Singer Peter - The Ethics of What We Eat

PRAISE FOR
THE ETHICS OF WHAT WE EAT

Vital, urgent and disturbing.
New York Times

Absolutely gripping reading. Its made even more so bythe writers patient, often failed, attempts to interrogate 87corporations that had manufactured a product the families hadbought. Also interesting are the lengths some companies go to toavoid their gentle questioning. Its Michael Moore without theantics...The arguments in this riveting book descend on us gently,as a missionpossible or otherwiseshould we choose to accept it.
Sydney Morning Herald

Accessible and well-researched...Singer and Jim Mason do notjudge or preach; they accept that for many people, for manyreasons, ethical considerations do not loom large when decidinghow to feed their families...this book will provide, yes, here itcomes, serious food for thought.
Australian

Joining the dots from producer to plate, their book, The Ethicsof What We Eat, is a moral compass for those who care about theimpact of their food choices. Without proselytising, Singer andMason navigate questions of cruelty, the environment, economics,culture and social justice...an excellent, detailed and engaging guide.
Age

An absolutely indispensable book for anyone who thinksabout what they eat...[a] rare combination of a lively read andthorough research and investigation. I cannot recommend ithighly enough.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson,
author of When Elephants Weep

THE ETHICS OF WHAT WE EAT

Peter Singer was born in Melbourne in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. He has been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University since 1999, a position that since 2005 he has combined with an appointment as Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, attached to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. An internationally renowned philosopher and acclaimed author, Peter Singer was also the founding president of Animals Australia, which represents over thirty organisations working to reduce the suffering of animals.

Jim Mason grew up on a family farm in the southwest Missouri Ozarks. He is an author, lecturer, journalist, environmentalist and attorney who specialises in humananimal concerns. Mason was the founding editor and a co-founder of The Animals Agenda, the US news magazine of the animal rights movement, and was elected to the US Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2001.

OTHER BOOKS BY PETER SINGER

Democracy and Disobedience
Animal Liberation
Practical Ethics
Marx
Animal Factories (with Jim Mason)
The Expanding Circle
Hegel
The Reproduction Revolution (with Deane Wells)
Should the Baby Live? (with Helga Kuhse)
How Are We to Live?
Rethinking Life and Death
The Greens (with Bob Brown)
Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement
A Darwinian Left
Writings on an Ethical Life
Unsanctifying Human Life
One World: The Ethics of Globalisation
The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush
Pushing Time Away

the ethics
of what we eat
peter singer
and jim mason

The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William St
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au

Copyright Peter Singer and Jim Mason 2006

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in the US by Rodale 2006
First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company 2006
This edition 2007
Reprinted 2009

Design by Chong Weng-ho
Typeset by J & M Typesetting
Printed and bound by Griffin Press

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Singer, Peter, 1946- .
The ethics of what we eat.

ISBN 978 1 921145 87 2.

1. Agricultural processing industries - Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Food animals - Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Natural foods - Moral and ethical aspects. I. Mason, Jim. II. Title.

CONTENTS

Part II
The Conscientious Omnivores

Part III
The Vegans

Part IV
Ethical Eating

We dont usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. Stealing, lying, hurting peoplethese acts are obviously relevant to our moral character. So too, most people would say, is our involvement in community activities, our generosity to others in need, andespeciallyour sex life. But eatingan activity that is even more essential than sex, and in which everyone participatesis generally seen quite differently. Try to think of a politician whose prospects have been damaged by revelations about what he or she eats.

It was not always so. Many indigenous hunter-gatherers have elaborate codes about who may kill which animals, and when. Some have rituals in which they ask forgiveness of the animals for killing them. In ancient Greece and Rome, ethical choices about food were considered at least as significant as ethical choices about sex. Temperance and self-restraint in diet, as elsewhere in life, were seen as virtues. Socrates, in Platos Republic, advocates a simple diet of bread, cheese, vegetables and olives, with figs for dessert, and wine in moderation. In traditional Jewish, Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist ethics, discussions of what should and should not be eaten occupy a prominent place. In the Christian era, however, less attention was paid to what we eat the major concern being to avoid gluttony, which, according to Catholic teaching, is one of the seven cardinal sins.

The way food is sold and advertised doesnt help. Despite the recent upsurge of farmers markets, in the developed world, almost all food is purchased from supermarkets. Shoppers are not presented with relevant information about the ethical choices that surround food. Instead, the food industry spends billions annually trying to make us crave their products. That buys an avalanche of advertising that sweeps down on us from all sides but tells us only what the advertisers want us to know. Marion Nestle, a nutritionist who worked in the US Department of Agriculture and on the Surgeon Generals Report on Nutrition and Health (1988), has described how the food industry has crossed ethical lines in bringing political pressure to bear on what should be dispassionate scientific government advice on how Americans can eat a healthy diet. Morgan Spurlocks Supersize Me raised serious ethical questions about the contribution of fast food chains like McDonalds to Americas epidemic of obesity. Our focus is not on these issues. There is already plenty of information out there about them. If you enjoy unhealthy food so much that you are prepared to accept the risk of disease and premature death, then, like a decision to smoke or climb Himalayan peaks, that is primarily your own business. Our focus is on the impact of your food choices on others.

A New Awareness

Over the last thirty years weve seen the first stirrings of a different kind of concern about what we eat. In Western Europe and the United States most veal is intensively reared, and many people there have stopped eating it after learning that veal calves are separated from their mothers soon after birth, deliberately made anemic, denied roughage or the possibility of exercise, and kept in stalls so narrow they cannot turn around. In the United States, veal consumption has fallen to less than a quarter of what it was in 1975.6 Consumers also increasingly seek out organically produced food, for reasons that range from an ethical concern for the environment to a desire to avoid ingesting pesticides and the conviction that organic food tastes better than food from conventional sources. Today, organic foods can easily be found in supermarkets and are the fastest growing section of the food industry.