Care and Nutrition: Ethical Issues. Exploring the Moral Nexus between Caring and Eating through Natural History, Anthropology and the Ethics of Care

Abstract

The way in which human beings eat is quite revealing of the kind of moral beings that they are. This sheds a light on how non-human animals eat as well as behave in activities regarding food. Every mammal at some moment of its life depends on someone else to be fed. Such activities involving food are universal and natural forms of caring. In these situations, social relationships between individuals are defined or reinforced. Thus, actions that involve sharing and caring can easily be seen as moral ones. At the same time, however, since meals are natural and ordinary that it is very difficult to view them as moments of immorality. Forms of injustice and domination over other genders, ethnic or social groups as well as over other species rest in the small and apparently inoffensive choices and gestures of everyday meals.