Eating Ethically

Religion and Science for a Better Diet

Jonathan K. Crane

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231545877
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Philosophie de la religion

Few activities are as essential to human flourishing as eating, and fewer still are as ethically fraught. Eating well is particularly confusing. We live amid excess, faced with conflicting recommendations, contradictory scientific studies, and complex moral, medical, and environmental consequences that influence our choices. A new eating strategy is urgently needed, one grounded in ethics, informed by biology, supported by philosophy and theology, and, ultimately, personally achievable.

Eating Ethically argues persuasively for more adaptive eating practices. Drawing on religion, medicine, philosophy, cognitive science, art, ethics, and more, Jonathan K. Crane shows how distinguishing among the eater, the eaten, and the act of eating promotes a radical reorientation away from external cues and toward internal ones. This turn is vital for survival, according to classic philosophy on appetite and contemporary studies of satiety, metabolic science as well as metaphysics and religion. By intertwining ancient wisdom from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with cutting-edge research, Crane concludes that ethical eating is a means to achieve both personal health and social cohesion. Grounded in science and tradition, Eating Ethically shows us what it truly means to eat well.

I

EATING UNWELL

For eating is that indispensable vital activity closest to the mindlessly natural, yet it is also influenced by the emergence of mind and culture.

—Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul (1999)

1

FULL OF OURSELVES

Eating is a scandal at the heart of human life.

—Alec Irwin, “Devoured by God” (2001)

Though it may seem in this era of superabundance that human eating has recently gone haywire, we have always struggled with understanding ourselves as eaters and what constitutes eating well. Evidence of our contemporary malaise flashes in the headlines daily, accosting us with pictures of sagging waists and charts of exploding health-care costs due to food-related maladies. We see it in the shocking disparities between those who have access to a range of decent foods and those who do not. Our purchases of certain foods, like meats and commodity crops, also create significant environmental effects. We have established convoluted legal and economic incentives that perversely and frequently negatively impact farmers and laborers. From failing personal health to faltering biospheric integrity, our current consumptive practices are increasingly proving to be not just unhealthy but altogether maladaptive.

Why? Why has our eating become so troublesome? Why has eating become in so many ways a deadly enterprise? Surely we humans have not always eaten so poorly; we would not have survived as a species were that true. So how can we make contemporary eating more adaptive, healthy, ethical? What might a better diet look like?

Pursuing such questions requires focusing more on eating than on food. Let us consider our assumptions about eating, because how we think about eating necessarily shapes how we eat, what we eat, when, with whom, and why.

Eating is more than a mere physical activity. Yet because we eat so habitually we have become inured to it: rarely do we pause to consider what we are eating and why we are eating this and not that. We hardly stop to think what being an eater implies in the first place.

Instead we are apt to ply ourselves mindlessly with what we believe is food. Many of us do this frequently, often in strange settings, like moving vehicles or dark rooms with flickering screens surrounded by people with whom we do not interact. We order sumptuous meals packed with silent killers. Our companies and schools and retailers cram foodstuffs into stairwell dispensaries and cashier stations to surround us with consumables, lest we go hungry for even a moment. Ironically, our hospitals often outsource cafés to fast-food chains that sell precisely the stuff that sends consumers back to the medical clinics, forging a perversely self-reinforcing and symbiotic relationship that extracts more and more money from the very people the hospitals assist.

We tease ourselves with food constantly. We bombard ourselves with advertisements touting flavors of the week and diets of the month. These ads whet our appetites, but they fade from the mind so quickly that we are soon ready for the next round. Our bodies hardly have time to adapt as we push the tantalizing stuff into ourselves. Sales of prepared food, especially combination or “combo” sales, arrest our attention and lead us to open our wallets. We have come to mistake the convenient and cheap for the nutritious. We favor longevity of our food: just note the manufactured foodstuffs lining the shelves at gas stations. Many are canned or packed with artificial preservatives and strange colors, making them more synthetic than biological; they are designed to allure and endure more than nourish. Nevertheless we pick them up, purchase them, open their wrappers, take a bite, quickly savor, swallow, and move on—hardly thinking about any of this.

Why do we wonder why so many suffer from food-related ills?

To be sure we should pay attention to the food our system produces. We should be concerned how what we consume gets from farm and factory to our grocery stores, restaurants, and bodegas. We should also be wary about the ever-changing diet regimens touted by authorities, as they are frequently influenced by powerful lobbies or vested interests. We should investigate how and why certain populations suffer a severe lack of nutritious foods when other populations enjoy superabundance, because structural injustices and long-standing prejudices are probably at play.

Yet such studies will do little to illuminate what it means to eat and what it means to be an eater. Looking at food distracts us from what we each do with food. No farm, no company, no law, no diet eats. In complicated ways, those other entities feed us, but we eat. So while we must study how our civilization goes about feeding itself, we also need to understand the basic fact that we are eaters: we need to understand what it means to eat and to be eaters.

WHAT ABOUT EATING?

Turning our attention to eating itself is a multifaceted task. At one level we need to appreciate the natural biological features of eating. Anatomy, physiology, and the sciences of metabolism, nutrition, and neurobiology of taste intertwine here. These fields focus on the body. At another level, eating necessarily involves other perspectives. For example, I eat foods that come within reach. Because food is what is beyond me, eating is a dynamic relationship between me and that which I consume. It is also a relationship with other eaters. This interactive feature of eating brings in morality, a complicated subject that integrates both philosophical and theological notions of good and bad, right and wrong. Eating “retains its importance and its glory” precisely because of science as well as “its moral history,” as the eighteenth-century French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin observed.1 It is at once intensely personal and immensely social, both idiosyncratic and universal. Focusing on either its materiality or its socially constructed elements will not suffice; both are integral to understanding eating in all its glory.

