Skip to main content

Chewing over FOOD!

Readers who know my strong slant towards FRUIT AND VEG in I Think Therefore I Eat, will maybe be puzzled to find me taking on the vegans recently. Nonetheless, that is where I felt the truth of the extraordinarily complex food arguments lies and philosophy takes us where the truth is whether we like it or not!

The Observer (London) even accused me of waging ‘culture wars’ and wondered:
Is it possible that a combination of well-meaning philanthropists and large agricultural concerns have united to exploit health fears for financial gain, while neglecting the nutritional shortcomings in their recommendations?
Anyway, in the event I was delighted to work with the brilliant Frédéric Leroy on this article, which basically follows up a request he received from the influential European Food Agency to raise public awareness about the complexity of food issues and the implicatons of simple ‘one size fits all’ solutions.

Our piece kicked off a public information campaign which included coverage in the UK Independent and the London Observer - which took a vigorously and unsceptically PRO-vegan line, to mention just two of the most read of the many papers that followed up on us.

In 2020, the Hungarian Press specifically linked my book to the 'vegan foods' campaign, which was both nice of them and quite shrewd. But then, as Gergely Nagy, the journalist put it:

“Veganism, artificial meat & plant-based foods may not save the world but they will certainly transform civilization.. in the wrong direction..”
 
He then adds: “His brilliant work (!) I Think, Therefore I Eat.. is a readable, entertaining historical overview of food philosophies. However, his message is deadly serious... Food, including its production, distribution and consumption, is one of the pillars of human culture and civilization...”
 



The EAT-Lancet Commission's controversial campaign

A global powerful action against meat?


Will 2019 be remembered as the year of the EAT-Lancet intervention, arguing for a planetary shift to a so-called “plant-based” diet? Isn’t it remarkablehow meat, symbolizing health and vitality since millennia, is now often depicted as detrimental to our bodies, the animals, and the planet? Why exactly is the minoritarian discourse of vegetarianism and veganism currently all over the media?

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Rethinking Thinking

By Martin Cohen I’ve been thinking  lot about thinking a lot! This book is pretty much a summary of my thoughts over thirty years… Tip One , via Sun Tzu’s classic text,  The Art of War , is don’t do things the clever way, nor even  the smart way: do them the easy way. Because it doesn’t matter what you’re wondering about, or researching or doing - someone else has probably solved the problem for you already. Google it, get the book, find the answer. Tip Two is to avoid ‘black and white’ thinking, binary distinctions, ‘yes/no’ language and questions, and instead take the tip from ‘design thinking’ that approaches rooted in notions of questions and answers are themselves limiting insight and that it is sometimes better to go for narratives. Tip Three , which, yes, is connected to the previous tips, and that’s a good thing too,  is to look for the pattern in the data. However, there’s a caution that has to come with advice to  pattern match, because as we become at...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE ‘AH-HA!’ MOMENT Exploring Philosophical Ideas through Jokes and Puzzles

   Why you’ve got to laugh… Okay, you say you don’t want to. That the world is looking pretty awful these days:  there’s a an actual genocide in Gaza, in America a mafia ‘don’ (or should I say ‘Don’) is plundering the country’s treasury and having opponents bundled off the street and imprisoned in far-away hell-holes… so is there any point to a book on jokes? Well, naturally enough, a lot of people don't think so. But this book is not actually a joke book (though it uses a lot for illustration)it's actually a more sociological study of both the role and mechanisms of humour. But it’s not pompous – it’s a lot of fun. That’s why the reviews editor at the Sun, the UK’s largest selling tabloid gave it a four star review (that’s the max) and called it the ultimate “feel good” book, while Talk Radio Europe crowned it grandly “the funniest book on philosophy ever written”. Okay, the full quote included the word “probably” but still! So what's this book about – and why, apart fro...
Post a Comment
Read more