author(s)
Aditi Singh and Romesh Singh

abstract
This paper aims at establishing environmental concerns through the practices of fasting and feasting, group habits, modern food production in the context of a certain ethical understanding. Food carries powerful emotions and its production and dissemination entails an aspect of environmental ethical issue, resulting in nearly zero food waste. Food goes in tandem with culture and emotions, as well as trust in terms of constraints. The paper expands on these ideas by introducing the concept of ecological footprint. It includes spaces needed for crop production, the efficient use of resources as well and having a rationale in decision making regarding purchase of services beneficial for the environment. Food has multiple dimensions including social, cultural and religious dimensions, all of which linked to public’s health and individual health. The latter is taken care of by means of personalised diet and functional foods that are both nutritive and positive. Public health is concerned with groups and population-level intervention to reduce harmful consumption, as we are facing the issue of global warming, increase of population, environmental pollution and the question of food quality. In this paper we argue for ‘food’ having a positive relation with both ‘emotions’ and ‘economic constraints’ under which it is produced even when the three variables are widely dissimilar. The positive impact of health and well-being on a community is directly reflected, making it a collective ideal i.e., a matter of public health. The economic constraints can be viewed through the prism of moral perception, as the economic issues have ethical implications. In the domain in which food and ethics intersect, the paper intends to look into the possible role of ethics in the contemporary system of food production (through its various approaches and concepts), despite the vast number of ethical dilemmas concerning food. The fundamental issue for investigation in this paper is the significance of ethics that we can expect for a sustainable ecological concern in examining critically the practices of food production and the moral issues governed. The paper, therefore, delves deeper into the ecological solutions that are offered by the concept of ecological footprints in the works of various contemporary thinkers.