WHAT DO WE DO WHEN WE EAT? Part I: AN INCONCLUSIVE INQUIRY
Abstract
What do we do when we eat? In the first part of this contribution it is observed that this question is surprisingly seldom addressed in philosophical, ethical and theological literature in such a way that the evolutionary rootedness of human eating, the role of predation and the necessity of death in any form of eating are addressed. A crude typology of interpretations of the act of eating is offered on the basis of concepts such as survival, human (male) supremacy, asceticism, hedonistic consumption and conspicuous consumption. It is argued that all of these positions remain unsatisfactory in the sense that they cannot do justice simultaneously to scientific, ecological, cultural, ethical and theological considerations. The under-lying problem is that the need for predation is either employed as a point of departure or minimised, if not avoided or denied.Authors retain copyright and grant the Journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this Journal.
This is an open access journal, and the authors and journal should be properly acknowledged, when works are cited.
Authors may use the publishers version for teaching purposes, in books, theses, dissertations, conferences and conference papers.
A copy of the authors’ publishers version may also be hosted on the following websites:
- Non-commercial personal webpage or blog.
- Institutional webpage.
- Authors Institutional Repository.
The following notice should accompany such a posting on the website: “This is an electronic version of an article published in Scriptura, Volume XXX, number XXX, pages XXX–XXX”, DOI. Authors should also supply a hyperlink to the original paper or indicate where the original paper (http://scriptura.journals.ac.za/pub) may be found.
Authors publishers version, affiliated with the Stellenbosch University will be automatically deposited in the University’s’ Institutional Repository SUNScholar.
Articles as a whole, may not be re-published with another journal.
The following license applies:
