A wonderful starting place to think about how to eat ethically.
A collection of essays on the topic of eating ethically, practically, and personally.
Editors Cognard-Black and Goldthwaite, both English professors who have written widely about food, begin with the guideline that there is no one specific diet or method for eating ethically. “Any consideration of ethical eating requires ecological thinking and a close attention to relationships, the environment, and diversity,” they write. The editors divide the book into four sections: Nature and Nurture, Appetite and Restraint, What’s Eating Us, and Our Pasts as Present. Each section opens with an overview of the essays included in that section, and the essays range from two to 25 pages, making the book an excellent choice for casual reading. The editors seek to offer “creative and nuanced food stories that link the culinary imagination to practices of everyday eating,” and they are successful in that endeavor. The essays range from light reading—e.g., “My Children’s First Garden,” in which Michael P. Branch shares his struggles with creating a viable garden—to more focused historical topics, including traditional Indigenous knowledge around food and how the colonization of the Americas directly affected the diet of modern Americans. Vegetarianism and veganism receive ample attention alongside examinations of ethical meat eating and how food remains a vital connection point within our cultures and histories. In a piece titled “Between the Shopping Cart and the Chinese Restaurant,” Adrienne Su explores her often complicated relationship between the joy (and necessity) of cooking at home and the enjoyment of communal dining: “The pandemic revealed that restaurant-going of all kinds can be a social good, keeping people employed, enlivening neighborhoods, and sustaining sources of prepared food for those who can’t cook for themselves.” Other contributors include Nikki Finney, Maureen Stanton, and Aimee Nezhukumatathill.
A wonderful starting place to think about how to eat ethically.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781479821792
Page Count: 352
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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