Acquired Tastes: Virtue, Community, and Eating Ethicall

The standard American diet revolves around the ideal of individual autonomy, expressed through choice. The modern industrial food system shaped itself to fit consumer demands, and has actively attempted to reify them at the level of subconscious habits and desires. This has made it more challenging to treat food as an ethical subject, to be considered beyond the notion of individual tastes.;However, issues of ecology and justice in the raising and consumption of food have demonstrated that food ethics is a necessary discipline. Food ethics has been brought to the popular mind most effectively through the "Food Movement", a social movement spanning across several issues related to food and agriculture, and spear-headed by author and journalist Michael Pollan, and including agrarians such as Wendell Berry, chefs such as Dan Barber, and social justice advocates such as Vandana Shiva.;The food movement has grown dramatically, and has done much good, but is, however, limited by the fact that it accepts the same ethical anthropology as the industrial system, which posits humans as primarily individualized rational agents who can simply choose to eat better, regardless of social context, and regardless of the impulses and drives which lie below the level of conscious decision making.;Virtue ethics offers a needed corrective, engaging not only the conscious mind but also subconscious habit. It offers guidance on the daily practices of life, while simultaneously offering a big vision of what eating could be, and the sort of people we would need to be to want to eat in a better way.;The "better way", or eudaimonia, is captured by the concept of sustainability. Underneath that banner, several approaches to food virtue can be pursued, and adherents of each can trust and honor the differences of the other. The virtues needed to reach such a goal can be best inculcated through the development of and adherence to distinctive cultural patterns and habits of eating, known as foodways. Those who commit to eat in this fashion can serve as living models, providing a glimpse into a better way of eating.