Jason Bourne kills your dinner plans

I love the Jason Bourne movies. They're on a select list of flicks that I can't turn off if I see them on TV. Tonight I saw the newest, The Bourne Ultimatum, and it somehow gave me a way to finally start blogging about food like I've been meaning to.

Bourne 3 deals with the idea of understanding the reasons for our actions. Assassins are told who to kill and aren't supposed to ask why. But Bourne, former CIA assassin, is troubled by the moral abominations of his past life and struggles to understand how he came to be in those situations.

There's a flashback scene where Bourne is given a gun and ordered to kill a hooded man, told only that doing so will help save American lives. Would you pull the trigger? I think that most people with a functioning moral compass answer that they would be reluctant to kill in almost any circumstances, and that in this specific scenario they'd minimally have to know a lot more before they'd take a life.

But if they were actually put into the situation, many more would kill than say they would. Why? Because people are social creatures, and they tend to follow orders. They rationalize that if an authoritative figure is giving them a command, there must be a good reason for it, and they probably ought to listen. Even if it turns out the order was morally wrong, it can't really be my fault, right? I was just following orders. The famous Milgram experiment chillingly documented this behavior.

Normal people can be manipulated or coaxed into doing things that they themselves would find morally wrong in other circumstances. Authority is one social mechanism to induce morally conflicted behavior. Another is the power of normalization - peer pressure, following the crowd. And yet another is to hide from people the immorality of the action. If everyone else does something, and I can't see anything obviously wrong with it, what harm can there be, right? Especially if the authorities are saying it is ok. That logic makes sense in the heat of the moment, but doesn't cut it for us as we carefully contemplate morals in a detached way. We see the moral obligation to make a reasonable effort understand the consequences of our actions before we act.

So what does Jason Bourne's moral crisis and the rest of this discussion have to do with food? Ask yourself these kinds of questions:

• Do you understand where your food comes from?
• Do you know how it gets from the ground to your plate?

If you're like most people, you don't know much about that. You know an apple grew on a tree and an egg came from a chicken on a farm, but you don't really know the whole process. And you certainly have very little idea about the complicated manufacturing project, the logistical miracle, that resulted in that soda or that microwave dinner or those corn chips.

Does it matter? Well, how about these questions:

• Do you understand the environmental impact of that process?
• Do you understand the public health impact of that process?
• Do you understand the political impact of your food choices?
  
• Do you know how the animals that you eat are treated?
• Do you know how the people who work along your food chain are treated?

If one or more of those sound like they might be issues of moral concern, you're probably a normal human being. You eat hundreds of times per year, spending thousands of dollars on food, and you don't know anything about the moral consequences of your actions. You don't know the answers to those questions because they're deliberately hidden from you. You eat more or less the way everyone else does, and it isn't something you've often thought to even question, aside from a few nutritional facts here and there. You compare prices, see what tastes good, and maybe try to be healthy sometimes.

Are you doing something morally wrong? Something to which you'd object if you only understood the whole situation? Would you kill a man without knowing why? Have you already? Why?

If you're like me, these are troubling questions. No wonder Bourne gets headaches. At first he tried to run away from the nightmare of all his questions, an understandable reaction. It is tempting to just try to forget about all this and keep eating the same way. Eventually Bourne realizes that he has to confront the questions.

And the answers turn out to be even more troubling. In real life and in the movie. No wonder Bourne is on an international rampage to get to the bottom of things. He has to understand it all before he can ever hope to make it right and try to be at peace.