As Brillant-Savarin remarked in 1825 in his classic text Physiologie du Goût, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” Philosophers and political theorists have only recently begun to pay attention to food as a critical domain of human activity and social justice. Too often these discussions treat food as a commodity and eating as a matter of individual choice. Policies that address the global obesity crisis by focusing on individual responsibility and medical interventions ignore the dependency of human agency on a culture of possibilities. The essays collected here address this lack in philosophy and political theory by appreciating food as an origin of human culture and a network of social relations. They show how an approach to the current global obesity epidemic through individual choice deflects the structural change that is necessary to create a culture of healthy eating. Analyzing the contemporary food crises of obesity, malnutrition, environmental degradation, and cultural displacement as global issues of public policy and social justice, these essays display the essential interconnections among issues of social inequity, animal rights, environmental ethics, and cultural identity. They call for new solidarities and new public policies to ensure the sustainable practices necessary to the production and distribution of wholesome and satisfying food. Lévi-Strauss located the origin of ethics in table manners. By learning what and how to eat, humans learned respect for others, for the earth, and for the other forms of life that sustain human existence. Lévi-Strauss fears that in our time this “lesson in humility” coursing throughout the mythologies of “savage peoples” may have been forgotten, so that the world is treated as a thing to be appropriated and the extinction of species and cultures as an inevitable result of the ascendancy of global capital. This volume makes clear the need to change the way we eat, if we are to live on the earth together with what Lévi-Strauss calls “decency and discretion.”

"The new 2nd edition of "Our Food, Our Right: Recipes for Food Justice" includes a Foreword by Raj Patel. The book has a focus on "Stories of Change" - stories of successful initiatives locally and globally that are helping to create more sustainable food communities. The texts combine hands-on tools for change with community recipes and political awareness to engage YOU in joining in the struggle for food justice! Our Food, Our Right promotes community knowledge sharing, self-sufficiency, accessibility, and food justice through a food sovereignty framework. Our Food, Our Right takes you on a journey through many of the current food system's failures, and showcases creative solutions that communities are designing to regain control over their food, and the health of their bodies and neighborhoods. This guide has the tools you need to take back your food choices and stand up for the right of all people to good, healthy, and culturally appropriate food!"--Publisher description.

Explores whether states possess extraterritorial obligations under international law to respect and ensure economic, social and cultural rights.

Food is a source of nourishment, a cause for celebration, an inducement to temptation, a means of influence, and signifies good health and well-being. Together with other life enhancing goods such as clean water, unpolluted air, adequate shelter and suitable clothing, food is a basic good which is necessary for human flourishing. In recent times, however, various environmental and social challenges have emerged, which are having a profound effect on both the natural world and built environment – such as climate change, feeding a growing world population, nutritional poverty and obesity. Consequently, whilst the relationships between producers, supermarkets, regulators and the individual have never been more important, they are becoming increasingly complicated. In the context of a variety of hard and soft law solutions, with a particular focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR), the authors explore the current relationship between all actors in the global food supply chain. Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Justice and the Global Food Supply Chain also provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary response to current calls for reform in relation to social and environmental justice, and proposes an alternative approach to current CSR initiatives. This comprises an innovative multi-agency proposal, with the aim of achieving a truly responsible and sustainable food retail system. Because only by engaging in the widest possible participatory exercise and reflecting on the urban locale in novel, material and cultural ways, is it possible to uncover new directions in understanding, framing and tackling the modern phenomena of, for instance, food deserts, obesity, nutritional poverty and social injustice. Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Justice and the Global Food Supply Chain engages with a variety of disciplines, including, law, economics, management, marketing, retailing, politics, sociology, psychology, diet and nutrition, consumer behaviour, environmental studies and geography. It will be of interest to both practitioners and academics, including postgraduate students, social scientists and policy-makers.

Steering a middle course between cosmopolitanism and a narrow nationalism, the book develops an original theory of global justice that also addresses controversial topics such as immigration and reparations for historic wrongdoing.

Completely updated and revised edition of one of the most widely-praised food books of recent years. It’s a perverse fact of modern life: There are more starving people in the world than ever before, while there are also more people who are overweight. To find out how we got to this point and what we can do about it, Raj Patel launched a comprehensive investigation into the global food network. It took him from the colossal supermarkets of California to India’s wrecked paddy-fields and Africa’s bankrupt coffee farms, while along the way he ate genetically engineered soy beans and dodged flying objects in the protestor-packed streets of South Korea. What he found was shocking, from the false choices given us by supermarkets to a global epidemic of farmer suicides, and real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa. Yet he also found great cause for hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable and joyful food system. Going beyond ethical consumerism, Patel explains, from seed to store to plate, the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of both farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.

A Christian response to global realities of human inequality, poverty, violence and ecological destruction in the twenty-first century.