This is part of a series encouraging an examination of everyday decisions from a moral standpoint. How do our everyday actions help or harm ourselves and others? Think about it. For those interested, there is a Scriptural insight relating to the everyday decision, from a Christian standpoint. I welcome responses from those who might be able to offer similar insights from the Koran or other sacred writings. Over the next few months, watch for postings on health decisions, work decisions, environmental decisions, relationship decisions, and...who knows what else?What constitutes an “ethical” decision? It is considering whether the decision has a negative or positive effect on ourselves or others. What we eat, or more importantly how we eat clearly has an effect on not only our bodies, but it also affects our mental well being, our social interactions, our family and friends, our economic system and, yes, even the cultural fabric of our society.
The effect on our bodies is well documented elsewhere, so just consider that your choice of what to eat is, indeed, a moral decision. While any particular choice about a particular food has little long term effects, we choose to build up or destroy our physical health by our collected decisions around diet. Beyond our physical health, though, the effects are not so obvious. However there is ample evidence that eating decisions are tied to self-image, mood, coping mechanisms, diagnosable emotional disorders, and more.
Dietary decisions, however, go far beyond ourselves. We have all been in situations in which choosing to eat or not to eat something hurt the feelings or offended the sensibilities of others. In certain cultural situations, the choice to eat or not eat certain things can have far reaching effects on our social relationships. Certainly, we see it often within families or in work situations.
Is it a stretch to say our decisions on diet affect our economic system? Hardly. The food industry is driven by consumer choice. Our choices help determine what is sold in our grocery stores and restaurants, what is advertised to our children, what is grown on our farms and what is imported and exported. For example, by choosing to include foods prepared with transfats in our daily or weekly diets ensures that transfats will continue to be used and affect our economy and our nation’s health (and therefore, the economy!).
Finally, dietary choices affect our cultural fabric. Perhaps it is not so much what we eat as how. The decisions we have made to make fast food a bigger and bigger part of our diet has clearly affected what our children eat, how people spend their money, how families cope with busy schedules around mealtimes, etc.
These are only some of the many ways to look at our dietary decisions, but it is enough to challenge us to examine our own decisions in light of how they affect ourselves and others. Decisions about what to eat are, indeed, ethical decisions.
Having established that, consider that each person must work through this decision maze for himself or herself. One person makes that hurts no one while another may make the same decision and cause a great deal of hurt. (This is easiest to see from a personal point of view. One person may eat peppers while the next person would suffer severe heartburn from the same decision). So, judge not, but do be intentional about your own decision making.
A Scriptural Perspective: One man’s faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. –Romans 14:2-3
Labels: diet, eating, ethical decisions, ethics, moral decisions
