(originally posted to Technoscience as if People Mattered April 17, 2016) I’m pondering the ethics of the “Eat Local” movement. If I go to Florida, am I behaving ethically by eating food grown there? What if I eat New-York-grown food there? What if I bring New-York-grown food with me to Florida and share it with a friend? Am I the only one of the two of us that is behaving ethically in that scenario? Is the very fact of my traveling to Florida the unethical part? After all, it’s the travel that costs fossil fuel, one of the main issues eating local is supposed to address. I became concerned with food provenance first when I was dieting strictly and so depending on others for nutrition
(co-authored with Becca Harrison and originally posted to Technoscience as if People Mattered April 2, 2015) “Believe in better.” Better nutrition. Better health. Better taste. Better farming practices. Better land use. Better cow care. Better milk. Coca-Cola’s new dairy product, Fairlife, brings with it these great promises, hoping to fill a perceived void in a market of consumers increasingly interested in healthy food, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability. But, is this claim of “better” the most appropriate metric for judging this novel product, or does it unintentionally continue to drive the problematic notion that companies and their technologies are increasingly defining our identity for us? Coca-Cola’s broad claims to “better,” as they pertain to Fairlife and consumer health, seem suspect when critically evaluated. While it
(originally posted to Technoscience as if People Mattered January 14, 2015) Disparities in health outcomes along racial, gender, and class lines are increasingly prevalent, and we don’t have to search for long to find media coverage of the spiraling costs of health care. Understanding medicine as a social phenomenon is thus now more important than ever. The book Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness attests to the increasing universality of the application of medical thinking to “normal” life, saying, “health itself and proper management of chronic illnesses are becoming individual moral responsibilities to be fulfilled through improved access to knowledge, self-surveillance, prevention, risk, assessment, the treatment of risk, and the consumption of appropriate self-help and biomedical goods and services.” There are two concepts, medicalization and biomedicalization,