We are eating ourselves to death in many ways, both bodily and societally. Few activities are as essential to human flourishing as eating, and fewer still are as ethically intricate. Eating well is particularly confusing. 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.

About the Author
Jonathan K. Crane is the Raymond F. Schinazi Scholar in Bioethics and Jewish Thought at the Emory University Center for Ethics. He is the author of Narratives and Jewish Bieothics (2013); editor of Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents (Columbia, 2015); and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality (2013).

Reviews
An accomplished ethicist and philosopher, Crane crafts a careful argument for what it means to eat well. Following a trajectory set by Michael Pollan and others, Eating Ethically is set apart by its interdisciplinarity, using biblical scholarship, nutritional science, biochemistry, and medicine to effectively buttress the idea that eating is an activity that resonates in both personal and social contexts. -- Benjamin Zeller, coeditor of Religion, Food, and Eating in North America



Book Information
ISBN 9780231173445
Author Jonathan K. Crane
Format Hardback
Page Count 264
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press