The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter

by Peter Singer, James Mason, Jim Mason

Book Overview

Written with investigative vigour, provocative and controversial but always accessible, Eating is a hard-hitting exploration of our eating habits, making us look at what we eat as a moral issue.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594866872
• ISBN13: 9781594866876
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: Harmony/Rodale
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

An outstanding, balanced and persuasive text

This book is an excellent introduction for those who want to find out more about where our food comes from. It is not preachy or aggressive. Rather, it opens your mind to the various arguments, while still offering the authors' views on the ethics of different food choices. The text is very well-researched, from their own first-hand experience, talking to various farmers, as well as from the existing body of literature in science, dietetics, agriculture and philosophy. No one could accuse this book of being unduly biased. They note the arguments of producers and concede ground where it is appropriate to do so. For example, they note the way some vegans overestimate the amount of water that it takes to produce different types of meat and reach a compromise figure that they believe more accurately reflects the amount of water that goes into beef. They also respectfully recognise the pressures that lead people to make unethical food choices and encourage a way forward without making people feel like they're being whacked over the head with a moral stick. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the origins of our food and how ethics relates to that.

A full-course meal

Few facets of human existence affect our health and the environment as much as what we eat, and surely none has a greater impact on animals. Thus, the time seems perpetually ripe for good books on human food choices. The authors of this one, both vegetarians and probably vegans, succeed in presenting a well-reasoned and reader-friendly discussion of their subject. The book is built around the food habits of three American families, one who subscribe to the traditional "meat and potatoes" diet, another who are conscientious semi-vegetarians, and the third who are vegans. Each serves as a base from which to examine food production and its consequences. We travel from factory farms to farmers' markets, from kitchens to ocean trawlers to dumpsters. We hear from people who work in all of these environments. And the authors provide analyses without sermonizing. Several trends emerge. Large meat corporations talk of educating the public about modern meat production, but fail to return phone calls and flatly deny access to their meat processing facilities. We learn of "the law of gravity of big business"--with big corporations buying up organic brands then cutting corners to maximize profits. We meet farmers who move their animals from intensive indoor confinement to outdoor pasture situations. One such, a pig farmer, describes how many hassles he now avoids by letting his pigs run outside on pasture: no more tail-amputation, no antibiotics, no special weaning feed (his piglets wean naturally at 8 weeks instead of artificially at 2 weeks), and "scouring" (diarrhea) is replaced by "pasture poop" that doesn't stink (I can attest to this, as a regular visitor to a sanctuary with free-roaming pigs). And far from being an economic liability, the ensuing demand for his product has outgrown his supply. For those who eat fish, there is news to prick the conscience--an excellent summation of recent findings demonstrating pain and cognition in fishes. To that end, I was surprised the authors chose not to include fish flesh as a form of "meat." For those who eat eggs, we learn of deluxe free-range eggs (sold at five times that of conventional battery eggs) being shipped from New Zealand to California with such efficiency that--owing to time zones--an American may be eating an omelet before the hen laid the egg. Little wonder, then, that the ingredients in some dinners have been shipped further than the distance around the Earth's circumference (24,000 miles). That said, here's to "freegans" who remove themselves from the troubled food supply chain by living entirely off discarded food mined from supermarket dumpsters. Wherever you are in that chain, you should read this book, and take stock of your food choices.

Life-Changing, Complex Look into a System Invisible to Most Americans

While Peter Singer and Jim Mason's track the sources of three families' food shopping choices back to the farm, they have simultaneously had an enormous impact on the way I view food. This life-changing book breaks down the systemically-entrenched, nontransparent industrial farming practices in a balanced, complex, interesting and readable way. I already knew something about each of the topics that are touched on in this book, but they pull together the pieces of this puzzle that I have been gathering over time in such a compelling way that is inspiring me to modify what I thought was already a conscientious way of eating, and to fight for changes to this system. In the first chapter, focusing on a family who shops at Walmart, you get an inside look into the inhumane, environmentally detrimental and unsustainable practices of the pig, cow and chicken farms that produce the inexpensive meat found in stores like Walmart. Meat and poultry, eggs and milk are as cheap as they are not because that's what the market will pay, but because corporations and consumers are not paying for the externalities to the environmental and animals that result in doing business this way. Singer and Mason describe with much imagery the way mainstream industrial farms keep large amounts of animals pent up in cages or crates, unable to turn around or interact with one another. In such situations chickens start pecking at each other and pigs bite one another's tales off, leading the farmers to sear off the nerve-intensive end of the birds beak, and cut off the pigs' tails. Lighting conditions in hen houses are made to trick hens into laying more eggs then they naturally would, which their bodies can't sustain, and cows are genetically engineered to be big and meaty, while not making their bones any stronger, causing broken bones and immobile cattle. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. The authors detail how such farming practices not only stresses the animals, but also the environment. For example, the large amounts of animals that can be raised through these methods produce more nitrogen-laden manure than the earth can absorb, which subsequently runs off into rivers and streams and greatly impacting fish populations down stream. Proceeding chapters follow a family that shops at Trader Joes, Wild Oats and farmers markets, and a vegan family. The book goes in depth into fair trade, organic farming, genetically modified organisms, wild versus farmed fish, and seafood cultivation, among others. At each step, the authors unpack the ethical dilemmas we face with each decision we make on what to eat, where the food we buy should be produced and what brands to choose. For example, they evaluate the ethical choices in some peoples preference to "buy local," looking at it from an environmental perspective (how much gas gets used per fruit or vegetable to drive to the farmers market, versus flying or trucking the vegetables to the supermarket) and a humanitarian