Eating Ethically: Religion and Science for a Better Diet

Eating Ethically is a book that discusses the complexities of eating well in the modern world, considering conflicting recommendations, scientific studies, and environmental and economic factors. It proposes a different eating strategy grounded in biology and philosophy, promoting internal cues and spiritual and social health. The book draws on insights from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to promote personal health and social cohesion.

Format: Hardback
Length: 264 pages
Publication date: 19 December 2017
Publisher: Columbia University Press

We are consuming ourselves to death in a variety of ways, both physically and socially. Few activities are as crucial to human well-being as eating, and even fewer are as ethically complex. Eating well is particularly perplexing. Conflicting recommendations, contradictory scientific studies, and the confounding environmental and economic factors that surround us make choices difficult. Eating just right is complex for the contemporary American, living amid excess and faced with moral, medical, and environmental consequences that influence our eating choices. A different eating strategy is needed, one grounded in our biology but also philosophically sound, theologically cogent, and personally achievable.

Eating Ethically provides evidence and arguments for more adaptive eating practices. Drawing on religion, medicine, philosophy, cognitive science, art, ethics, and more, Jonathan K. Crane distinguishes among the eater, the eaten, and eating to promote a radical reorientation away from external cues and toward internal ones. From classic philosophy on appetite to contemporary studies of satiation, from the science of metabolism to metaphysics and theology, Crane intertwines ancient wisdom and cutting-edge scholarship to show that eating well is not only a biological necessity but also an integral facet of spiritual and social health.

He draws on insights from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that promote personal health and social cohesion. Eating Ethically, grounded in science, tradition, and our internal necessities, points us toward eating well.

Weight: 498g
Dimension: 161 x 237 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780231173445