Ombus-ombus is a traditional steamed rice-based cake originating from the Batak Toba community of Siborongborong, North Sumatra, Indonesia. Beyond its role as a local snack, ombus-ombus functions as a culturally embedded food that reflects social values, communal practices, and indigenous knowledge systems. However, existing studies on Indonesian traditional foods remain highly fragmented, often addressing either cultural or technological aspects in isolation, resulting in the absence of an integrative framework that connects socio-cultural meaning with physicochemical and safety dimensions. This review aims to bridge this critical gap by providing the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary synthesis of ombus-ombus, integrating socio-cultural, philosophical, and food science perspectives. Particular attention is given to traditional processing methods, physicochemical transformations during steaming, nutritional and functional properties, and shelf-life and food safety challenges. The review highlights the central role of starch gelatinization, ingredient interactions, and banana leaf wrapping in shaping texture, flavor, and product stability, while also addressing safety concerns associated with high-moisture rice-based foods. Importantly, this study advances current knowledge by explicitly linking traditional practices with contemporary food science principles and by critically examining the tension between cultural authenticity and technological modernization. By consolidating dispersed studies and contextualizing traditional practices within contemporary food science frameworks, this review addresses a critical knowledge gap in the study of Indonesian traditional foods. The findings provide a conceptual and scientific foundation for advancing academic discourse, guiding future research and process optimization, and supporting heritage food preservation through sustainable and culturally responsible innovation.
Bakmi jowo is commonly understood as a traditional Javanese noodle dish, yet it also represents a complex ethical space where cultural preservation, sensory authenticity, and public health intersect. This perspective article argues that traditional foods such as bakmi jowo should be examined not only as cultural heritage but as ethical practices embedded in everyday food systems. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from food ethics, sensory studies, and culinary heritage, this paper develops a conceptual framework structured around three ethical dimensions: (1) cultural integrity and culinary acculturation, (2) sensory authenticity as a form of tacit ethical knowledge, and (3) public health responsibility in informal street food systems. We argue that sensory practices-such as charcoal-based cooking and manual preparation-are not merely technical choices but ethical acts that shape trust, identity, and cultural continuity. At the same time, bakmi jowo raises critical ethical tensions between maintaining authenticity and ensuring food safety. Street food vendors, consumers, and regulatory institutions are positioned as distributed moral agents whose decisions influence both cultural sustainability and public health outcomes. Rather than viewing food safety regulations as external constraints, this paper proposes an integrative ethical framework in which safety and authenticity are co-constitutive. In the context of modernization and digital food culture, bakmi jowo faces risks of commodification and cultural dilution, yet also opportunities for ethical adaptation. This perspective contributes to ongoing debates in food ethics by arguing that traditional foods are best understood as living culinary practices, in which authenticity, ethical responsibility, and cultural continuity are continually negotiated within contemporary food systems.
This paper uses a rights-based framework for analyzing the ethics of unhealthy food marketing to children and applies it to the design and implementation of mandatory policy. The framework works across two registers: a legal register, based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which seeks to protect children's rights to health, privacy, and freedom from exploitation; and a moral register, which provides the normative grounding that justifies and extends the legal obligations. We argue that the marketing of unhealthy foods to children constitutes a form of exploitation that violates these rights through developmental targeting, digital profiling, and the commercial shaping of preference structures during the period when they are most plastic. These violations place a positive duty on states to respond and actively create conditions in which children's rights can be realized, a duty that voluntary self-regulatory approaches have been incapable of discharging. Arguing for a mandatory approach, the paper examines how the rights-based framework governs the scope of such regulation and how the legitimacy of policymaking processes depends on addressing the asymmetries that industry lobbying introduces. The paper’s central claim is that framing these concerns in the language of rights, as distinct from welfare or health metrics, generates the accountability that protection of children in the food marketing context requires.
Cellular meat is at the centre of a growing socio-technical controversy in France. While it is promoted as a sustainable alternative to conventional meat, its regulation raises political, legal and ethical challenges. Taking a socio-legal and pragmatic approach, this article examines how socio-technical controversies expressed in public debates and institutional framings shape the emerging regulatory framework. It sheds light on the mechanisms through which certain voices and concerns are amplified in the legislative process, while others remain marginalised. Drawing on documentary research, interviews and French parliamentary debates on cellular meat, the study shows how law operates as a site of negotiation where competing values and interests are translated into norms. By examining the case of cellular meat, the article emphasises the importance of understanding law not as a fixed set of rules, but as a living practice shaped by controversies, narratives and power relations. Taken together, this perspective offers valuable insights into the challenges of regulating emerging food technologies in complex and plural societies, and highlights the need for inclusive and context-sensitive regulation.
