Ninth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

For the last two decades, ethical approaches to production, distribution and consumption of food have commanded a significant amount of attention for scholars across several disciplines. Much of this academic labour consists of defining, critiquing and refining the notion of what constitutes the “ethical.” Using South Korea’s foreign population as a case study, this presentation seeks to draw on that scholarship, while exploring how ethical concepts are complicated by spatial factors, particularly mobility and migration. Survey data and interviews give insight into how physical relocation affects otherwise fixed or stable notions of the ethical, and how the local conditions within South Korea lead to certain aspects of food ethics becoming mutable or invigorated.