The Ethics of What We Eat
By Peter Singer & Jim Mason
Text Publishing, Melbourne
2006, $32.95
REVIEW BY BELINDA SELKE
The Ethics of What We Eat by world-renowned ethicist and animal liberationist Peter Singer, and Jim Mason, a journalist, lawyer and animal-rights activist, is a compelling, challenging and highly readable book that is bound to make a lot of people uncomfortable with their food choices.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of awareness and concern about the hidden nature of industrial capitalist food production. The food scares of the 1990s — of which Mad Cow Disease is the most well-known — exposed our lack of knowledge about the origins of the food we eat. Increasingly, we have begun to ask how our food is produced, by whom and under what conditions.
Singer and Mason provide us with some disturbing answers, by sharing a meal with three families in the US, then tracing the foods they ate back to their production origins.
Uncovering the reality behind the wholesome marketing imagery, however, proves no simple task. The factory farming industry is highly secretive about its practices, and the authors are repeatedly refused entry to farms despite industry assertions that it has nothing to hide. When a turkey farm denies the authors access, they apply for jobs as turkey inseminators — a job that is now necessary because intensively farmed turkeys are bred with breasts so large that they can no longer reproduce naturally.
The book is a stinging indictment of the capitalist food system, which reduces nature and animals to vehicles for profit. It depicts a food system based on the rationally calculated torture of animals and plunder of precious natural resources. This will be familiar territory to Singer fans. For the uninitiated, the violent, bloody reality of the factory farm will shock, repulse and outrage.
However the book is not primarily intended as an expose of the factory farming system. Rather, the authors aim to connect the hidden misery of production to our everyday food choices. The central message is that eating is a moral act and our food choices have ethical consequences.
As in Singer's earlier works, Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, this latest work argues from a utilitarianist philosophical perspective. According to Singer, all beings capable of suffering have interests worthy of equal consideration. Humans and animals share an interest in avoiding pain, so a moral act is one that maximises interests and minimises suffering to all sentient beings.
Eating a Big Mac can therefore be seen as an immoral act: it does not maximise interests; it causes suffering to animals, and degrades the environment. When alternative food choices can be made, eating a Big Mac represents privileging one's own selfish desires over the interests of animals (and all our interests in environmental sustainability).
The authors are not, however, as preachy or fanatical as this may sound. They allow for some flexibility based on real-life contexts. "A little self-indulgence doesn't make you a moral monster", they concede.
So what does eating "ethically" look like? Singer and Mason answer "vegan". But not before they have examined the ethics of a number of other ways of eating: the Standard American Diet (SAD being the apt acronym); eating locally; buying organic; dumpster diving; and being a "conscientious omnivore".
Along the way a number of very interesting questions are raised. Is eating organic food always more ethical than eating conventionally produced foods? Is locally produced food better? Is it okay to eat animals that led "natural" lives before being trucked to the slaughterhouse? Are fish farms okay?
Some of the answers are surprising and refreshingly critical. The book questions the assumptions of "Locavores", who argue that locally grown food is preferable because it keeps dollars in local communities, supports small-scale farming, and is better for the environment because it reduces carbon emissions and packaging waste.
When you live in one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, wouldn't it be more ethical to support poor farmers in underdeveloped nations by purchasing their produce imported under fair trade conditions? And what if your local family farmer doesn't pay award wages or let its workers join a union?
Singer and Mason also show how buying distantly produced food can contribute less to global warming — for example, when it is grown seasonally, in soils and climates naturally suited for its production and transported by sea (which is very efficient in fossil fuel terms).
Singer and Mason are not opposed to buying locally, but recognise that it is not automatically the more ethical choice.
The book also questions the assumption that fish farms are more environmentally friendly than conventional fishing methods, which are wiping out global fish stocks. The commercial fishing industry uses huge nets that trash the seabed and scoop up unwanted species, or "bycatch". Each year, 27 million tonnes, or a quarter of all fish caught worldwide, is bycatch. Fish farming avoids this type of environmental vandalism. Or does it?
Fish farming is highly intensive. Because tens of thousands of fish are crowded into small sea cages, they can no longer hunt and feed naturally. Other fish must be caught from wild fisheries and fed to farmed fish. This produces the ludicrous situation where three or four tonnes of small fish will be dragged from wild fisheries, trucked to factories, made into pellets, and then trucked to fish farms for feed, in order to make one tonne of farmed fish.
Singer and Mason also explore an issue that has been niggling at the back of many "green consumer" minds: the corporate takeover of organics.
The demand for certified organic food is rapidly expanding in Australia, Britain and the US. Organic food is making the leap from the marginal, small-scale and oppositional into the mainstream. As large capital moves in, it seems that an earlier commitment to the principles of sustainable agriculture is being discarded. In the US, large organic farms concentrate animals together and pollute the environment. Critics argue that these factory farms shouldn't qualify as organic just because they "cram organic feed down the throats of [their high-producing] cattle".
Singer and Mason investigate Horizon, the largest organic dairy marketer in the US, whose milk cartons feature images of happy cows leaping in green pasture. The reality of their 4500-head dairy in Idaho is, however, somewhat different: "cows standing in crowded pens in a stark arid landscape with no pasture in sight".
Yet Singer and Mason hold that buying organic is still the better ethical choice and is far better for farm workers, animals, consumers and the environment. The large, intensive organic farms are presently the exception rather than the rule.
Some readers will baulk at the authors' response to the objection that organic food is too expensive for poor people to buy: "cheap" food is not cheap at all. Rather, intensive agriculture externalises its many costs to others: "the neighbours who can no longer enjoy being outside in their yard; the children who cannot safely swim in local streams; the farm workers who get ill from the pesticides they apply ... [those] who will be made homeless by rising sea levels caused by global warming".
Still, this insight doesn't make it any easier for poor people to buy organic and the authors appear to be remarkably insensitive to the economic realities of life for the poor.
The other major weakness is that Singer and Mason seem to be arguing that the capitalist food system can be transformed by individual consumption choices. So, factory farming will disappear if more and more people abstain from purchasing its products.
However as their own discussion of "corporate organics" illustrated, organic farms are subject to the same imperatives as any other capitalist company: they must continuously drive down production costs in order to remain competitive. Thus it seems almost inevitable that as the corporate takeover of organics continues, "organic" production will no longer mean production based on principles of social justice, environmental sustainability and animal welfare. Sure, consumers can refuse to buy from corporate organic firms and can lobby for more stringent certification criteria. But none of this changes the fact that a constant tension exists between the imperatives of profit and those of ethical production.
Moreover, consumer demand for ethically produced food needs to be seen as part of the broader context of struggle. The struggles of workers, farmers, environmentalists and animal-rights activists the world over have brought issues such as genetically modified foods to public attention. The authors' argument about consumer power would be strengthened by connecting individual acts of ethical consumption to the broader context of global food activism.
Ethical food choices do make a difference. However, on their own, their effectiveness is limited. Moreover, ethical consumption is not a realistic form of struggle for the majority of the world's poor. Those of us who are able need to combine ethical eating with participation in collective public acts of resistance. The Ethics of What We Eat gives us only some of the ingredients for an ethical life.