Terrific overview by the Star-Trib's Jeremy Iggers of the ethical issues raised by the conduct of U.S. military troops in Iraq. Iggers to my mind is an exemplar of a glocal journalist. He began his career as a restaurant and food critic, and he still writes regularly on this beat. But over the years he has used the most quintessential of local and commercial journalistic roles not only for the purpose of creating a celebrity brand, as so many food critics do, but also as a base from which to launch deeply moral and practical explorations of the wider world.
As a reviewer, Iggers never fails to serve as a practical consumer guide. But he is just as likely to use a meal as a gateway into discussing the impact of factory farming on the environment; or how America's obsession with food and eating reflects a sense of inner emptiness; or how to raise pigs or chickens in ways that are humane to animals and healthy to humans. He's written about ethics in journalism, and his writing as a food critic, which he has always taken seriously on an intellectual level, has led him to naturally to ask basic questions about human connection and responsibility.
Journalists writing about the automobile industry, real estate, home improvement, electronic gadgets, or interior design would like Iggers naturally be led to a simlarly global and ethical perspective in their writing -- if they also followed the thread of their beat to its widest possible context.
It's in this respect that I say, to me, Iggers is an exemplary glocal writer. Because he can take a bite of peppered pink salmon and trace its flavor back to the icy salmon runs of Alaska.
He doesn't lose the reader by taking this environmentally righteous turn. Rather he pulls them closer and shows how to enjoy salmon more by understanding where they come from and the state of their world; which is the state of our world. That is glocalism par excellence.
In today's article on the ethics of war, Iggers makes a similar jump -- from describing that which most nourishes and fulfills us (food), to that which most depletes and degrades us (war). Check it out.
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