From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone

I'm heavily involved with our small town food co-op, and though I'm a retired city person living out my lifelong rural fantasy now, making friends with farmers, eating fresh farm food, happily free from commuting and shopping in supermarkets, I am very tuned in to all the arguments about eating local foods as a way to be kind to humans, animals, and the environment. This book educates me about the impossibility of untangling the interwoven factors that a person would want to understand in order to make ethical decisions. I like uncertainties that make strong opinions impossible, so even though I can't know if my food choices are ethically justified, I and hoards of others enjoy the fantasy of thinking we can save the world through better shopping,I probably wouldn't pick a book about ethics off the shelf, but when it's about food my attention is alive, especially when it makes me into a skeptic about my own good intentions..

This is the best book available for people who are concerned with the ethics of food production and diet. Paul Thompson is a philosopher, an ethicist. But he is also steeped in the science of agriculture, the history and culture of agriculture, and the issues of the day, as he is a professor in one of the premier colleges of agriculture and natural resources in the world: Michigan State University. He will not let the reader off wth simple answers, though. His analyses of agri-ethics require one to consider first-order, second-order, and third-order consequences of of choices. Don't expect that all your presumptions and preferences will be easy to justify as you read. The book is well written, with a scholar's command of the subject. I have taught about agriculture and food as social scientist for 38 years. This book will affect the way I teach it from now on.

Best book I've yet read on Food Ethics. Succinct, clear and measured, and appropriate for a general audience. I highly recommend.

I judged the book by the cover. I was not looking for a book about ethics; my mistake. What I read of it was very good.

Having seen only a very simple ad for this book at a time of yet more controversy about food, and having trusted the publisher, I went ahead and ordered it. I was extremely pleasantly surprised. It is so well and fluently written that it is almost compulsive reading once started. It is about the ethical questions to be considered, and not about the decisions you should make, a difference that I found refreshing. However, as someone associated with one of the "land grant" universities originally set up in the United States for agricultural research, he does have a serious bias towards intensive, industrial agriculture, and at one point does describe himself as an "insider". While this is not surprising, it is limiting at times, and is particularly worrying when he seems to think that objections to the side effects of the genetically modified foods we are actually being offered (i.e.. glyphosate-resistant weeds and ever heavier applications of herbicide) should somehow be considered irrelevant when compared to their greater productivity. But generally the arguments are meticulous - he even, if briefly, mentions that some agriculturally modified ecosystems can be considered to need (and be worth) preservation, although he doesn't follow through the implications of this. Here II must declare a personal interest; I've been lucky enough to live in some of these areas, all used for pasture and/or hay-making, and know just how valuable and ecologically rich they can be.