For the Sundanese people of West Java, oncom represents more than a fermented food. It embodies an edible philosophy. Produced from tofu residue through the action of Neurospora fungi, oncom exemplifies the principle of cikaracak ninggang batu, laun-laun jadi legok: persistent effort gradually creates lasting value. This traditional practice manifests a profound ethical commitment to kearifan lokal (local wisdom), transforming agricultural waste into a nutrient-dense resource. This narrative review synthesizes current knowledge on oncom’s historical emergence, cultural classification, philosophical foundations, microbial ecology, nutritional characteristics, and functional properties. It examines how oncom exemplifies principles of waste valorization, intergenerational knowledge transmission, and communal responsibility. The review further analyses ethical challenges including cultural preservation, intellectual property protection, and the balance between innovation and tradition. By positioning oncom within broader discussions of food ethics, this paper argues that traditional fermentation knowledge offers valuable resources for reimagining contemporary food systems along more equitable and ecologically sound lines.
The spreading of food deserts in rural and urban areas decreases the quality of life for the respective local population. Consumption patterns are linked to health, so food deserts significantly affect consumers’ health. Our goal is to map how consumers perceive the presence of food deserts based on a distance-time awareness. This research, utilising a questionnaire based on distance and time, investigates the consumers’ perceptions of food deserts. The availability of major food groups and the associated purchasing options (e.g., shopping frequency, type of store) were systematically examined. Subsequently, the findings were statistically correlated with demographic variables and general health characteristics (e.g., body mass index, chronic diseases). The results were obtained from a representative sample of 1,000 individuals in Hungary. The analysis revealed that a significant segment of the population faces the problem of food deserts, and purchasing habits were shown to be affected as well. A total of 15
Daniel Dorado has argued that appeals to health in vegan advocacy may harm more animals than they save. This paper accepts the force of that warning when health is made the principal justification for veganism or vegetarianism. Arguments that put bodily or nutritional health first are vulnerable to contested evidence, individual variation, substitution from larger to smaller animals, and the narrowing of animal ethics into a campaign for human benefit. The paper argues, however, that this critique should not be extended to every appeal to health within dietary persuasion. Drawing on the idea of a cumulative case, it defends a limited pluralist strategy in which concern for animals remains central while environmental, humanitarian, feminist, character-based, and prudential considerations play subordinate yet legitimate roles. The paper also situates this strategy within a history of philosophical abstinence, including Pythagorean, Empedoclean, Stoic, Porphyrian, and Plutarchan arguments against meat. Properly framed, health considerations can answer prudential objections and widen entry points into ethical reflection without displacing the suffering, exploitation, and killing of animals, or the human injustices endemic to industrial animal agriculture.
Acknowledging the rapid biotechnological developments taking place during the last decade and the serious challenges identified in the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the article examines which role human rights principles and substantive human rights can have as tools for inclusive governance. Human rights treaties and related non-binding sources have not adequately been applied as governance tools, despite the clear recommendations by the United Nations Development Group in 2003 to apply human rights principles and standards in all programming. For the last decades there have been numerous debates and encounters between those working in the realm of human rights and those working in the realm of intellectual property rights. This article analyzes mutual relationships and potential tensions between human rights treaties and treaties regulating genetic resources and genetic technologies. Bringing in relevant sources particularly from the EU and Norway, as well as legislation and court rulings from other States, the article demonstrates important considerations and mutual interactions between legal regulation of genetic resources genetic technology and legal regulation of human rights. Hence, there is an underutilized role for human rights and human rights principles in relation to genetic technology.
This article explores how farmers in Thessaly, Greece, perceive and respond to sustainability policies such as the EU Green Deal and the Farm to Fork Strategy. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and focus groups, we map perceived injustices and how they are reflected in everyday practices, particularly after recent destructive storms. The research shows that farmers do not dismiss sustainability goals but filter them through what they perceive as injustices: policies disconnected from local realities, market asymmetries, knowledge gaps and identity neglect. These perceptions foster cultures of resistance, expressed through actions like selective participation, symbolic compliance, or the continuation of local practices that deviate from standardized frameworks. Mostly silent, these performances can hinder the realization of EU policy objectives. Building on performative justice and resistance theory, we outline four cultures of resistance: rejection of uniform financial logic, symbolic compliance, distrust of advisory systems, and disillusionment with collective structures. We show that cultures of resistance are not loud protests but quieter strategies through which farmers redefine sustainability on their own terms. We argue that agrifood transitions require treating justice as foundational: only by engaging with farmers’ practices, knowledge, and identities can more inclusive and resilient pathways emerge, moving sustainability goals from policy imaginaries to attainable, livable horizons.
