Ethics of 21st century food

America has become a nation obsessed with food. We are orthorexics – searching for the latest and best in healthy eating. In that drive for health, we created the science of nutritionism, deconstructing food into its essential nutrient parts and then attempting to reconstruct that foodstuff into better, cheaper, faster, edible material. This has given us such recent innovations as vitamin-enriched Diet Coke and heart healthy chocolate.

Industrial capitalism is now attempting to maximize organic potential and the moral approbation of organic labeling without actually adhering to the principles at the heart of the sustainable organic market. America's increasing isolation from its food supply has ruptured cyclical causal chains, creating a system where it is easier to search for technological fixes than address our actual disconnection from sustainable agriculture.

Using the works of John Coveney, Michel Foucault, Michael Pollan and others, this paper will show how our relationship with food has created an industrialized, centralized food system that isolates our crops from our livestock from ourselves. The very way in which we eat has become moralized, codified through a genealogy of historical and social imperatives, where those who can eat in supposedly sustainable ways pay not only to eat better, but to feel better about themselves. The end result is that our food continues down an unsafe and unsustainable path.