Food Ethics Made Easy

More Resources

Want to learn more? Check out our list of good writing on topics relevant to the Two Strategies.

Just a little more info, please:

Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual offers easy to read, engaging guidance on how to eat ethically. This popular book is a great starting point if you want to learn more about how to change your eating habits for the better. For a more in-depth discussion of the consequences of our food choices, check out Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.
Marion Nestle’s What to Eat blends careful research and personal narrative to explore the intersections between the global food system, nutrition, and health. It’s a powerhouse of information on the complexities of the food system that will make you see your local grocery store in a new light.
The Community Alliance for Global Justice’s Our Food, Our Right: Recipes for Food will introduce you to food justice. And it has recipes.

Great for sharing:

In Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, James E. McWilliams offers thoughtful critiques of today’s most controversial food topics — think GMOs, organic, and local. The discussion questions in the appendix make this a great option for book clubs or family dinners.

For the budding scholar:

If you want to learn more about food ethics, Paul B. Thompson’s From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone is a good place to start. Thompson’s book is a comprehensive tome that provides an in-depth look at a wide array of topics in the food ethics space.
Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman’s Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability dives deeper into the forms that racial and economic injustice take in the food system (and in the alternative food movement), and some of the ways they might be addressed.

To learn more about the environmental and animal welfare effects of animal agriculture:

In Eating Earth: Environmental Ethics and Dietary Choice, Lisa Kemmerer explores the environmental effects of eating animals. She combines moral discussion with scientific analysis and historical perspective as she examines the problems of our food system and how to solve them.
Chris Schlottman and Jeff Sebo make the case against animal agriculture in their Food, Animals and the Environment: An Ethical Approach. Ben Bramble’s The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat asks whether eating meat is ever morally acceptable. In a twist, he also explores whether not eating meat carries moral costs.

To learn more about food waste:

Ready to start cooking? 

If all this reading about food has made you hungry, you’ll want to pick up one of these cookbooks:
Matthew Prescott’s Food Is the Solution: What to Eat to Save the World pairs essays about the food system with healthy, plant-based recipes. Prescott tackles the big issues — pollution, deforestation, water use are just a few — with personal interviews, case studies, and engaging graphics. The second half of the book features environmentally friendly recipes. With its lush, full-page color photography, this book would make a great gift or coffee table read. 
Chef and food justice activist Bryant Terry’s Afro-Vegan: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean, and Southern Flavors Remixed combines recipes of food from the African diaspora with interesting historical tidbits about ingredients and dishes, and even has menu suggestions (for example, a menu for “Saint Bob Marley’s Birthday, February 6, 1945”). Read about it here. 
Another good option is Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel’s Decolonize Your Diet: Mexican-American Plant-Based Recipes for Health and Healing.

Scientific research on food waste and plant-based diets: