We don’t usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. Stealing, lying, hurting people—these 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, and—especially—our sex life. But eating—an activity that is even more essential than sex, and in which everyone participates—is 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.1 Temperance and self-restraint in diet, as elsewhere in life, were seen as virtues. Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, advocates a simple diet of bread, cheese, vegetables and olives, with figs for dessert, and wine in moderation.2 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 doesn’t 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.3 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 General’s 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.4 Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me raised serious ethical questions about the contribution of fast food chains like McDonald’s to America’s epidemic of obesity.5 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 we’ve 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.7
Buying organic isn’t enough, however, for the millions of vegetarians all over the world who refuse to eat any meat or fish. In the United States, a 2003 Harris poll found that almost 3 per cent of the population says they never eat meat, poultry, fish, or other seafood.8 In Australia and New Zealand, 6 per cent of people interviewed in a survey on food labelling said that they or a member of their family wanted to know what products are vegetarian or vegan.9 Avoiding meat and fish used to be as far as anyone went. Now vegans, who eat no animal products at all, are as common as vegetarians once were. In fact, the United States’ Harris poll found that half of those who said they never eat meat, poultry, fish, or other seafood also said they never eat dairy products, eggs, or honey. And it’s not just the vegans who are conscious of food. Throughout developed countries, people are learning to ask tough questions about where their food comes from and how it was produced. Is the food grown without pesticides or herbicides? Are the farm workers paid a living wage? Do the animals involved suffer needlessly?
Questions like these are part of a growing movement towards ethical food consumption. In 2005 two major US supermarket chains, Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats, announced that they would not sell eggs from caged hens, and Trader Joe’s said it would not use caged eggs for its own brand of eggs.10 In Australia, Macro Wholefoods is a new and expanding chain (so far only in Sydney and Melbourne) that sells mainly organic food, and does not sell eggs from caged hens. As John Mackey, Whole Foods Market’s CEO, has said, these changes were the result of customer demand.11 Nor is this concern limited to highly educated people in upper-income brackets. It affects all forms of food consumption, right down to McDonald’s and Burger King, both of which have, as we shall see, recently taken steps that show them to be sensitive to ethical criticism of their products.
Virtually anyone, irrespective of income, can make a positive contribution to this movement. Making better food choices doesn’t require hours spent reading labels or rigid adherence to any particular diet. All it takes is the information we provide in this book, which we hope will bring a little more awareness about the significance of the food choices we all make.
Voting at the Supermarket
Increasingly, people are regarding their food choices as a form of political action. One of the conscientious consumers we interviewed for this book said, ‘I try to vote with my dollar and not enrich those who are doing bad things in the world.’12
In Europe, ethical consumption has gone much further than in Australia. Since the 1980s, non-government organisations have been campaigning to persuade supermarkets to stock products that are fairly traded, free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and, in the case of animal products, from producers who avoid the most restrictive forms of confinement. Most major supermarkets in Europe carry free-range eggs, a wide variety of GMO-free products and fairly-traded coffee, tea, chocolate and bananas. McDonald’s introduced organic milk to its British restaurants in 2003.13 The Co-Op, a national British supermarket chain, now buys its house brand of chocolate from growers who meet fair-trade standards. Because the cocoa growers in Ghana receive a higher price for fair trade cocoa, the price of the Co-Op’s house brand chocolate increased. The conservative Daily Telegraph predicted that consumers would resist paying higher prices for fair trade products. Instead, sales of Co-Op brand chocolate have doubled, while sales of the other brands of chocolate the store stocks have declined. In 2003 the Co-Op converted its own brand coffee to fair trade and in the next year saw Co-Op brand coffee sales rise 20 per cent, while sales of other brands fell 14 per cent.14
The extent to which British consumers choose ethically when buying food is, by Australian standards, quite astonishing. In Britain, sales of free-range eggs—that is, eggs that are not only from ‘cage free’ hens, but from hens able to walk outside—have now surpassed in value sales of eggs from caged hens.15 Since 2002, two major British supermarket chains, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose, have sold only free-range whole eggs. No major Australian supermarket has gone that far. Marks & Spencer has also eliminated eggs from caged hens from its entire food range, requiring every manufacturer from whom they purchase food products to source their eggs from a list of approved and inspected egg producers. Now Tesco is also phasing out eggs from caged hens, and ASDA, the British Wal-Mart affiliate, does not use eggs from caged hens in its own brand eggs. In Australia, in contrast, about 85 per cent of all hens are still kept in battery cages.
Given the strong British concern for ethical consumption, it is hardly surprising that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, became the first major Christian leader to affirm that ethics extends to food choices. Under his leadership the Church of England has issued a report entitled Sharing God’s Planet that recommends sustainable consumption and says every Christian has a duty to ‘care for every part of God’s creation.’ The Church recommends that clergy themselves make eco-friendly consumption choices, selling fairly traded products at church fêtes and using organic bread and wine for communion services.16
Three Families
The issues raised by our food choices are clearly illustrated by three families we’re about to meet. The families are all American, but they illustrate three different approaches to food that can now be found anywhere in the developed world. American ways of eating, marketing and producing food have a powerful influence on other countries, including Australia.
We’ll start with the Hillard-Nierstheimer family, who live in Mabelvale, Arkansas: Lee Nierstheimer; his wife Jake; and their two children, Katie and Max. Their food choices exemplify the Standard American Diet. Jake, who does the family shopping, generally goes to her local Wal-Mart Supercenter because it is hard to beat their prices, and she can get everything in one stop. When they want to go out to eat, the family picks one of the many fast food chains in the area.
Halfway across the country, in Fairfield, Connecticut, we’ll sit down to dinner with the Masarech-Motavalli family: Jim Motavalli; his wife, Mary Ann Masarech; and their daughters Maya and Delia. Jim and Mary Ann are concerned about their family’s health and about the impact their food purchases have on the environment. Much of the food they buy is organically produced, so they know it is relatively free of pesticides and has not been grown with synthetic fertilisers. In summer and fall Mary Ann likes to go to a local farm to get fresh, locally grown vegetables. But Jim and Mary lead busy lives, and convenience is a factor too, so their purchases don’t always quite match up to their ideals.
And in Olathe, Kansas, an outer suburb of Kansas City, we’ll talk with the Farb family: Joe; his wife JoAnn; and their daughters Sarina and Samantha. Of our three families, the Farbs follow the strictest ethical principles. Theirs is a vegan household; everything they eat is purely plant-based, and nothing comes from an animal. The Farbs also seek out organically grown food whenever possible.
In getting to know our families, we come to appreciate the individual circumstances in which each of us chooses what to buy and what to eat and the complex personal, social and economic factors that go into these decisions. As we have already said, we think that these choices have ethical significance, and we will later criticise some of the food choices made by our families. Obviously, though, food choices are only one aspect of what people do and not a sufficient basis for judging their moral character. Indeed, since food ethics has been such a neglected topic in our culture, it is quite likely that otherwise good people are making bad choices in this area simply because they have not really focused on it, or do not have access to the information they need to make good choices.
Knowledge Is Power
Our plan was to note the foods that our families chose and then trace them back through the production process to see what ethical issues arose. Once we found out what our three families ate, we wrote to 87 corporations who had manufactured at least one product that a family had bought. We informed each corporation of our project and asked for their assistance in identifying and facilitating our visits to the farm or facility from which the product came. Few companies bothered to reply. So we sent follow-up letters, adding that we were keen to get the producers’ side of the story. After all this, only 14 companies indicated that they were willing to assist us in any way. