So I’m teaching a class on philosophy of food and one of the subjects that comes up frequently is moralizing about food. We use the language of good and bad, and even, evil, when really what we are talking about are the nutritional and health values of certain foods. But then there’s a slide between that and then judging the people who eat those foods.
We’ve all done it, I think. There’s Halloween candy in the house again, and we talk about being “good” when really what we mean is “staying away from the candy” or “eating candy in moderate amounts.”
We confess to friends about “being so bad” at a party and we don’t mean that we murdered the guests. We might just mean that we ate too much guac and chips.
Moral language is all over the place when it comes to food, and we’ve blogged about it lots. So I’ve been directing the students (and now you) to some of our older posts about food and moral language.
See Catherine’s post (one of many actually) on the goodness or badness of eggs.
In 2019 I asked, Has the evil of orange juice finally been established?
In the end, I like Tracy’s view, that food talk shouldn’t be moralized (except insofar as there are concerns about the way it’s produced. See Tracy’s practically vegan blog here.
Catherine also wrote on this theme.
