Ethical Eating

World production is changing, what we eat now are often things which would not have been eaten two or three generations ago. 'Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food' This is the second rule in Michael Pollan's book, Food Rules.

'Imagine your great-grandmother at your side as you roll down the aisles of the supermarket. She picks up a portable yoghurt tube – and hasn't a clue what this plastic container of colourful gel could possibly be. Is it food or is it toothpaste?' (Pollan, 2010 : 7 )

Take for example the chicken nugget. Michael Pollan asks his son about the 'chickeny' taste; 'no they taste like what they are, which is nuggets' .This is important, we are evolving and our eating habits are changing. What you expect to be a piece of deep fried chicken actually contains 38 ingredients one of which is butyhydroquinone (TBHQ) which makes up 0.02% of the oil in McChicken Nuggets 'ingesting one gram of TBHQ cab cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation and collapse” Ingesting 5 grams can kill'.

Fast food aside, conventional production of meat has been ousted to allow more 'efficient' methods of production. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO's) are taking over. In their short history CAFOs have produced excessive amounts of environmental and health problems such as 'polluted water and air, toxic wastes, novel and deadly pathogens.' This mixed with the speed of which they are produced which,

Causes their flesh to marble well, giving it a taste and texture which consumers have come to like. Yet this corn – fed meat is demonstrably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega 3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass.

We are as yet unaware of the implications of consuming food produced in this way but research shows that it could be harmful. 'Modern day hunter-gatherers who subsist on meat don't have our rates of heart disease. In the same way ruminants are ill adapted to eat corn, humans may in turn be ill adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn'.

My interest and research into food production and sustainability cause me to pursue the art challenges that I do. This current piece Ethical Eating was inspired by my horror at the production methods and the amount of food waste the UK produces 'From farm to plate an estimated 18 to 20 million tonnes of food are wasted every year in the UK' (Stuart, 2009).