So this article is essentially saying if you are passionate about ethical eating and do the homework to understand how to seek out sustainable food choices in your area, as well as support local community places or businesses that support equality, do this while you travel too. Yeah – I didn’t think that needed to be said. I think many of us who are likeminded this way, have a natural appeal towards places that show this commitment, so what is the article really asking us to do differently (to be fair, I did not listen to their podcast)? Just to double check websites and look for those statements from the restaurant about their declarations of sustainability or community partnership? Do they want us to research the background and history of each chef/owner while we’re traveling? Should I have asked the old lady in Peru who was selling tamales on the street if she was certified in her sustainability practices and how she supports her neighborhood?
I am a big supporter of ethical eating, but it’s a bit like preaching to the choir. If you do this at home, you’ll try to do this when you travel. If you don’t do this when you’re at home, no way you are doing this when you travel.
Lots of veg & salads, grilled meats & seafood, whole fat dairy products, not too much sugar, not a lot of processed food, reasonable portions aka eating till I’m sated vs. eating till I’m full.
However, the thread title is about “eating ethically while traveling,” which implies caring more about others’ health/well-being (including animals & the planet as a whole) than one’s own, not what we each consider a “healthy” diet.
One can come into ethical challenges with a solution without understanding the dilemma. When it comes to eating, better explore one’s own solution carefully before exploring cultural alternatives.
Your own perspective sounds very reasonable to me.
While travelling, it’s nice to experience various types of regional assholery, which helps one appreciate the assholes one takes for granted back home.
This chain went sideways fast. I’m going to try to course-correct. I find that to the extent I try to do things that conserve/protect the planet - which is my own interpretation of ethical eating, it is much harder to do when I’m traveling and eating out. The portions are generally too big, and sharing only helps if someone in your party wants what you want. So much food gets thrown away. If we have a mini fridge, then leftovers are brought home, but then there is packaging to throw away. There are rarely any compost bins, which we have at home. Sometimes, there are no recycle bins. All of this makes me a bit itchy, and then I redouble my efforts at home.
It won’t keep me from travelling though. That is too big a price to pay. And as indicated more upthread, individual people who use styrofoam boxes or straws sometimes are not the main reason that we have the climate issues or garbage management issues that we have.
Ethics and morality is so fluid and context-dependent, that if I relied on ethical norms to guide my palate, I would starve from paralysis by analysis.
My point was and is that one must have a foundation in healthy eating to consider ethics–and it was implicit in the linked narrative. There was no off topic content to my post–IMO, of course.
