Before we reach specific conclusions about how we should eat, we will outline five ethical principles that we think most people will share. These principles do not encompass everything that is morally relevant, but they can help us to decide all but the most contentious ethical issues.
1. Transparency: We Have a Right to Know How Our Food Is Produced.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, it’s often said, we’d all be vegetarian. That’s probably not quite true—some people can get used to almost anything. But transparency is increasingly recognised as an important ethical principle and a safeguard against bad practice. Consumers should be able to get accurate and unbiased information about what they are buying and how it was produced.
2. Fairness: Producing Food Should Not Impose Costs on Others.
The price of food should reflect the full costs of its production. Then consumers can choose whether they want to pay that price. If no one does, the market will ensure that the item ceases to be produced. Meanwhile, if the method of producing food imposes significant costs on others without their consent—for example, by emitting odours that make it impossible for neighbours to enjoy living in their homes—then the market has not been operating efficiently and the outcome is unfair to those who are disadvantaged. The food will only be cheap because others are paying part of the cost— unwillingly. Any form of food production that is not environmentally sustainable will be unfair in this respect, since it will make future generations worse off.
3. Humanity: Inflicting Significant Suffering on Animals for Minor Reasons Is Wrong.
Most people, even those opposed to more radical ideas of ‘animal liberation’ or ‘animal rights’, agree that we should try to avoid causing pain or other forms of distress to animals. Kindness and compassion towards all, humans and animals, is clearly better than indifference to the suffering of another sentient being.
4. Social Responsibility: Workers Should Have Decent Wages and Working Conditions.
Minimally decent treatment for employees and suppliers precludes child labour, forced labour and sexual harassment. Workplaces should be safe, and workers should have the right to form associations and engage in collective bargaining, if they so choose. There must be no discrimination on the basis of race, sex or disabilities irrelevant to the job. Workers should receive a wage sufficient to cover their basic needs and those of dependent children.
5. Needs: Preserving Life and Health Justifies More Than Other Desires.
A genuine need for food, to survive and nourish ourselves adequately, overrides less pressing considerations and justifies many things that might otherwise be wrong. In contrast, if we choose a particular food out of habit, or because we like the way it tastes, when we could have nourished ourselves equally well by making a different choice, then that choice has to meet stricter ethical standards.
Drawing on these principles, let’s look at some of the food choices, bearing in mind the information provided in earlier chapters.
Factory-farmed Food
In supermarkets and ordinary grocery stores, you should assume that all food—unless specifically labelled otherwise—comes from the mainstream food industry and has not been produced in a manner that is humane, sustainable, or environmentally friendly. Animal products, in particular, will virtually all be from factory farms unless the package clearly states the contrary. Don’t be fooled by terms like ‘all-natural’ or ‘farm fresh’. They are often used to describe factory-farm products.
Factory-farmed Chicken: The first food purchase we examined—Jake and Lee’s chicken—is one of the worst. Whether the chicken comes from Tyson, Inghams, Steggles or any of the intensive producers, the conditions in which the birds live, are transported, and die should be enough to disqualify factory-farmed chicken from every ethical shopping list. In addition, broiler sheds have polluted water resources and ruined the lives of people into whose area they have moved. Work in chicken slaughterhouses is dirty, dangerous, and low-paid, and attempts to unionise plants may be met with intimidation.
Factory-farmed Turkey: Everything we have said about factory-farmed chicken applies to factory-farmed turkey. Think about it before Thanksgiving. We prefer ‘Tofurky’, a tofu ‘turkey’ made from organic soybeans that has a ‘skin’ that turns deliciously crisp when baked. (See www.tofurky.com for more information.) Those who simply must have a real turkey should at least seek out one who has been organically raised, with access to pasture.