Food aid and antipoverty transfers are usually targeted towards poor or food-insecure households. However, the limited cost-effectiveness of aid targeting and its numerous collateral effects raise many ethical issues: many non-poor households receive the aid while a high percentage of poor or food-insecure households are not covered; the targeting cost sometimes absorbs a significant share of the available budget (thereby reducing the amount transferred); and targeting practices generate stigmatisation, social tensions and other negative effects within the population of potential recipients. These issues raise practical questions. Is it always relevant to target aid? When this is the case, which method(s) should be used? Answering these questions requires balancing all the positive and negative effects of targeting, which is complicated by the lack of a common metric to express its benefits in terms of channelling the aid to the poor and the collateral damages it generates (which are often non-monetary). To overcome this difficulty, the present article mobilises ethical theories. It builds on the extensive literature concerning the effects of targeting to provide an ethical assessment of targeting practices, distinguishing between classical methods and those relying on self-targeting. They are assessed both under consequentialist approaches based on welfare or capabilities and under Rawls’ Theory of justice. The implications for policies are far-reaching regarding (i) whether it is relevant to target, (ii) the method(s) to be used, (iii) how to decide and (iv) the potential relevance of alternative policies.
While many animal advocates emphasize health benefits when they promote veganism, this paper argues that such a strategy rests on shaky foundations. This paper raises three objections to health-based vegan advocacy. First, the health argument faces several epistemic limitations: health is multidimensional, requiring explicit axiological choices about which outcomes matter; and nutritional epidemiology faces severe methodological constraints, including reliance on self-reported data, heterogeneous study designs, and insufficient longitudinal follow-up particularly in randomized controlled trials. Second, health recommendations may inadvertently increase total victim numbers through substitution from cow and pig meat toward chicken meat. Third, the health argument weakens ethical discourse by framing animal advocacy as instrumental to human wellbeing, offering no foundation for addressing non-dietary contexts—including wild animal welfare and harms caused by emerging technologies. A reformulated approach identifying limited situations where health considerations may appropriately supplement ethical arguments is proposed, though significant risks persist even in these cases.
Food livestream e-commerce is rapidly reshaping digital marketplaces and posing new challenges for food industry practitioners. This study examines how food-related ethical judgments and practices are transformed within this context, and how responsibility and trust are reconfigured across key actors in the livestream ecosystem. Drawing on 51 in-depth interviews conducted in China and analyzed using the Gioia methodology, the study identifies five interconnected challenges shaping food livestream commerce: intensified algorithm-driven performance competition; the performative construction of trust through narrative exaggeration; growing financial pressure on suppliers under conditions of excess inventory and shrinking margins; market over-competition that obscures quality differentiation and fosters adverse selection; and the normalization of ethical compromise through platform-mediated governance. By foregrounding the role of algorithmic systems and competitive market dynamics, this study advances food ethics research by showing how ethical practices are reconfigured and responsibility is redistributed across the platform–supplier–host chain. The study concludes by suggesting that regulatory approaches should move beyond post hoc correction of individual misconduct and place greater emphasis on embedding ethical considerations into platform design and governance.
In Germany, food rescue organizations (FROs) – including traditional food pantries and complementary food-sharing initiatives – redistribute surplus food to a new consumer base. While food pantries typically aim to reduce food insecurity, food-sharing initiatives emphasize environmental sustainability by reducing food waste. However, the extent to which both FRO types pursue organizational targets to address the needs of socioeconomically disadvantaged populations and aim to contribute to food security, particularly in terms of access and agency, is underexplored. This study examines FROs’ objectives through Luhmann’s concept of inclusion via organizational communication, applying a Theory of Change (ToC) framework. Based on 22 semi-structured interviews with managers from both FRO types in a Bavarian district, analyzed using Grounded Theory, the findings reveal heterogeneous and sometimes conflicting goal orientations toward access and agency across and within traditional and complementary FROs, and across all ToC levels. The findings indicate tensions but also synergies between material support and normative goals, shaped by differing views of beneficiaries as either passive recipients or active participants. Traditional FROs emphasize food access with limited user agency, while complementary FROs promote both access and agency to support ecological aims. Hence, both navigate overlapping social, ecological, and institutional responsibilities, with potential implications for users’ food security experiences.
