Meet the Cosmovores

God knows, the last thing the world needs is another batch of annoying yuppies with a clever name for their fiddly list of food rules. But I sort of didn't hate a recent story in Foreign Policy, which coins such a term after taking on some myths about ethical eating.

(Reason has covered similar territory, such as the carbon cutting power of New Zealand lamb and the pesticide-intensiveness of some organic crops compared with the tweaked chemical counterparts.)

Plain old naysaying is no fun when your dinner companions start comparing their lists of dos and don'ts. So join in the fun: Become a cosmovore—a cosmopolitan consumer of the world's food—for ethical reasons and then sit back and enjoy dropping lines like this into the chatter:

Why shouldn't developing countries strive to be the world's breadbasket? Again, there may be transport costs in flying fresh produce from southern Africa to Europe or the United States, but you save all of the heating, lighting, and construction costs associated with hothouse produce grown in the gloom of a European or North American winter. It is good news that Gambia managed to increase its fruit and vegetable exports to the European Union by 25 percent over the past 10 years—to 123,000 tons. We shouldn't be kicking the legs out from under such efforts in a misguided attempt to build an Arcadia under glass.

Read the whole thing for lots more good stuff, including a wrap-up laundry list of what it means to really eat like a responsible global citizen.