The Ethics of What We Eat (2006), by Peter Singer and Jim Mason

Eating, like everything we do that affects others, is a political act. Each time we eat McDonald’s, for instance, we provide implicit support to that organisation’s corporate structure, to its treatment of its young staff, to its outrageously unhealthy menu (which it sells at an ostensibly low dollar price to consumers, many of whom are children or parents of young people, influenced by its shiny advertisements).

In their new book, Singer and Mason don’t spend a lot of time on fast-food chain ‘restaurants’, perhaps because their lack of food ethics is obvious. (If anything, the authors tend to applaud McDonald’s recent changes to the way it does business, many of which were brought about when two activists, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, successfully defended a number of claims they made against the corporation in the longest-running libel case in UK history.[1])

The authors are more concerned with investigating the hidden histories of the foods we buy from supermarkets, butchers and fish shops when we think we’re buying healthy and ‘better’ alternatives to fast food. They encourage us to step outside the neat retail-consumer paradigm that allows us to conveniently ignore every stage in the food production process prior to our selecting the packaged item from the shelf to the soothing soundtrack of easy-listening pop.

The book’s emphasis is on food production in the United States (Mason is a US citizen, and Australian-born Singer is the part-time Ira W DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values), where standards are apparently well below those in Australia and Europe. The sheer cruelty of the practices of many US factory farms is horrific, and the industry does everything in its power to prevent its consumers from knowing anything about them. What’s described in this book is enough to potentially put most readers off eating any meat, poultry or fish products in that country. Cattle and pigs suffer major depression from being kept in total physical confinement (without even the ability to turn around) on concrete floors for their entire lives. Chickens, stuffed in battery cages to bursting point, have the most sensitive parts of their bodies – their beaks – sawn off, without anaesthetic, to prevent them pecking other chickens to death.

Beyond such obvious examples of problematic production processes, Singer and Mason ask some difficult questions. If we had to hunt and kill our own meat, would we do so? Many consumers of meat products would not. Indeed, the severe separation between between the production and consumption phases serves not only the meat industry, but also meat-eaters themselves.

That question is far less difficult, ethically speaking, than the question of whether humans have the right to kill animals for their own purposes at all. Apart from the dogmatic Christian justification (that humans, created in the Christian god’s image, are separate from and ‘above’ other living things, and actually have the responsibility to exploit ‘natural resources’), the most common argument advanced for the continued consumption of meat by humans is that humans possess a special and unique quality which gives them the right to treat non-humans differently than they would each other. As the authors point out, however, this ‘argument’ is really a justification, based on a prejudice they call ‘speciesism’: humans define the boundaries of human-ness in order to justify their treatment of non-humans. Even if some reasonable and universal delineation between humans and non-human animals were agreed upon (and such delineation is all but impossible), there is still no obvious reason to cause suffering to other living creatures. Recall, for example, that the same reasoning was used by past societies to justify such practices as slavery, colonisation and ethnic genocide.

The book continues Singer’s quest to make ethics ‘practical’. He and Mason have collaborated previously, on the 1985 publication In Defense of Animals (re-published in an updated edition last year). The Ethics of What We Eat is perhaps a little drier than Singer's most recent books, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W Bush (2004) and, with Tom Gregg, How Ethical is Australia? (2004), but is no less explosive or thought-provoking. In terms of contextual evidence, it is less relevant to Australian readers than to Americans, though its discussion of ethics is universal and important. [Russell]

[1] McDonald’s Corporation, McDonald’s Restaurants Ltd v Helen Marie Steel and David Morris [1997] EWHC QB 366 (19 June 1997). See Steel and Morris’s website: www.mcspotlight.org