Eggs from Caged Hens: Everything we have said about factory-farmed chicken applies to eggs from caged hens. The lives of the closely confined hens are, if anything, even more miserable than those of broilers. No one needs to eat eggs from caged hens. For those on a limited budget, a healthy option is to eat fewer eggs and buy the more expensive but better-tasting eggs from hens free to move around inside sheds or, preferably, outdoors (as described in Chapter 8). The other choice is to replace all eggs with vegan alternatives—for cooking and baking, there are several vegan egg substitutes, available in natural food stores or online.
Factory-farmed Veal: Most people who think about food ethics have already crossed off this item. Veal calves reared for ‘white’ veal are removed from their mothers on their first day of life, put in a crate so narrow that they cannot turn around or walk, deprived of straw and bedding, and kept deliberately anemic, all so that their pale soft flesh—really pale pink, not white—can be sold at the highest price. Enough said.
Factory-farmed Pork, Ham and Bacon: Most sows on pig farms are treated as breeding machines and are so closely confined that they cannot even turn around, let alone walk. For their entire lives, they are miserable, bored animals. Their offspring are permanently indoors, on concrete, without bedding. Intensive pig farms use 6 pounds of grain for every pound of boneless meat they produce, putting stress on the environment. They use large amounts of fuel and often generate considerable pollution problems too. We don’t consider this an ethical food choice.
Factory-farm Milk, Cheese and Other Dairy Products: Intensively reared dairy cows are genetically selected and managed so that for a few years they will give vast quantities of milk. To that end they are regularly made pregnant and separated from their calves soon after birth, which causes distress to both mother and calf. They don’t get to walk around on pasture and eat grass. If their bodies collapse and they can no longer walk, they are considered worthless and, as we have seen, may be tied to a tractor and dragged across concrete and into a truck before being killed. Many male calves of dairy cows go to the veal industry. In addition, intensive dairy farms can be serious polluters. So intensively produced dairy products should be avoided. (Unfortunately, most of these problems occur in large-scale organic dairy production as well.)
Intensively Produced Beef: Beef is not a factory-farmed product in the same way as the other animal products we have considered. Calves raised for beef usually live for at least six months by their mothers’ side, on pasture. Later, in feedlots, they have more room to move than chickens, laying hens, veal calves or pigs and they are under less stress than dairy cows. But they are still subjected to extreme hot and cold weather without shade or shelter, as well as hot iron branding, dehorning and castration, all without anaesthetic. They can, under an 1872 United States law, be transported by rail for 28 hours without water or rest—and even that minimal protection has been rendered obsolete by the widespread use of trucks to transport cattle. The US Department of Agriculture refuses to interpret the ‘Twenty-Eight Hour Law’ as applying to trucks, which carry 95 per cent of the farm animals transported, so there are effectively no limits on how long calves can be trucked without water, food or rest. Cattle find their feedlot diet difficult to digest. It gives them diseases from which they would die without antibiotics—and even the antibiotics would not suffice to keep them alive much beyond the age at which they are slaughtered.
The lives of feedlot beef cattle are probably still better, on the whole, than those of factory-farmed pigs or chickens. The counterweight to that, however, is the inefficiency of cattle as converters of grain to meat. This means that eaters of feedlot beef are responsible for the use of more land, fertiliser, fossil fuels, water and other resources than those who eat chicken. They may also be responsible, as we saw in Chapter 16, for the degradation of public lands.
An Overall Verdict on Factory-farmed Meat, Eggs and Dairy Products: As explained in Chapter 16, concentrated animal feeding operations reduce the amount of food available for human consumption. We don’t need them. What factory farms do to animals, nearby residents, and the entire planet’s environment, they do because people are accustomed to eating these animal products and can’t imagine a meal without them, or because they like the way they taste. These are not ethical justifications, given the harm these practices cause. Supporting factory farming by knowingly buying its products is wrong.
There are many alternatives to factory farm products. If price and convenience are important, tofu and vegan soyburgers are similar in cost, for the protein they contain, to factory-farmed chicken, while dishes based on dried beans and lentils provide more protein for less money. Some Asian groceries carry meat and fish substitutes made from gluten, in accordance with an ancient Chinese Buddhist tradition. Textured vegetable protein ordered from www.healthy-eating.com is another bargain-priced source of protein.1 Or you could just eat less protein. As we have seen in Chapter 15, adults who get enough calories will almost always be getting enough protein, without specifically seeking high-protein foods.