What it means to eat and what it means to be eaters has been known for a long time. For example, an ancient author whose work has been canonized in the Bible observed, “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink.… For who eats and who enjoys but myself?”2 Eating is done by individuals and is something individuals enjoy. Most other endeavors and achievements are like property: they can be passed on to others. Eating, by contrast, is that activity whose benefits redound back to the individual eater, both while the food is being consumed and digested and later, as it nourishes the body.

Many ancient sources speak about eating, about both its benefits and its dangers. While few premodern sources had the scientific insights we have today about the anatomy and physiology of eating, they nevertheless reflected on the material side of eating. I will review those insights in due course in this book. Suffice it to say for now that human musings on eating have been around for millennia and have been robust, scientifically and normatively.

A further question arises, in addition to exploring the nature of eating and what it means to be eaters: What does it means to eat well? Answering this requires, in part, attending to a related issue: What does it mean to eat poorly? There are, of course, many ways to eat poorly. A common concern is when to stop eating. The bigger problem for some, though, is starting to eat in the first place or eating enough. Figuring out when, how, and why to start or stop eating is perhaps no less biologically and ethically fraught than figuring out how to eat well. Indeed, these issues—eating well and starting and stopping eating—are intimately interrelated.

STUFFED FULL OF PROBLEMS

“I’m stuffed.” This short phrase says a great deal. The speaker often means he or she has reached a stage of consumption verging on the uncomfortable (e.g., “I’m so stuffed I can’t move!”). Perhaps the speaker has merely attained a level of repletion requiring no more food. Either way, the hosts know they have done their duty, having plied their guests with plentiful food. It is an expression eaters want to say and feeders want to hear, for it means everyone has achieved their respective goals: to be stuffed and to stuff.

This exchange has become so pervasive in our culture, in our restaurants, and at our kitchen tables that it occurs without much notice. Rarely do people pause to consider the phrase’s deeper meanings, and they use it after nearly every meal. Some people do pause, however, and would rather avoid likening themselves to the very foods they’ve eaten, such as stuffed turkey or double-stuffed potatoes, much less to the overly stuffed furniture upon which they so desire to lie down to pant. So instead they push away their plates and say, “I’m full.”

FIGURE 1.1

A 1952 Timken-Detroit Axle advertisement.

What does this mean, to be full? Though “full” has been linked to eating for nearly a thousand years, the expression “I’m full” came into vogue only in the mid-twentieth century, when the automobile was the central figure of American progress and success.3 For over a century now, we have continued to drive into a gas station, open the gas cap, pour fuel into the tank, and when we resume our journeys the gauge points away from the “E” to the “F.” With gas tanks full, our automobiles can go just about anywhere our dreams imagine. With tanks full, they are effective and efficient machines, ideal vehicles onto which we can hitch our aspirations, especially our economic ones. It is unsurprising, then, that the notion of fullness came to be linked with effectiveness and efficiency in the American landscape. This linkage seeped into our own desires to be effective and efficient machines of the burgeoning post–World War II American economy. Speaking of ourselves as full at meals became a simple rhetorical strategy to import and superimpose this mechanistic ideal onto our organic selves. When we are full, we are the best of all machines.

FIGURE 1.2

Only a full tank can get you there.

Yet this analogy has begun to sputter and stall. Vehicles run well when full, but do stomachs? Do we not suffer indigestion when full, especially when “full to the brim”? Though we fill our gas tanks frequently, do we not expose ourselves to a whole host of ailments when we regularly fill ourselves, particularly when we fill ourselves with questionable foodstuffs that are more akin to toxins than real food? Philosophically, what does it mean to compare ourselves to vehicles? Are we machines that break down and rust? Might there be something insidious in thinking this way, not to mention eating this way? The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) thinks so. He argues that privileging fullness is dangerous: it assumes that anything less than being full is less than ideal.4

We have come to think that being full is the marker of satisfaction, that being full should be our aim since fullness is life’s purpose. Add this philosophical attitude toward fullness to the mechanistic and economic incentive model of fullness, and it is no wonder that fullness became the standard for our eating.

Yet something strange happens when we eat our fill: we become mollified; that is, we become contented with ourselves. Our hunger, our very neediness dissipates. By reestablishing our natural plenitude, we do not need anything else; indeed, we need nothing at all. We lack nothing and we need nothing. All things beyond us are unnecessary and undesirable. As all other things fade into oblivion our metaphysical and physical worlds merge.

In short, when we are full we become full of ourselves. This allows egoism, narcissism, and many other venalities to spawn.

Conversely, according to this worldview, those patterns of eating that do not produce fullness are both metaphysically and physically unsatisfactory. Were I to eat too much or too little and/or inappropriately so that fullness is not achieved, my body would not be satisfied. My fleshy needs would go unmet. When physically unsatisfied I remain needy. To the extent that I am needy, I cannot be my best, true, authentic self. Whether I am hungry, stuffed, or malnourished, I am not fully real: I am unreal. Of course, hunger and malnutrition are real and need careful attention.

This worldview fixated upon fullness assumes the very existence of need as deleterious and undesirable. Need is something to be avoided. Ideal existence has no needs; it is replete and full.

This approach fails life. For life—biological existence itself—is necessarily needy. No biological creature lives only for itself. None is so full of itself that it has no needs. All biological creatures exert energy and in so doing deplete their own stores of energy. In and through living, each creature necessarily becomes needy: its needs to replenish its energy necessarily and constantly reassert themselves. The only way a creature can live is to meet those biological needs constantly, and this is done in part by consuming the world around it. I will say more on this later. For now, though, we should appreciate the fact that any en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Eating Unwell
• Part II: I Eat Therefore I Am
• Part III: Eating Well
• Part IV: I Eat Therefore I Am Tasteful
• Part V: Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index