Ethical eating or food ethics

Ethical eating or food ethics

It seems that our society is becoming more sensitive to anything and everything. Not everyone is the same in what they believe in or what their morals are, and people have become respectful as to how we should do a certain thing. Our society is becoming more serious about ethical eating, which includes veganism, eating well-raised meat, or not eating family pets. Everyone has their own opinions on what is harming mother nature, whether it is about industrial farming harming the environment or pig feces spreading infections in the river. Everyone also has their own opinion on eating and it is a personal subject to some people. Everyone has free will, and with free will, people are able to choose a course of action closely linked to morals, praise, guilt, sin, and religion.

According to Wikipedia, “Ethical eating or food ethics refers to the moral consequences

of food choices, both those made by humans for themselves and those made for food animals.”

What are some of the moral consequences of my food choices? In America, as Jonathan Safran

Foer points out in his essay “Let Them Eat Dog” (2009), “Eating man’s best friend’ is as taboo

as a man eating his best friend” (429). So, if a person were starving to death and had the

opportunity to kill and eat a stray dog, would that person become morally reprehensible to the

rest of the population? If this is a moral problem, so much so that others will shun and look

down upon that dog-eating person, the moral thing for the rest of the community to do is to

feed that person something other than dog.

For example, person A wants others to follow their morals, and when person A morals are not being followed, they are angry. People do not know the underlying cause of why someone is eating meat or not eating meat. Everything happens for a reason, “Morality and self-consciousness set us in judgment over ourselves, so that we see our actions constantly from outside, judged by ourselves as we are by others. We become cut off from our instincts, and even the spontaneous joy of fellowship is diminished by the screen of judgment through which it first must pass” (Scruton 395). Society takes away so much from people that we are not able to think for ourselves. We think about how society is going to judge us, and this is the problem that everyone faces. Before an idea gets brought into light, it is shut down by anyone who feels they have the power to tell someone; left is wrong and right is right.

In most essays about eating, the authors are not telling people to be vegan, but they are putting their ideas into light because they feel that they need to be heard. The authors are trying to help us have a better environment by informing their audience about industrial farming and climate change due to animal waste. There is no harm in change, but in this case for ethical eating, there is harm in no change. People who share their ideas about ethical eating are trying to save our environment and to help us have a cleaner environment. In “Are My Hamburgers Hurting the Planet?” Sarah Kaplan states, “Cattle are responsible for 62% of agricultural emissions – eating fewer of them is one of the most powerful steps an individual can take toward protecting the planet”. This statistic shows how cattle being absent in our diets can have a powerful effect on protecting the planet. People expressing their ideas about eating is a way to help improve the planet.

Everyone has a guilty conscious no matter what they say or do. In “I Don’t Like Green Eggs and Ham!” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. states, “I’ve reconciled myself to the idea that an animal’s life has been sacrificed to bring me a meal of pork or chicken” (54). There will be a point in mostly everybody’s life where they start to think that the meat they are eating was once a living animal and had to be killed. Kennedy came to a point of guilt that an animal’s life has been taken away for his own satisfactory. This has to do with guilt, and someone feels guilt when they feel they have done something wrong intentionally or unintentionally. It is not a human’s fault for having cravings for meat. Meat has been exposed to many people since they were born, and when someone tells them to take meat away from their diet it is not easy. It is like telling someone who can not walk to walk. It will be easy for them because they are used to not walking. It comes down to the point of free will, where someone will choose a course of action that will help or hurt them in the long-run.

Everyone has different morals when it comes to anything. Lars Eighner explains the morals of a scavenger in his article, “On Dumpster Diving”. Eighner explains, “But it is a common practice to set aside surplus items: pairs of shoes, clothing, canned goods, and such. A true scavenger hates to see good stuff go to waste and what he cannot use he leaves in good condition in plain sight” (92). This quote shows how scavengers have their morals. An animal scavenger eats dead animals long after they are dead. Many people say they do not eat meat because an animal has been killed for their own liking. People rather animals to die from a natural cause just like humans do. A scavenger leaves something that they can not use in plain sight, and this shows their morals of what they think is right.

Guilt, morals, praise, sin, and religion have to do with everybody’s free will. Everyone has the free will to make their own choices and with free choices comes responsibility for one’s own actions. Ethical eating is something everyone should care about because we do not want to sit around letting the earth die and do nothing about it. Everyone needs to make a difference in some way that will have a significant effect in this society. No matter what happens, everyone will complain about something that is bothering them. If someone is sharing their own ideas on ethical eating and how it can help the earth, then we should listen because they are telling people for a good reason.