Animal products from sustainable producers who show some concern for animal welfare are available in many areas. Start by checking out the health food and natural food stores and food co-ops in your area. If they don’t stock what you are seeking, ask them to do so (and then be sure to go back and buy it!). If you live in a small town or rural area where there are no such stores, look for farmers’ markets and buy directly from local farmers who are open about their methods and will allow you to visit their farm.
A growing variety of food is also available for delivery to your door. A list of useful resources can be found at the back of this book.
Fish and Other Marine Animals
Farmed Fish: Fish farming is factory farming in the water, and, like land-based forms of factory farming, it suffers from the general problem of concentrated animal feeding operations—we have to catch or grow the food and bring it to the animals we are feeding. With fish farming, the extent to which this damages the oceans and wastes food resources depends on whether the fish are carnivorous, as salmon are, or herbivorous, like carp. Carp are farmed and eaten extensively in China, where they contribute to meeting the protein needs of rural people with relatively few food choices. In the industrialised countries, however, it is usually the more expensive carnivorous fish that are eaten, and farming them wastes the ocean’s resources. Fish farming often causes pollution problems too. Farmed fish may be stressed from the crowding and confinement to which they are subjected. The methods by which they are killed show total indifference to their pain and suffering. For these reasons, farmed fish isn’t an ethically acceptable food.
Wild-caught Fish: If you are going to eat fish at all, wild-caught fish is definitely preferable to farmed fish, as long as it comes from sustainable fisheries. The Australian Marine Conservation Society’s publication ‘The Sustainable Fish Finder’ can be ordered from AMCS on 1800 066 299 or from their website: www.amcs.org.au. But identifying appropriate species may not be enough, because even high-end stores have been caught selling farmed salmon mislabelled as wild salmon. That means that well-intentioned consumers seeking to make an ecologically good choice could instead unwittingly be buying one of the ecologically worst choices.
Suppose, however, that you buy fish that, like Jake and Lee’s pollock, is from a sustainable fishery. The fish live free, so eating them doesn’t contribute to prolonged suffering, as it does when you buy factory farmed animal products. To that extent, eating fish can be a better ethical choice than eating most of the meat, eggs and cheese sold in supermarkets. Still, the suffering fish experience while dying is a compelling reason for avoiding fish, at least for families able to get enough food, and sufficient protein, without eating fish.
Invertebrates: The key ethical issues related to eating invertebrates (such as squid, octopus, crabs, lobster, shrimps, oysters, clams and mussels) are environmental sustainability and the possibility of causing unjustified suffering. On the environmental question, there are too many species and too many ways of farming or catching them to detail here, and any information we might provide would soon be outdated by changing conditions and new information. To avoid contributing to environmental damage to the oceans and seabed, however, it is essential to know what you are eating and where it comes from.
Imported shrimp or prawns are often produced in an unsustainable manner and should therefore be avoided. Australian prawns, however, are more likely to come from sustainable fisheries. Rock lobster and spiny lobster are sustainably fished if they are from the United States or Australia, but otherwise are probably not. There is, as we’ve seen, an ongoing debate about the environmental sustainability of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab fishery, but it is better regulated than many Asian crab fisheries, where imports originate. In some areas, molluscs like scallops and oysters are obtained by dredging the ocean bottom, which causes serious damage and catches many unwanted fish and other creatures. But scallops, oysters and mussels are also farmed sustainably on ropes suspended in the sea, so removing them does not disturb the sea bottom. On the question of pain, for the reasons given in Chapter 9, we think crustacea like squid, lobster, crabs and shrimp—along with at least one mollusc, the octopus—should be regarded as capable of feeling pain. It is much less likely, however, that bivalves like clams, scallops, oysters and mussels could experience pain. So when these shellfish are sustainably produced, there is no strong ethical reason against eating them.
