Moral Issues Of Food

Food is a great example of a situation where humans have found themselves in a very new and quite potentially dangerous situation as a result of ecological change.
In the hunter gatherer ecologies that humans are most adapted to, humans ate a very diverse diet of vegetable foods and meat.
In historic civil ecologies, most humans had diets with far less diversity. If an agrarian group grew bread grains, that is what they mostly ate.
Both groups periodically dealt with starvation.

Currently, not only do we have an incredible abundance of foods, we have an incredible variety of all kinds of food. A technological society is not likely to be food limited. The problem is this very abundance. Humans are well adapted to a lack of food. Starvation has always been an important limiting factor on all past human societies. Partly in response to that, humans have a taste for high calorie and high fat foods. Now we are betrayed by that instinct which in the present ecology, can lead to dangerous situations of overweight and obesity.
A Morality must be used to prevent a hazard from an instinct that was an adaptation to a previous ecology. In ways it is very similar to the natural adaptation to malaria, sickle cell anemia. It is a survival traite in one ecology and a danger in another. In the case of food, there will be natural and artificial genetic adaptation, but first there will be behavioral adaptation.

How we acquire food has changed in relevant ways. Before agriculture, food gathering skills by both men and women contributed to status. The act of group food gathering and hunting led to much of current human communication and social skills that are used quite differently now.
Most important to consider is that changing to agriculture is a large and significant change in the most basic part of human ecology. It's signifigance is in that we have not been in a stable ecology since then. Current agricultural practices are depletive and cannot be the basis of a long term stable ecology.
It is interesting to note that there is one general theoretical exception to this. In terrace farming the soil is not lost. It is manually moved from the bottom to the top.
Future food production is going to heavily rely on technologies we do not presently use or have.

The Greek word 'vegetas' basically means 'firm'. The Ancient Greeks used the term to refer to unspoiled food and it was a philosophical or moral concept that one should not eat rotted or spoiled food. It was a somewhat novel concept at the time, but is a good illustration of a concept or meme that has come to be part of very common belief. It's reasons behind it's truth can be judged more accurately now than it could be then, but that didn't prevent it from becoming part of common moral law back then.
From that word has come the term vegetarian, though the original term did not refer to eating a diet with no meat in it, as the term is commonly meant today. Interestingly enough, it would not be particularly surprising if at some future time, humans come to believe that eating meat is novel or is as unacceptable as eating rotten foods. It could depend on many things, including food availability and diseases. Looking at technological development and the potentials of synthetic foods, it could easily come to be that eating any naturally grown meats or grain products could become considered strange.

Varying degrees of malnutrition have been the rule for humans rather than the exception. The uninterrupted abundance of food associated with the present technological society is a great novelty in history.
Some questions arise from that and an interesting moral concept.
The first question is what are the pluses and minuses of a modern diet? Humans tend to be bigger with relitively weaker skeletons. At the same time, modern diets certainly cut down on infant mortality and promote better development of the brain.
As a minor question, is occasional food deprivation good for humans? It does serve the purpose of allowing the intestines a break and an opportunity to cleanse themselves.

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A more interesting point is related to human 'rites of passage'. The significance of rites of passage in all primitive societies is well studied. When hypothesizing about characteristics of potenial future moral methods, could fasting be used as a valuable rite of passage in a technological society? Fasting is a behavior that triggers hunger, a very basic physical response. It is going to a greater or lesser extent act as a behavioral release. A rite of passage is to define a step in maturity in the individuals society. Fasting could cause a behavioral release that by itself could an important component of an individuals maturity. It also could have a great validity in a "rich" technological society with abundant food. The action of fasting, as part of a common rite of passage, could be a useful element of a modern moral system.

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