This essay explores some well-traveled territory—the area in which eating and suffering come together. I undertake two projects. First, I scrutinize some foods that are often portrayed as unambiguously either good (homegrown organic vegetables) or bad (foie gras), in an effort to complicate the stories we tell about them. What violence has been heretofore invisible in them? What compassion has been occluded? This project informs a second: an answer to the question “how should we eat?” My answer takes up Kelly (...) Oliver’s call for an ethics of “sustaining relationships.” I ground it in an alternative ontology of food, one that views foods not as substances, but as loci of relations. (shrink)

The way we farm, the kinds of backyards and landscapes we favor, and the way we control patterns of development are creating an invisible crisis through their affects upon soil ecology. The invisibility of soil ecosystems, the seemingly alien properties of the organisms that inhabit them, and the specialized knowledge required to understand them create obstacles to moral concern for these fountains of life. Our treatment of soils has reached the point of crisis. Obstacles to moral thinking about soils might (...) be overcome by supplying the moral imagination with a deeper understanding of our own biological identity as ecosystems analogous in organization and functions to soil ecosystems. Not only have microbes created the conditions necessary for human life, but they have shaped our evolutionary history and helped constitute the human genome. Our biological identity encompasses communities of microbes, such that humans (and all organisms) are most properly understood as ecosystems. For this reason, moral concern for humans implies moral concern for ecosystems. (shrink)

A key theme in Michael Pollan's first two books dealing with food, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, is the notion of "co-evolution." The first book deals with it somewhat humorously, suggesting that we are manipulated by our plants. These, the claim goes, have gotten us to co-evolve so that we will take good care of them. All they need to do in return is sort of relax and throw us bits of nutrition or beauty now and then. (...) In The Omnivore's Dilemma, a more mitigated tone prevails. This one lays out how important, for a vibrant farm, are all of the components that must function together. The book even highlights a plant whose relationship to humans is one great example of co-evolution: corn. Corn .. (shrink)