Organic, Local, and Fair Trade
Organic Food: Organic labelling schemes are never perfect. Making the standards for organic certification easy to apply in a consistent manner involves taking a philosophy of agriculture, or even a way of life, and reducing it to a checklist of points that can be verified by inspectors. As we saw in Chapter 14, big corporations have gone into organic farming and pushed the rules to their limits. Some small farmers may be following the spirit of organic farming better than these big corporations, but for various reasons, including the cost of certification, their products may not carry an ‘organic’ label. Nevertheless, in most cases buying organic means less chemical fertiliser runoff, fewer herbicides and pesticides in the environment, more birds and animals around the farm, better soil conservation, and, in the long run, sustainable productivity.
Organically grown plants are not genetically modified, so they pose no risk of gene flow into wild plants that could disturb natural ecosystems. The welfare of animals used in organic agriculture will be at least somewhat better than those kept in conventional factory farms, although on some big organic farms the difference may be marginal. On the other hand, organically produced food is more expensive than conventional food. While it would, as Cyd Szymanski suggested, be wrong to complain that organic food is too expensive and then buy a $4.50 latte, it is harder to object to buying conventionally produced food and donating the savings to fighting global poverty. But voting with your dollars and supporting more environmentally friendly agriculture is important, and for those who can afford it, organic is a good choice.
Local Food: There are various reasons why, other things being equal, it is better to buy local food. The most important is reducing the use of fossil fuels. Greater transparency is another. But other issues arise. Some of these relate directly to energy usage:
• Local early vegetables may have been grown with heat, using more fuel than required to transport them from a warmer growing region.
• Delivering small quantities of local products to many different markets may use more fuel than trucking a full load to a more distant supermarket.
• Consumers who drive to outlying local farms or markets instead of doing one-stop shopping at a supermarket may use as much fuel as would have gone into bringing the products from more distant growers to their supermarket.
• Food production in another country may be less energy intensive than domestic production, and the difference may be greater than the energy used in shipping the food thousands of miles.
Before buying locally, we should also consider the benefits that, as we saw in Chapter 11, trade brings to farmers in distant countries who are much poorer than our local farmers. What all this suggests is that the recommendation ‘Buy Local!’ is too simple a principle to provide sound ethical guidance. The most one can say is: ‘Buying local food, when it is in season, is generally a good thing to do, but sometimes there are stronger ethical reasons for buying imported food.’
Fair Trade: Fair trade schemes ensure that more of your money gets to the people who actually grow your food; the higher earnings benefit their communities and encourage sustainable farming methods. Choose fair trade products when you buy coffee, tea, chocolate, bananas, and other items for which there are fair trade brands in your store. If your store doesn’t stock fair trade items and you know that they are available, ask the store to stock them.
Humanely Raised, Vegetarian, or Vegan?
We have argued that ethical consumers will avoid factory-farmed products and most seafood. In Chapter 18 we examined the view that it is ethical to eat animals that have lived good lives and would not have existed at all, except for the ready market for their meat. We found that in practice it is often difficult to determine when animals have truly been well treated. We also expressed our concern that treating animals as commodities for sale leads producers to seek to maximise their profits in ways that are contrary to the interests of the animals. Some animal welfare advocates have instituted labelling schemes to try to ensure that this does not happen. In the United States, Humane Farm Animal Care authorises those producers who meet its standards to use its ‘Certified Humane’ seal. In Britain, the RSPCA offers a highly successful ‘Freedom Food’ program, and other RSPCA accreditation schemes exist in Australia, New Zealand and British Columbia. In Europe, the French have the ‘Label Rouge’ program and the Austrians the ‘Animal Index’.
