Posted on April 1, 2002 at 10:33 a.m.
BIRMINGHAM, AL — “Food is the very stuff of life,” writes University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) philosopher and bioethicist Gregory E. Pence, Ph.D. While it’s essential to everyone’s existence, food hasn’t been the object of philosophers’ curiosity. But with growing debates over genetically modified (GM) foods, world hunger, the emergence of mad cow disease and agricultural terrorism, today’s food policy issues abound with ethical questions, Pence said.
Pence explores these topics in two new books Designer Food: Mutant Harvest or Breadbasket of the World? and The Ethics of Food: A Reader for the 21st Century, both published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. In Designer Food, Pence argues that the debate over GM foods stems not from facts, but from diverse political ideologies. He makes his case by outlining four world views: naturalism, scientific progressivism, globalism and egalitarianism, and using these four frames he illustrates how people in good faith come to different conclusions about GM food.
The book also provides insight into the political fallout that occurred after Europeans discovered that American companies had secretly introduced GM foods into European diets. Pence also chronicles the mad cow epidemic in England and gives readers the differing views on world hunger, eco-fascism, the meat industry and environmental ethics, as well as European vs. American attitudes toward food.
Moreover, Pence challenges what he calls “alarmist” views against GM food, which he says is tested “10 times more thoroughly than new foods first served in exotic restaurants and many herbs and supplements sold in health food stores, which aren’t tested at all.”
Pence’s other book The Ethics of Food is a collection of essays on topics, including GM foods, starvation, vegetarianism, organic foods and the food industry written by Pence and other such notables as philosopher Peter Singer, writer and critic Vandana Shiva, science journalists Ronald Bailey and Nichols Fox and the Nobel Prize-winning plant biologist Norman Borlaug, whose development of dwarf wheat is credited for increasing yields worldwide. The book, writes Michael Brannigan, executive director of La Roche College’s Center for the Study of Ethics, “speaks to one of the most pressing, though under-examined, issues in our biotech age.”
Pence is a professor of medical ethics in the UAB Department of Philosophy and the School of Medicine. His other books include Flesh of My Flesh: The Ethics of Cloning Humans, Who’s Afraid of Human Cloning? and Re-Creating Medicine: Ethical Issues at the Frontiers of Medicine, all published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. His text, Classic Cases in Medical Ethics, published by McGraw Hill, will soon go into its fourth edition.