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WARNING: This article contains content which could be disturbing for some readers. The video clip provided at the end is extremely disturbing. Watch at your own risk.
.food ethics: the final frontier?.
Americans like to think of themselves as a moral bunch of people. In the United States, we monitor others religious choices, fashion statements, waist lines, and, especially, sex lives. We make sure that convicted criminals don’t “suffer” when put to death by the state and we practically dish-out vigilante justice anytime a child is allegedly harmed. However, when it comes to eating, not many consider what they eat to be much of a moral or ethical issue. As Peter Singer and Jim Mason put it in their 2006 manifesto The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, we hold a “belief in dominion – a God-given license to use [animals] as we see fit – and a sense of alienation from nature that is at the root of many of our social and environmental crises”. If having a God-complex over what we perceive to be less sentient beings isn’t an issue of morality gone awry, I’m not certain what is.
This graphic and easy-to-follow book co-written by Singer and Mason, one of whom is a Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and the other whom is a fifth generation of family farmer and lawyer, tackles our morality-dismissing excuses head-on. Not only are these men qualified to discuss the ethics of food production as representatives of their respective professions, but they present extensive research including their own undercover work to bring you the facts. These men, clearly, know what they are talking about.
The book traces the diets of three “typical” American families from grocery store back to the farm. The first part of the book is dedicated to what is known, colloquially, as the meat-and-potatoes diet or, formally, as The Standard American Diet (SAD). If eating a meal plan short-termed as a negative emotion doesn’t clue you into its harm, then Singer and Mason’s depictions of life for the animals and workers involved in producing your SAD meals should light up your ethical consciousness like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Shopping mainly at Wal-Mart because it’s so fast and cheap and easy, the mom purchasing food for her household doesn’t really care about where her food comes from, but would if it didn’t require her, as she puts, “be less lazy”.
The second family consider themselves more “conscientious” omnivores; they try to eat organic and fair-trade goods with more vegetable options and less fast food than the SAD plan. And, most radically, the third part of the book is dedicated to a family of all vegans, meaning they consume absolutely no animal products including milk, eggs and honey, who also support locally-grown produce and attempt to abstain from restaurants as well as supermarkets.
Throughout the book, Singer and Mason work to preserve judgment and, instead, attempt to let the food speak for itself. Going backwards through someone’s daily diet to find the origins of their exact product (and they do infiltrate some of the actual producers and manufacturers of brand-named goods) is a disturbing experience. I personally now know enough about chicken slaughter to re-affirm my vegetarianism for the rest of my life.
If you think scalding chickens alive in hot water or attempting to slit their throats merely maiming them is not a moral issue that should be on your radar, then this book is worth the read for the random facts alone. I learned about artificial turkey insemination (the turkey you eat in your sandwich comes from a bird too weighed down by its breasts to reproduce naturally) and a radical form of “free”-ganism called “Dumpstering”.
Many European countries have taken great strides to ensure that farming practices are ethical. Here in America, on the other hand, we’re mostly just too lazy to care. By reading this book, maybe some of our ever-so-watchful moral compass will shift from consuming the tell-all nightmares of former pop stars and wagging fingers over the sexual exploits of politicians to the very real decline in morality that comes from supporting deranged corpse abuse and inhumane slaughter.
Don’t think this issue is still relevant? This video clip released September 17th, 2008 by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) showcases conditions inside a Hormel factory pig farm, the same type of farm heavily discussed in this book.
