Not only “good for you”: philosophically-correct food
As food production is ultimately driven by consumer choices and lifestyles, the manufacturing process enters the ethical debate: it is no longer enough for foodstuffs to be “good for you”, to incorporate all the ingredients wellness implies; it must also add ethics to the recipe and meet consumers’ notions of right and wrong throughout an increasingly transparent farm-to-fork chain. The concept is being acknowledged and included in industry trade fair forums, as seen in the recent case of Anuga FoodTec in Cologne.
Limagrain Cereales Ingrédients (LCI) has recently received an award for “Ethical Responsibility” highlighting the company’s work on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at the Nestlé UK and Ireland Supplier Awards 2015. As a subsidiary of Groupe Limagrain, the European Union’s leading seed group with an inherent concern for environmental issues, LCI has consistently upheld the five commitments of its CSR strategy, which often go beyond regulatory and contractual obligations and cover the areas of economics, ethics and governance, the environment and social concerns.
The ethical debate has at its core the identification of today’s ethical issues pertaining to food production and incorporating solutions. Opinions will differ between scientists and the public in this respect; as Dr. Jochen Hamatschek of the Association of German Food Technologists (GDL) commented during his presentation, “As the current ethical debate affects the food technology”, defining concepts and drawing up action plans is an ongoing task. One example in this respect is that of GMO foodstuffs, he explained.
The global food ethics project
To identify the ethical issues that are of critical importance to the challenge of global food security and on which real progress could be made in three to five years, 19 leading experts met in October last year, coming from a vast range of disciplines, including nutrition, health and food safety, occupational safety, economics, agronomy and agroecology, animal welfare, plant genetics and plant breeding, agrifood systems and economic sociology, water ethics and management, climate change, bioethics and philosophy.
You can read more in our latest issue of European Baker print magazine!