Ethics of Food Production and Consumption - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 243

Enhancement brought about through genetic modification is seen as the most impor-
tant task and the steps toward the actual deployment of the seeds by the farmers and the
digestion of the seed product as porridge or bread by the consumers are secondary con-
siderations (Brooks 2010). That is, biofortification is one-sided in that it neglects the role
of farmers and consumption. Farmers have to deal with scarce resources and food pref-
erences of consumers. Are biofortified crops in their interest, if more water is needed,
but not available, or are markets available?
Malnutrition is a multifaceted problem: physiological, agricultural, social, and cul-
tural; all these views should be taken together. The overall orientation of framing mal-
nutrition as a health problem has several severe disadvantages that express themselves
in the continuation of micronutrient malnutrition. Because both strategies frame mal-
nutrition in terms of health disentangled from food (production), they risk underesti-
mating the complexity of the problem. The issue is not an intentional or nonintentional
mistake from the side of the scientists. The whole landscape of treatment of malnutrition
is torn between the two large boxes that are used in classifying complex human body
issues by national and international administrations: they are either health (belong-
ing to World Health Organization, WHO) or food problems (FAO). Mostly, the health
side has more power and wins, because it looks so much more urgent to care for health
problems.
The current solutions seem not to be very effective so long as they concentrate only
on the seeds and not on farmers and consumers, who have their own interests; the solu-
tions are not favorable toward local farmers (mostly women; see Agarwal, this volume).
From a deontological position, such a solution is not acceptable. Utilitarianism, on the
other hand, will perhaps make a calculation with a different outcome because rights
are just calculable items. The pragmatists' solution would be to bring together all the
stakeholders from the beginning and find out where the root causes of malnutrition lie;
perhaps, rather than more production, there is a need for prevention of leakage of nutri-
ents in particular in the postharvest period and during food preparation and cooking.
Education may be important as well as health improvements with the result that avail-
able nutrients are actually and effectively used in the body (Sahn, this volume).
Eating meat
Meat eating is an enduring bone of contention: when a vegetarian says, “You eat a piece
of a corpse and feed for a cow is stolen from hungry people,” the meat eater replies: “don't
be so sour, it's so tasty and healthy.” Meat eating or not and moralizing are closely related.
Originally, vegetarianism was inspired by respect for animals and their abuse in ani-
mal husbandry. The (vegetarian) animal-rights movement is an abolitionist movement
that wants to get rid of domesticated animals. However, the battle between meat-eaters
and vegetarians got more ammunition since the FAO report, directed by Henning
Steinfeld and called Livestock's Long Shadow published in 2006. That report power-
fully inserted meat eating and vegetarianism into the debate on climate change and