In contemporary literary studies, the intersection of animal studies, posthumanism and food ethics offers new ways to interrogate the gustatory terrain beyond the human subject. This paper explores how anthropomorphic animal narrators when endowed with voice, agency and emotional depth, contest the hierarchies of taste and consumption that have historically privileged human palates while erasing the sentient other. Through close readings of Laline Paull’s The Bees, Sun-mi Hwang’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, and Sara Gruen’s Ape House, it examines how food becomes a site of ethical entanglement and narrative resistance across heterogeneous narrative and media ecologies. In The Bees, Flora 717’s caste-bound labour and gustatory sensorium expose how feeding, scarcity and sacramental ‘Queen’s Love’ enforce hierarchies of edibility and reproductive control. The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly portrays Sprout, a hen whose maternal devotion subverts reproductive and species boundaries. In Ape House, bonobos with emotional and linguistic intelligence reveal how feeding rituals are entangled with performance and surveillance. Drawing on Carol J. Adams’ ecofeminist discourse, Donna Haraway’s companion species theory, and Cary Wolfe’s posthumanist ethics, the study situates these narratives as participating in counter-discursive tendencies that begin to unsettle the binaries of human/animal and eater/eaten. It proposes taste as a visceral, affective and ideological construct, where consumption can become critique and empathy emerges as a tentative posthuman horizon rather than a fully realized imperative.
The persistence of hunger in a world characterised by unprecedented levels of food production and technological capacity reveals profound structural contradictions at the heart of contemporary food systems, despite abundant international commitments and legal frameworks. Current approaches fragment the right to food into isolated, individualised, and state-centred interpretations, remaining largely reactive rather than structural, while ignoring power asymmetries, food commodification, and the erosion of territorial and cultural rights that perpetuate systemic inequalities. This research develops a normative theory of food systems that integrates philosophical principles, material dignity, structural justice, material equality, non-domination, participatory governance, food sovereignty, territoriality, and culture, with legal foundations, including the fourfold interpretation of the right to food. Employing doctrinal, comparative, and critical legal methods, it conceptualises food systems as normative politico-legal structures governed by values, institutions, and power relations, articulating expanded state obligations: structural design, distributive regulation, participation, and ecological management. The theory contributes a coherent iusphilosophical framework that transforms the right to food from an abstract subjective right into a structural organising principle of governance, providing legitimacy criteria for policies, constitutional reforms, and institutional evaluations. Ultimately, it redefines food system legitimacy as spaces of material justice, laying foundations for future empirical and comparative research in food governance.
Traditional food systems play a crucial role in sustaining dietary diversity, cultural identity, and food security among indigenous communities. In Northeast India, freshwater snails constitute a long-standing dietary tradition where such practices are interwoven with cultural identity and local traditional knowledge yet under-documented traditional freshwater food resource. The present study explores the culinary heritage, consumption patterns, cultural significance, and community perceptions of freshwater snail-based dishes in Manipur, a biodiversity-rich state in Northeast India, from an ethnographic and food-systems perspective. A cross-sectional mixed-methods approach was employed, integrating household surveys, semi-structured interviews with key informants (n = 500), market surveys, and participant observation across selected urban and rural sites in Manipur. The results revealed that freshwater snails remain culturally embedded in local diets, with Tharoi thongba emerging as the most widely consumed traditional dish. Communities follow well-defined traditional preprocessing and cooking practices, reflected by a high level of consumer confidence and minimal reported adverse health effects. Local informants strongly endorsed the consumption of snails, not only for their taste but also for their perceived health benefits. The study underscores the importance of freshwater snails as a culturally significant, affordable, and potentially sustainable source of animal protein. However, declining consumption trends linked to nutrition transition and changing food preferences pose challenges to the continuity of this traditional food system. Documenting and promoting indigenous culinary knowledge, alongside scientific validation of nutritional and safety attributes, may support sustainable diets, livelihood enhancement, and preservation of biocultural heritage in the region. The paper concludes by recommending interdisciplinary research to support snail farming, research and incorporating this traditional food resource into broader strategies for global sustainable food and nutrition.
Dairy is the second largest greenhouse gas emitter in animal agriculture and requires the killing of animals. Most people wish to avoid harming animals and the climate but also consume meat. Consumers subconsciously use coping strategies to reduce cognitive dissonance caused by this meat paradox. But is there also a dairy paradox? For this exploratory study, we used focus groups to investigate cognitive dissonance and coping strategies related to dairy consumption and compared these to coping strategies around meat. We found that dairy is framed much more positively than meat. However, the types of dairy-related coping strategies strongly overlap with those for meat. We conclude that dairy-related cognitive dissonance occurs, identify the dairy paradox, and three dairy-specific coping strategies: dairy is indirect, overwhelming, and, in summary, neglectable. We suggest adding a fifth N to the Ns of justification of meat consumption: natural, normal, necessary, nice; specifically for dairy: neglectable.
Major concerns exist about the provision of sufficient renewable resources for nourishing as first primary need, clothing, living, travelling, working and leisuring for all generations, everywhere and anytime, while preserving nature’s biodiversity. This requires a balanced view on bioeconomy, of which food accounts for more than 50
