Ethics of Food Production and Consumption - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 239

These concepts are: food choice, consumer concerns, informed (food) choice and label-
ing, ethical traceability, food sovereignty, co-existence of different agro-food systems,
and animal welfare and integrity.
Food choice may not be, in itself, an ethical concept, but many ethical issues are con-
nected with this concept. Social scientists have identified multiple factors involved in
food choice: costs, availability, sensory aspects like taste, social and cultural aspects,
convenience, cognitive restraint, and familiarity. However, ethical aspects may play a
significant role, not only in the obvious case of vegetarianism or religious dietary laws,
but also in the range of products that one finds acceptable or even desirable to eat. The
most important ethical issues regarding food choice are that choice should be the right
of consumers and is recognized as an expression of their autonomy. In fact, however,
consumers often are compelled to buy certain foods; food choices can often be placed
somewhere between the poles of autonomy and dependency. Moreover, there are
good ethical arguments that it is not necessary to make food choices continuously in
an explicit and reasoned way. The concept of an autonomous life cannot mean a life in
which every choice is argued about; an autonomous life means being connected with
routines and habits and building new routines when necessary. Moreover, the choice
context is always structured by past decisions of others, and sometimes it is ethically
acceptable to change that context, as is argued in the theory of nudging (Thaler and
Sunstein, 2009). However, from a deontological, principalist view, real-world barri-
ers that act autonomously cannot be accepted as moral arguments against the right to
choose your own food per se.
Consumer concerns: Respect for consumers' concerns is mostly motivated by deonto-
logical considerations on the right of consumers to make their own food choices. These
concerns can be divided into two categories. First, consumers have substantive concerns
about the seven ethical issues like animal welfare or fair trade. These are issues that relate
directly to the consequences of production practices or to the consequences or impacts
of food consumption, for instance human health and food quality. They are substantive
in that they are a matter of substance rather than a matter of procedure; one could also
term them vertical (up the chain from farm to fork) or specific concerns. The issues of
these concerns can be inspired by the kinds of ethical approaches mentioned earlier.
he second category, the procedural concerns , includes matters of access to information,
transparency, and trust. Procedural refers in this context to the communicative aspects
of information sharing, feedback and listening procedures, participatory methods, and
co-production. They are procedural in the sense that they are not matters of substance
but, rather, are horizontal and cut across the various substantive or vertical concerns.
They are about access to, and availability of, information, the reliability of informa-
tion, and the opportunity for consumers to have a voice on substantive concerns. The
two categories are of a different nature and, therefore, they raise different problems and
demand different solutions. Consumers differ in the emphasis and the weighing of these
concerns, and it is impossible to make a uniform system that covers all the concerns
equally; information, labeling, and certification are, therefore, necessary implications of
taking these concerns seriously (Coff et al. 2008; Clough, this volume).