Astra. Examined Life, ed., Astra Taylor, NY: The New Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1595584472. 

Buy at MIT Press “Introduction: The Food Movement as Polyculture” in Alkon, Alison Hope, and Agyeman, Julian. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. MIT Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0262516327.

Labor

UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center

Tondo, Lorenzo and Kelly, Annie. “Raped, beaten, exploited: 21st century slavery propping up in Sicilian farming.” The Guardian. Last modified on March 11, 2017.

Estabrook, Barry. “Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes.” Politics 4 (1909): 50.

Kruzik, Ahna and Hazard, Erik. “Gender Injustice in Industrial Agriculture.” Food First. Last modified on March 8, 2017. 

Health and Human Welfare

World Health Organization Food Safety and Food-Borne Illness Fact Sheet

 “The Food Industry and ‘Eat More’” in Nestle, Marion. Food Politics. Revised Edition. University of California Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0520254039.

Gunderman, Richard. “Is Obesity Really a Disease?The Atlantic. Last Modified on June 24, 2013.

Catherine, W. “(Weight Stigma) science is hard: some thoughts on the newest study on fat shaming.” Fit is a Feminist Issue. Last modified on March 19, 2017.

Kinzel, Lesley. “What’s Wrong with Fat Shaming?Everyday Feminism. Last modified on February 27, 2013.

Fuck Fat Loss, but like, Actually.” Fit Is a Feminist Issue, Last modified on August 20, 2016.

Orbach, Susie. “Why Fat is a Feminist IssueThe Huffington Post, Last modified on January 5, 2015.

World Health Organization Obesity and Overweight Fact Sheet

Freedman, Alex. “Habit Forming: Fast-Food Chains Play Central Role in Diet of the Inner-City Poor.” Wall Street Journal, December 19, 1990. 

Freedman, Alex. “Deadly Diet: Amid Ghetto Hunger, Many More Suffer Eating Wrong Foods.” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 1990.

Freedman, Alex. “Poor Selection: An Inner-City Shopper Seeking Healthy Foods Finds Offerings Scant.” Wall Street Journal, December 20, 1990.

Allhoff, Fritz, and Monroe, David, eds. Food and Philosophy: Eat, Think, and Be Merry. John Wiley & Sons, 2009. ISBN: 978-1405157759.

America’s 9 Worst Urban Food DesertsNewsOne, Last modified on September 21, 2011.

Pollan, Michael. “Our National Eating Disorder.” The New York Times Magazine 27 (2004).

Hylton, Wil S. “A Bug in the System: Why last night’s chicken made you sick.” The New Yorker, Last modified February 2, 2015.

Pollan, Michael. “Unhappy Meals.” The New York Times. Last modified on January 28, 2007.

Mcardle, Megan. “America’s Moral Panic over Obesity.” The Atlantic (2009).

Vegetarianism and Animal Welfare

 “Take a Deep Breath” in Foer, Jonathan Safran. Eating Animals. Penguin UK, 2010. 978-0316069885.

 Harman, Elizabeth. “The Moral Significance of Animal Pain and Animal Death.” In The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics. Edited by Tom Beauchamp and Raymond Frey. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0195371963.

 “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce.” chapter in Sagoff, Michael. Environmental Ethics. Edited by David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott. Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN: 978-0199793518.

Wenz, Peter S. “An Ecological Argument for Vegetarianism (PDF - 1.8MB).” Ethics and Animals 5, no. 1 (2011): 4.

Waste

 Chapters 1, 2 and 10 in Bloom, Jonathan. American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can do About it). Da Capo Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0738215280.

 “Just Garbage” in Wenz, Peter S., and Laura Westra. Faces of Environmental Racism. Rowman and Littlefield, 1995. ISBN: 978-0742512498.  

Environmentalism

Desrochers, Pierre, and Shimizu, Hiroko. The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-Mile Diet. Public Affairs, 2012. ISBN: 978-1586489403.

Hill, Thomas E. “Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments.” Environmental Ethics 5, no. 3 (1983): 211-224.

 “Ethics of Repsect for Nature” in Timmons, Mark. Disputed Moral Issues: A Reader. Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0195177633.

Activism

Oxfam America

Equal Exchange

Boston Food Not Bombs!

Fireside, Daniel. “Equal Exchange’s Radical Approach to Corporate Social Responsibility.” Green Money Journal, 2011.

“Food sovereignty: A struggle for convergence in diversity” in Food Movements Unite!: Strategies to Transform Our Food System. First Food Books, 2011. ISBN: 978-0935028386.

Philosophy

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

 “Introduction: Moral Reasons.” in Barry, Vincent E. Applying Ethics: A Text With Readings. Wadsworth Publishing Company, 2005. ISBN: 978-0495094999.

Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey. “Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals A Very brief selective summary of sections I and II (PDF).” Chapel Hill: UNC (2000).

Kant, Immanuel. “Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (PDF).” (1785).

Films

FLOW: For Love of Water. Directed by Irena Salina. Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2008.

Tapped. Directed by Stephanie Soechtig and Jason Lindsey. Atlas Films, 2009.

Blue Gold: World Water Wars. Directed by Sam Bozzo. PBS, 2008.

Waste = Food. Directed by Grant Baldwin. Blacklight, 2010.

Examined Life. Directed by Astra Taylor. Sphinx Productions, 2009.

Other

Mindmeister Website

Project Bread 2016 Status Report on hunger in Massachusetts

Course Info

As Taught In
Spring 2017
Learning Resource Types
Lecture Notes
Written Assignments