and in college of agricultures at Texas A&M University, Purdue University and Michigan State University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. Thompson was the inaugural occupant of the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State, where he taught courses in environmental science and sustainability, as well as philosophy. In addition to award winning books such as From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone (2015), Thompson authored over 200 research articles and book chapters.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, From Silo to Spoon: Local and Global Food Ethics, and reported the following:
Page 99 of From Silo to Spoon: Local and Global Food Ethics is wrapping up Chapter 4 on the ethics of locavorism—trying to eat foods produced within 100 miles of where you live. I’m arguing that other philosophers writing on locavorism have mistakenly assumed that the ethic is about making better dietary choices. Instead, we should see it as an invitation to explore alternative paths to identity formation and social engagement. The idea of food sovereignty contributes to this exploration.Learn more about From Silo to Spoon at the Oxford University Press website.
The book starts with four case studies in food ethics: the food movement, food aid, locavorism and food labels. In each case, I make contrasts between an ethics of persuasion (where the philosopher already knows what is right) and an ethics of enquiry, where the goal is to avoid judging too quickly. Both are performed in the context of unreflective processes of social control. Social control gives power and force to ethical claims but it can also distort them or allow them to be co-opted. Page 99 is making an important pivot from discussing a particular problem in food ethics to more general questions in an environmental philosophy of agriculture.
The second half of the book uses food-related themes to take up more fundamental moral issues: the very idea of pollution or sustainability, and the sense in which any ethic relies implicitly on our sense of a shared history, a history in which food systems have played an underappreciated role. It is most evident the first person plural: any claim about what “we” do or think reflects an unspoken background necessary for social cognition. I am a philosophical pragmatist in thinking this background is inescapable, but also that we (whoever we are) must be willing to use all the tools at our disposal in questioning whether we are the people we really want to be. I argue that focusing on food production is a powerful way to bring environmental issues deeply into the heart of social identity formation.
But there are other questions, too. The final chapter attempts to begin a conversation with others who have seen racial division as the element of our history—what we presume when we say “we”—in need of challenge and correction. Prioritization of food and the privilege given to certain forms of farming and food production have clearly contributed to “the racial contract”, as described by philosopher Charles Mills. The chapter examines forms of structural racism in food systems, and expresses hope that an examination of agrarian thought can create a richer exchange of views between environmental ethics and the philosophy of race.
-Marshal Zeringue
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