When it comes to laws and policies that deal with food--such as special taxes on sugary drinks and the banning of certain unhealthy food ingredients--critics argue that these policies can be paternalistic and can limit individual autonomy over food choices. In Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach, Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti show that both paternalistic justifications for healthy eating efforts and anti-paternalisticarguments against them can be grounded in perfectionist views that overly prioritize some values, such as autonomy and health, over other values. The authors therefore propose a more inclusive, public reason approach to healthy eating policy that will be appealing to those who take pluralism and culturaldiversity seriously, by providing a framework through which different kinds of values, including but not limited to autonomy and health, can be factored into the public justification of healthy eating efforts.

This book explores the moral and political significance of gastrospaces: the spaces where we eat. It adopts an innovative approach, combining analytic political philosophy and analytic ontology, to lay down the theoretical foundations for a multi- and interdisciplinary research agenda on the complex interconnections between food and space. Social science and humanities scholars have studied the ties between food consumption and space from multiple angles. This book sets up a different and more foundational approach, which engages with these bodies of work and integrates them into a coherent framework. While taking the reader through a theoretical journey of varying complexities, the book also illustrates the social, political, and cultural significance of gastrospaces by surveying an array of examples from diverse historical and geographical contexts. It then draws on political philosophy to show that gastrospaces are sites of justice and injustice and complements this analysis by developing an ontological model for gastrospaces that facilitates a systematic analysis of their social, political, and cultural significance. The book ends with a toolbox for the study of gastrospaces that different stakeholders may apply to their respective contexts of intervention. This book will appeal to philosophers, political scientists, food scholars, geographers, and anyone interested in the intersection between food and space. By focusing on a wide range of real-world topics related to gastrospaces, such as racist dress codes, family-friendly restaurants, speakeasies, and gendered kitchen designs, the book will also be of interest to nonacademic stakeholders such as urban planners, policymakers, designers, managers, and consumers.

Intertwining policy analysis and ethnography, José Tenorio examines how, and why now, the promotion of healthy lifestyles has been positioned as an ideal ‘solution’ to obesity and how this shapes the preparation, sale and consumption of food in schools in Mexico. This book situates obesity as a structural problem enabled by market-driven policy change, problematizing the focus on individual behavior change which underpins current obesity policy. It argues that the idea of healthy lifestyles draws attention away from the economic and political roots of obesity, shifting blame onto an ‘uneducated’ population. Deploying Foucault’s concept of dispositif, Tenorio argues that healthy lifestyles functions as an ensemble of mechanisms to deploy representations of reality, spaces, institutions and subjectivities aligned with market principles, constructing individuals both as culprits for what they eat and the prime locus of policy intervention to change diets. He demonstrates how this ensemble enmeshes within the local cultural and economic conditions surrounding the provisioning of food in Mexican schools, and how it is contested in the practices around cooking. Expanding the conversation on the politics of food in schools, obesity policy and dominant perspectives on the relation between food and health, this book is a must-read for scholars of food and nutrition, public health and education, as well as those with an interest in development studies and policy enactment and outcomes.

This book explores food from a philosophical perspective, bringing together leading philosophers to consider the most basic questions about food. Each essay analyses many contemporary debates in food studies. Slow Food, sustainability, food safety, and politics, and addresses such issues as happy meat, aquaculture, veganism, and table manners.

Fifty distinguished contributors survey the entire history of political philosophy. They consider questions about how the subject should best be studied; they examine historical periods and great theorists in their intellectual contexts; and they discuss aspects of the subject that transcend periods, such as democracy, the state, and imperialism.

While the history of philosophy has traditionally given scant attention to food and the ethics of eating, in the last few decades the subject of food ethics has emerged as a major topic, encompassing a wide array of issues, including labor justice, public health, social inequity, animal rights and environmental ethics. This handbook provides a much needed philosophical analysis of the ethical implications of the need to eat and the role that food plays in social, cultural and political life. Unlike other books on the topic, this text integrates traditional approaches to the subject with cutting edge research in order to set a new agenda for philosophical discussions of food ethics. The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over 35 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into 7 parts: the phenomenology of food gender and food food and cultural diversity liberty, choice and food policy food and the environment farming and eating other animals food justice Essential reading for students and researchers in food ethics, it is also an invaluable resource for those in related disciplines such as environmental ethics and bioethics.

The Political Philosophy of the European City is a courageous and wide-ranging panorama of the political life and thought of the European city. Its novel hypothesis is that modern Western political thought, since the time of Hobbes and Locke, underestimated the political significance and value of the community of urban citizens, called ‘civitas’, united by local customs, or even a formal or informal urban constitution at a certain location, which had a recognizable countenance, with natural and man-made, architectural marks, called ‘urbs’. Recalling the golden age of the European city in ancient Greece and Rome, and offering a detailed description of its turbulent life in the Renaissance Italian city-states, it makes a case for the city not only as a hotbed of modern democracy, but also as a remedy for some of the distortions of political life in the alienated contemporary, centralized, Weberian bureaucratic state. Overcoming the north-south divide, or the core and periphery partition, the book’s material is particularly rich in Central European case studies. All in all, it is an enjoyable read which offers sound arguments to revisit the offer of the small and middle-sized European town, in search of a more sustainable future for Europe.

Public health raises critical ethics issues and concerns, making public heath ethics an essential topic for students and public health professionals. The 73 chapters in this volume examine public health ethics across a broad range of public health topics both in the U.S. and globally. It is the first ever comprehensive collection devoted to public health ethics.

In Righting Health Policy, D. Robert MacDougall argues that bioethics needs but does not have adequate tools for justifying law and policy. Bioethics' tools are mostly theories about what we owe each other. But justifying laws and policies requires more; at a minimum, it requires tools for explaining the legitimacy of actions intended to control or influence others. It consequently requires political, rather than moral, philosophy. After showing how bioethicists have consistently failed to use tools suitable for achieving their political aims, MacDougall develops an interpretation of Kant's political philosophy. On this account, the legitimacy of health laws does not derive from the morality of the behaviors they require but derives instead from their role in securing our equal freedom from each other. MacDougall uses this Kantian account to show the importance of political philosophy for bioethics. First, he shows how evaluating kidney markets in terms of the legitimacy of prohibiting sales rather than the morality of selling kidneys reverses the widely accepted view that Kantian philosophy supports legally prohibiting markets. Second, MacDougall argues that an account of political authority is necessary for settling longstanding bioethics debates about the legal and even moral standards that should govern informed consent.

Paul B. Thompson covers diet and health issues, livestock welfare, world hunger, food justice, environmental ethics, Green Revolution technology and GMOs in this concise but comprehensive study. He shows how food can be a nexus for integrating larger social issues in social inequality, scientific reductionism, and the eclipse of morality.