There are compromises, however, in setting the standards the farms must meet for certification, and one can also question how well the standards are met when inspectors are not present. Even when the animals from whom animal products are obtained live reasonably well, there may be suffering elsewhere in the production chain. Chickens raised outdoors for meat usually come from breeds selected to grow very quickly, and the breeder birds, their parents, will have been kept permanently hungry to prevent them from becoming too obese to breed. It is a rare dairy farmer indeed who does not separate calves from their mothers soon after birth—and what is the fate of the male calves then? And what about slaughter? Certification schemes generally are silent on that topic, so meat may be labelled ‘humanely raised’ but may not have been humanely killed. Those who eat this meat have a duty to inform themselves about what that can mean for the animal.
If, as seems likely, going vegan is still too big a step for most of the hundreds of millions of people in industrialised countries who now eat animals, we urgently need another alternative to eating factory-farmed products. A commercially successful, animal-friendly, environmentally sustainable form of agriculture looks like a promising option. Truly conscientious omnivores, however, are going to have to put time and effort into finding farms that are genuinely humane. ‘Certified Humane’ and similar certification schemes help. Products with such labels are usually preferable to similar uncertified animal products, but it is questionable whether their standards are high enough.
One possible moral rule would be: Only buy animal products if you have visited the farm from which they came—and observed procedures like searing off the beaks of laying hens, if the farm has debeaked hens. Faced with that rule, many people would find it simpler to avoid eating animals altogether. A few might put in the effort required to find farmers who show real concern for their animals and maintain the highest standards of animal welfare.
Suppose, however, that you object to the idea of killing young, healthy animals so you can eat them. That ethical view leads many people to become vegetarian, while continuing to eat eggs and dairy products. But it is not possible to produce laying hens without also producing male chickens, and since these male chicks have no commercial value, they are invariably killed as soon as they have been sexed. The laying hens themselves will be killed once their rate of laying declines. In the dairy industry much the same thing happens—the male calves are killed immediately or raised for veal, and the cows are turned into hamburger long before normal old age. So rejecting the killing of animals points to a vegan, rather than a vegetarian, diet.
Becoming a vegan is a sure way of completely avoiding participation in the abuse of farm animals. Vegans are living demonstrations of the fact that we do not need to exploit animals for food. The vegan diet is also environmentally friendly (although not more so than a diet that includes some organic animal products from animals grazing in a sustainable way on pasture that is unsuitable for growing crops). And there are now so many substitutes for animal products that becoming a vegan is far easier than it has ever been. Soy milk, along with rice milk, is now available almost everywhere, and soy yoghurt is also popular. For those who, like Mary Ann Masarech, still crave bacon, there are excellent vegan bacon substitutes, usually available in the refrigerated section of supermarkets or natural food stores There are also vegan sausages, in many different varieties, along with other vegetable-based meat substitutes. And, of course, there are many vegan cookbooks packed with an endless variety of recipes drawn from cuisines as diverse as Japan, China, Thailand, India, the Middle East and Italy.
The Ethics of Obesity
‘Waste not, want not,’ the old saying went. We have already seen how much food people in industrialised nations waste. The proportion of food wasted in America would rise much higher still, however, if we included not just what people put in their garbage, but also what they put in their mouths above and beyond reasonable nutritional requirements. Eating too much should be seen not only as a health problem, but also as an ethical issue, because it wastes limited resources, adds to pollution, and increases animal suffering. The average American today eats 64 pounds more meat, poultry and fish a year than his or her counterpart in the 1950s.2 That’s almost a 50 per cent increase—and Americans were not undernourished then. As a result, 3 out of 10 Americans are now obese, and close to two-thirds weigh more than is considered healthy.3 Australians are rapidly catching up, with 62 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women now overweight or obese, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.4 This has ethical implications.
