The Importance Of Food Ethics

Everyone has their own personal set of values and ethics. One is never necessarily like another which creates a sense of uniqueness to each individual. However, not many realize that there are ethics involved with food. One may ask themselves, “How can food have ethics? Food is just something you eat.” In our modern today, food is made elsewhere in all sorts of different ways as compared to our ancestral roots of growing and scavenging food from our surroundings. The new and different ways of harvesting food, unfortunately, include unfair working conditions, animal endangerment, major processing of fats and sugars, and injections of a large amount of antibiotics. These questionably moral practices are how food ethics came to be; and combined with the rise of food industrialization in which our society has an abundance of food that we’ve never had before, adds a deep complexity to what exactly should we be eating and how much do we eat.
This internal dilemma surrounding food can be illustrated through the terms “first-order food preferences” and “second-order food preferences”, as defined in Bee Wilson’s book, “First Bite”, “A first-order preference is simple: you love crispy roasted potatoes, smothered in butter and salt. A second-order preference is more convoluted: you want to like eating carrots instead of the potatoes, because you think they would be less fattening and healthier” (Wilson xxviii). I’d like to be able to change my second-order food preferences to become