24.03
Good Food: The Ethics and Politics of Food
Explores the values (aesthetic, moral, cultural, religious, prudential, political) expressed in the choices of food people eat. Analyzes the decisions individuals make about what to eat, how society should manage food production and consumption collectively, and how reflection on food choices might help resolve conflicts between different values.
Spring 2017 · Good Food: Ethics and Politics of Food
Topics
- Introduction
- Moral Theory
- Global Hunger (Consequentialist Ethics Approach)
- Global Hunger (Harm Principles)
- Global Hunger (Political Approaches)
- Famine Relief: Ethics or Politics
- Justice and Oppression
- Food Sovereignty
- Food and Identity
- Gender, Race, Religion, and….
- Justice in Food Production
- Capitalism and Liberty
- Capitalism and the Food System, part 1
- Film Screening, Flow: For the Love of Water
- Capitalism and the Food System, part 2
- Speciesism
- Respect for Animals
- Harm and Killing
- Vegetarianism and Veganism
- Waste and Freeganism (Gleaning)
- Food, for Free
- Industrial Plant Agriculture
- Environmentalism
- Locavorism
- GMOs
- Final lecture wrap-up
Readings
- [FES] = Barnhill, Anne, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett. Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings. Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-0199321742
- session: 1: Introduction · reading: No readings
- Wallace, David Foster. “Consider the Lobster” Gourmet . Last modified August, 2004.
- “Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.” Time . Last modified on May 23, 2016.
- [FES] Pages 36-59, Chapter 2 “Global Hunger”
- “Lifeboat Ethics” in Pojman, Louis, Paul Pojman, Katie McShane. Food Ethics . Cengage Learning, 2016. ISBN: 978-1285197319
- “Little Meals with Great Implications” in Fisher, Mary Frances Kennedy. A Stew Or a Story: An Assortment of Short Works by MFK Fisher . Shoemaker and Hoard, 2006. ISBN: 978-1593761653
- [FES] Page 275, Chapter 6. “Food and Religion”
- Chapter 12 in Seid, Roberta Pollack. Never Too Thin: Why Women Are at War with Their Bodies, 1989. ISBN: 978-0136156000
- session: 15: Capitalism and the Food System, part 2 · reading: No required readings
- Chapters 1 and 9 in Bloom, Jonathan. American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of its Food (and what we can do about it) . Da Capo Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0738215280.
- [FES] Page 407, Chapter 9 “Industrial Plant Agriculture”
- “People or penguins: The case for optimal pollution.” in Pojman, Louis, Paul Pojman, Katie McShane. Food Ethics . Cengage Learning, 2016. ISBN: 978-1285197319
- “Deep Ecology.” in Pojman, Louis, Paul Pojman, Katie McShane. Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application, 1985. ISBN: 978-1285197241
- session: 24: Locavorism · reading: No required readings
- “Activism, social and political” in Anderson, Gary L., Kathryn G. Herr, eds. Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice . Sage Publications, 2007. ISBN: 978-1412918121
Prerequisites & course information
Prereq: None U (Spring) Not offered regularly; consult department 3-0-9 units. HASS-H; CI-H
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Spring 2017
- MIT OCW calendar ↗
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.