If I choose to overeat and develop obesity-related health problems that require medical care, other people will probably have to bear some of the cost—through increased taxes needed to support my healthcare or through higher insurance premiums. A recent study in the US magazine Health Affairs reported that overweight people with private health insurance incur insurance outlays that are, on average, $1200 more per person than people with healthy weights.5 The US Centers for Disease Control reports that the annual medical costs attributable to overweight and obesity add $20 to $28 billion to private insurance bills and $25 to $38 billion to taxes.6 That’s an average annual cost of up to $300 for every American adult. Choosing an unhealthy diet may seem like a personal choice, but it’s not fair to the people who ultimately have to pay for it. If Americans were to cut back to the meat-eating levels of the 1950s, that would improve health and slash health care costs. It would also reduce the number of animals suffering on factory farms by about the same amount as if roughly 80 million Americans became vegans.
The sin relevant to food on which Christianity has placed most emphasis is gluttony. Yet despite the strong Christian influence on American life and culture, it is hard to see much Christian influence in that country on attitudes to overeating. It would be wrong to say that everyone who is obese commits this sin. Some have eating disorders or metabolic problems that are difficult to control. But others just eat too much and should show more restraint. Along with the old-fashioned virtue of frugality, the idea that it is wrong to be a glutton is in urgent need of revival.
Food Is an Ethical Issue—But You Don’t Have to Be Fanatical about It
Sometimes the very success of the ethical consumer movement and the proliferation of consumer concerns it has spawned seems to threaten the entire ethical consumption project. When one ethical concern is heaped upon another and we struggle to be sure that our purchases do not contribute to slave labour, animal exploitation, land degradation, wetland pollution, rural depopulation, unfair trade practices, global warming and the destruction of rainforests, it may all seem so complicated that we could be tempted to forget about everything except eating what we like and can afford.
When we feel overwhelmed, it is important to avoid the mistake of thinking that if you have ethical reasons for doing something, you have to do it all the time, no matter what. Some religions, like Orthodox Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, have strict rules against eating particular foods, and their adherents are supposed to follow these rules all the time. If they break them they may feel polluted, or disobedient to their god. But this rule-based view isn’t the only possible approach to ethics, nor the best one, in our view. Ethical thinking can be sensitive to circumstances.
Suppose that your elderly uncle Bob lives in a town two hundred miles from where you live, and you are his only living relative. Is it wrong not to go to see him on his birthday? The answer might well depend on how much he would enjoy seeing you, whether you have a car, or, if not, whether you can get there by bus, whether you can easily afford the bus fare, what else you could do with your time, and so on. In thinking about these things, you are paying attention to the consequences of what you are doing. How much of a difference will my visit make to Bob? How much of a sacrifice, for me or others, does it require? Similarly, a sound ethical approach to food will ask: what difference does it make, if I eat this food? How do my food choices affect myself and others? It’s not wrong, in answering that question, to give some weight to your own interests and even your own convenience, as long as you don’t do it to a degree that outweighs the major interests of others affected by your choices. You can be ethical without being fanatical.
Amanda Paulson, writing in the Christian Science Monitor about ‘One woman’s quest to enjoy her dinner without guilt’, describes the ethics of Daren Firestone, a Chicago law student who won’t buy meat, but will eat the remnants of a big Thanksgiving dinner before they get tossed out. Whether or not you agree with that view—don’t eat meat unless it will otherwise be wasted—there is nothing that disqualifies it as an ethical principle.
Yale philosophy professor Shelly Kagan takes the same view about airline meals. A vegetarian in his everyday life, he orders meatless meals when he flies. Airlines, however, sometimes fail to deliver on such requests. If that happens, and he is offered a meat meal that he knows will be thrown out if he doesn’t eat it, he’ll eat it. In these circumstances—in contrast to buying meat at the supermarket—his consumption of meat seems to make no difference to the demand for it. (It’s like dumpster diving without getting your clothes dirty.) Nevertheless, by not making a fuss, Kagan is sending the airlines a message that failing to provide a vegetarian meal is not a serious problem. He might also be missing an opportunity to start a conversation with the passenger next to him about why he is a vegetarian.
