FAB Gab ep 27 megan dean_mixdown

Kathryn MacKay28min

Kathryn MacKay

00:04

Hello and welcome. This is the podcast for the International Journal of feminist approaches to bioethics brought to you by fab Network. My name is Katherine McKay. And today I'm joined by making from Michigan State University to discuss her paper time to eat the importance of temporality for food ethics. Hi, Megan. Hi, Kathryn. Thanks for being here with me.

Meagan Dean

00:28

Thank you for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here. It's my pleasure.

Kathryn MacKay

00:31

So let's get started with your paper about temporality of food ethics. very keen to talk to you about this today. So could you tell our listeners what the summary of your paper is?

Meagan Dean

00:47

Sure, yeah. So I think it's a it's a fairly common experience to feel like we don't have time to eat well. And there's research showing that people report this as a barrier to eating healthily, which is one, one way many of us think about eating well. But we can make a distinction between what we might call the reality of time how much time we have to eat and our lived experience of time. So like, sometimes like today, usually, I only had 20 minutes between classes, and I forgot my lunch. All that was available was like vending machine chips. So like, there's a reality there of Time, time to eat. But you know, other times, we might literally have time to eat a meal. But we might feel like it's a waste of our time to prepare or acquire and eat what we might think of as like a healthy meal or a good meal, we might feel like there are more urgent and important things to do, than to sit down and share a meal with other people are, you know that our time is just not well used by eating in a particular way, even if we think that that is a good way to eat. So you can feel like you don't have time, even if you in a sort of material, concrete sense do. And these sort of feelings are a part of our lived experience of time or temporality. So this paper explores the relationship between how we experience time, and the ways that we eat and what the ethical implications of that relationship might be. So I draw on phenomenology to suggest that eating and temporality are in dynamic relationship with one another. So like our experience of time, say, as a scarce resource is running out like as we never have enough time, that informs what and how we eat. So things like eating in the car on the bus, choosing to go through a drive thru multitasking while you eat all those things make a lot of sense when you experience time as a scarce resource. But I also argue that the ways that we eat can shape how we experience time. So our eating can reinforce a particular way of experiencing time. Or we can engage in specific eating practices, to try to change how we experience time. So that's kind of an abstract, like, theoretical claim. But in the paper, I argue that this actually matters for feminists bioethics and food ethics, because there can be significant downsides, I guess, two different ways of experiencing time. And so in the paper, I compare and critique a few different ways of experiencing time and the eating that's linked to it. So for example, I mentioned, you know, experiencing time as a scarce resource that we have to manage. And in the paper, I call that clock time, which is a name from Raymond Boisvert's work, but experiencing time like that can produce a lot of anxiety, you know, that you're not doing time, right? You know, it can also encourage us to disconnect from others, or to overlook connections that are there in the interest of saving ourselves time. But as I argue, in the paper, you know, our food choices and our eating actually, deeply connect us to others, like in our local communities, but also around the globe, food producers, you know, the animals that that are raised as part of the food system, food workers, environment, all that stuff. So it's actually like a significant ethical issue if we ignore the ways that we're connected to others through food. But the argument is that this way of experiencing time can actually encourage that. So if that's true, then we might have a reason to want to experience time differently. Maybe in a way that's less anxiety provoking, or one that opens up possibilities for acknowledging and appreciating our connections with them. others through food, in particular. So in the second part of the paper, after I sort of discuss, you know, clock time eating and go through some of the critiques of that, I think about how we could cultivate an alternative experience of time through our food through our eating. And specifically there, I think about intuitive eating as a practice that, I argue, actually explicitly tries to change how we experience time. And it kind of centers that as necessary for, for eating well. And, you know, I think that, that's really interesting and promising. Ultimately, I have some critiques of of that too. But, you know, the bottom line of the paper is really to draw attention to this dynamic relationship between eating and temporality and the ethical implications of that. So it's kind of like adding a layer of complexity to our understanding of good eating like a, like a temporal layer. To that, to that question of what counts as good eating and, you know, so maybe part of what makes some eating good, and some eating less good is the kind of experience of time that is linked to. So that yeah, that's, that's what this paper smell.

Kathryn MacKay

06:19

Yeah, thank you. And I wonder if you could say something about what made you want to write those papers, there's something like thinking about time and eating, is this something that you've been working on for a little while.

Meagan Dean

06:31

So I'm really interested in thinking about eating in general, and all of the different ways that eating matters, ethically, so, you know, I sometimes describe my research as at the intersection of bioethics and food ethics, but I actually like don't care that much about food. I think there's, there's a lot of good work out there about like the ethics of food production and distribution, and, you know, food sovereignty and all of that stuff. But I actually think that eating as an activity is super ethically rich and complex, and in ways that are often like just not recognized or under appreciated. So just, for example, in bioethics, when we talk about eating and the ethics of eating, it's often really flattened out into either, you know, it, eating matters ethically, because it's an instrumental way of achieving health or promoting health. And it matters ethically, because it's a way to express our autonomy, you know, freedom of choice, you know, and you get this old and like, I'm sure everyone who listens, this podcast probably feels similar to me, it's like very tired way of setting up bioethical problems, and it's just like health versus autonomy, you know? Yeah. And so I'm really interested in thinking about, okay, but what are all the other ways that eating matters ethically, you know, and I'm not saying autonomy is not important. And so it's health, right. But there are just a lot of other ways in which eating matters to us as humans. And so part of my overall research project is just to enrich our understandings and our conversations about eating, and to help us make better judgments about what counts as good eating and good eaters. So one of the ways I think it matters is in relation to temporality. So that's kind of where this paper, you know, I think there's some really interesting work in phenomenology that's like pointing us toward that, that I drawn in the paper, but the implications of that for people who care about, you know, feminist food ethics, feminist bioethics, you know, the ethics of intervening on people's eating, I didn't see that being, you know, acknowledged at all. So, I was kind of just motivated to bring these resources from this other area of philosophy into, to try to kind of bring it into these other areas of conversation are where people care about the ethics of eating, but the ethical richness of eating and a lot of the literature is quite thin, I guess is the right way to put that there are some people in food ethics and bioethics who are trying to enrich our understanding of of eating beyond that sort of health versus autonomy thing and, you know, and Barnhill is one person who's been working on this a bit and she has a new book with Matteo Bernardi. about it that's like centrally, like eating matters, Food Matters for all of these reasons. And, you know, public health folks really need to take this seriously. And I think that's great. But the one issue that I have with with their approach is that it's a very, it very much presupposes, like a liberal subjects, like somebody who has already a set of values, plans, preferences, goals, and eating is a way to, you know, achieve or sort of instantiate a lot of different goals. But I think that eating also is a way to to shape our subjectivity shape ourselves in ways that isn't really captured by that view, you know, the ways that we eat and understand eating, and so think about ourselves as eaters. I really think they inform what we care about our preferences or values or self understandings, as well as our temporality, which is what I argue here. Which then like structures, even what kinds of eating or seem possible, or like, appeal to us. So that's something that I really want to add to this conversation. Like, I think it's not just about saying, you know, eating matters in more ways than folks have been acknowledging, because it does, but it also is a way of shaping the self. And I think that sort of like dynamic processes, you know, familiar to a lot of feminists who who work on agency and those sorts of, you know, relational autonomy and those sorts of issues, but the role that eating plays there, I think has been under discussed.

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