S&F_scienzaefilosofia.it (Jun 2024)
Filosofia, etica e tecnologie alimentari: questioni etiche e teoretiche
Abstract
Philosophy, Ethics and Food Technologies: ethical and theoretical issues “Man is what he eats” So wrote Ludwig Feuerbach in an essay in 1862. Reflection on what we eat and the ethical issues raised by the consumption of food has constantly run through the history of Western thought, from Plato and Aristotle to the Old Testament, Luther’s exhortations, and Nietzsche with his dietary recommendations in Ecce homo. However, food ethics, in its current form, did not emerge as an independent field of study of applied ethics until the 1990s. Often, it is Ben Mepham’s 1996 text Food Ethics that is referred to as the starting point for a structured reflection on it. There are numerous topics under analysis in Food Ethics, and they concern both the production and distribution of food as well as its consumption. Browsing through the table of contents of Mepham’s text may give us an idea: world hunger and moral dilemmas; food aid and food distribution; sustainable food systems; the use of food of animal origin; the equation between food production, nutrition and health; food safety and ethical aspects; ethical analysis of food biotechnology; cultural aspects of food biotechnology; consumer freedom as an ethical practice in the food market; ethical issues in agri-food policies and food research. Almost thirty years after the publication of that volume, many of those issues are resurfacing. Advances in science and technology, however, are also handing us new possibilities to address them: cultured meat and fish, the use of 3D printers for food production, the introduction of new foods and new procedures to make them, the widespread use of AI in agribusiness, the new fields of nutrigenomics and nutraceutics. In fact, and broadening our gaze from ethical to theoretical reflection, the use of new technologies in the food sector is part of a broader process of technologisation of the world of life (and nature) that is present in various spheres. This process is culminating in the production of biohybrid organisms, in which the natural/biological and technological/artificial elements are difficult to separate. In other words, therefore, ‘in being what he eats’, through the use of various technologies, the human being is bidding farewell to dualistic and naive approaches that see a deep divide between technology and nature – thus laying the foundations for a new philosophical anthropology. Hence the profound need to understand, analyse and philosophically examine how the use of new technologies and new modes of food production and consumption are able to shape, hybridise and ultimately change the world around us. In this sense, this Dossier aims to explore the theoretical merits and preconditions behind the use of technologies in the creation of new forms of life and sustainable food practices. In this intersection of philosophy of technology, science and analysis of life-form structures, purely theoretical questions emerge: what notion of technology underpins food production in the 21st century? What concrete practices operate within the new food technologies and how do they relate to the techniques that have always characterised food production? How is it possible, de facto and de jure, to move from the use of foods considered natural to those derived from 3D printing? In other words, what notion of nature emerges from the use of new technologies in today’s food production and printing? In this dossier, we will examine, from a multi-focal perspective, both the ethical and the historical-philosophical aspects of food, in the belief that food choices attest to important characteristics of our modus essendi and our expectations of the future of humanity.