We are not too concerned about trivial infractions of the ethical guidelines we have suggested. We think intensive dairy production is unethical. Because dairy products are in so many foods, avoiding them entirely can make life difficult. But remember, eating ethically doesn’t have to be like keeping kosher. You can take into account how difficult it is to avoid factory-farmed dairy products, and how much support you would be giving to the dairy industry if you were to buy an energy bar that includes a trace of skim milk powder. Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse— and persuading others not to support it—is. Giving people the impression that it is virtually impossible to be vegan doesn’t help animals at all.
How relaxed can we be? Firestone’s dietary rules also include what he calls ‘the Paris exemption’: if he is lucky enough to find himself in a fine restaurant in Paris—or, very occasionally, in a truly outstanding restaurant elsewhere—he allows himself to eat whatever he likes.7 We wondered whether he believes that on these rare occasions, the pleasure that he gets from eating meat outweighs the contribution his meal makes to animal suffering. When we contacted him, however, he readily admitted that his ‘Paris exemption’ is ‘more self-indulgence than utilitarian calculus’. But that doesn’t mean that his general opposition to eating meat is not ethical. It is, but he gives more weight to what he wants to do than he would if he were acting on strictly ethical principles all the time. Very few of us are in any position to criticise that, and most of those who do criticise it are deceiving themselves about their choices when their own desires are at stake. A little self-indulgence, if you can keep it under firm control, doesn’t make you a moral monster, and it certainly doesn’t mean that you might as well abandon your principles entirely. In fact, Firestone believes that by allowing himself to satisfy his occasional cravings—maybe once every three months—he has been able to be faithful to his principles for many years, while other vegetarians he knows have given up the whole practice because one day they could not resist the smell of bacon frying.
At the opposite end to the ‘Paris exemption’ is the ‘hardship exemption’. Factory farming and other unethical methods of producing food have spread because they lead to food that sells for less than food produced by more traditional methods. Replacing these foods with organically produced food generally means paying more for your food. In recommending foods that are more expensive, we are not saying that people who can comfortably afford organic food and humanely raised meat are more ethical than those who cannot. As with your visit to uncle Bob, circumstances matter. If Bob would very much like to see you, but the bus fare will make such a dent in your budget that your children will go to bed hungry, no one will blame you for not going. But few families in industrialised nations are as poor as that. In the United States, families that consider themselves poor often drink sodas rather than water. Shopping at Wal-Mart, Jake bought a lot of prepared, packaged food like corn dogs, steak fingers and breaded fish fillets. Unfortunately, these products deliver poor value for money in terms of their nutritional content. Food that is both more ethical and more economical is available in every supermarket. Buying organic food without incurring extra expense, on the other hand, is usually not possible. Taking that into account, and considering that there are more powerful grounds for avoiding factory-farmed products than for buying only organic food, it is reasonable to limit the obligation to buy organic food to what one can afford without undue hardship, while seeing the obligation to avoid factory farm products as more stringent.
No other human activity has had as great an impact on our planet as agriculture. When we buy food we are taking part in a vast global industry. Americans spend more than a trillion dollars on food every year. That’s more than double what they spend on motor vehicles, and also more than double what the government spends on defence. In Australia ‘food and non-alcoholic beverages’ is, at $153, the largest component in weekly household expenditure. That puts it ahead of housing, transport and recreation, and more than three times the amount spent on medical care and health.8
We are all consumers of food, and we are all affected to some degree by the pollution that the food industry produces. If we manage to avoid local pollution of our water and air from manure, pesticides and chemical fertilisers, we and our children still cannot escape the long-term impact of the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to its impact on over six billion humans, the food industry also directly affects more than fifty billion nonhuman land animals a year.9 For many of them, it controls almost every aspect of their lives, causing them to be brought into existence, reared in totally artificial, factory-style production units and then slaughtered. Additional billions of fish and other sea creatures are swept up out of the sea and killed so we can eat them. Through the chemicals and hormones it puts into the rivers and seas and the spread of diseases like avian influenza, agriculture indirectly affects all living creatures. All of this happens because of our choices about what we eat.
We can make better choices.