Virtuous eating : landscaping the ethics of elder care with food

The paper invigorates the discussion on ethics of care in ‘care-ful geographies’ by highlighting the importance of thinking with ‘culture’ and its moral dimensions in filtering local ethics of elder care in China. More specifically, it illuminates how care, both as ethics and virtue, was manifested by a group of Buddhist older adults' appreciation of vegetarian eating in relation to the responsibilities for their own health and accompanying moral obligations. The conceptualization of ‘virtuous eating’ provides a hermeneutic cultural tool to interpret the shifting identifications with vegetarian eating, articulated as xiu lian (修練cultivation), fu bao (福報blessing) and ci bei (慈悲compassion), thus generating its analytical capacity in highlighting the reciprocity and relationality of care. The meanings associated with values and morality of vegetarian eating were enacting in forging new configurations of ethics of care within their self-therapeutic caring encounters.