Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy

Abstract This book develops a ‘public reason approach’ to healthy eating efforts. Public reason is the view that political rules are legitimate only if they are justified on the basis of reasons that are public, i.e. reasons that all citizens can accept at some level of idealization despite their different values and worldviews. The book applies the idea of public reason to healthy eating efforts and develops a framework that can be used in the assessment of such efforts in the real world. By doing so, the book adopts a ‘farm to fork’ approach to the ethics of healthy eating efforts: it engages with rather abstract theories and debates in political philosophy, considers the implications of different theoretical positions for healthy eating efforts, and then develops a concrete tool for assessing healthy eating efforts that will be of interest to both scholars and policymakers. The book also serves another purpose: it brings not just public reason but political philosophy more generally to bear on healthy eating efforts and the debates about it. This will be of interest to two audiences. The first audience consists of those who are familiar with healthy eating efforts but may have little experience with political philosophy—it might include public health researchers and practitioners, public health ethicists, and other researchers who take an interest in healthy eating efforts. The second audience comprises political philosophers, who will be already familiar with the concepts and theoretical debates the book considers but may find their concrete application to healthy eating efforts to be of interest.