Few activ­i­ties are as essen­tial to human flour­ish­ing as eat­ing, and few­er still are as eth­i­cal­ly fraught. Eat­ing well is par­tic­u­lar­ly con­fus­ing. We live amid excess, faced with con­flict­ing rec­om­men­da­tions, con­tra­dic­to­ry sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies, and com­plex moral, med­ical, and envi­ron­men­tal con­se­quences that influ­ence our choic­es. A new eat­ing strat­e­gy is urgent­ly need­ed, one ground­ed in ethics, informed by biol­o­gy, sup­port­ed by phi­los­o­phy and the­ol­o­gy, and, ulti­mate­ly, per­son­al­ly achievable.

Eat­ing Eth­i­cal­ly argues per­sua­sive­ly for more adap­tive eat­ing prac­tices. Draw­ing on reli­gion, med­i­cine, phi­los­o­phy, cog­ni­tive sci­ence, art, ethics, and more, Jonathan K. Crane shows how dis­tin­guish­ing among the eater, the eat­en, and the act of eat­ing pro­motes a rad­i­cal reori­en­ta­tion away from exter­nal cues and toward inter­nal ones. This turn is vital for sur­vival, accord­ing to clas­sic phi­los­o­phy on appetite and con­tem­po­rary stud­ies of sati­ety, meta­bol­ic sci­ence as well as meta­physics and reli­gion. By inter­twin­ing ancient wis­dom from Judaism, Chris­tian­i­ty, and Islam with cut­ting-edge research, Crane con­cludes that eth­i­cal eat­ing is a means to achieve both per­son­al health and social cohe­sion. Ground­ed in sci­ence and tra­di­tion, Eat­ing Eth­i­cal­ly shows us what it tru­ly means to eat well.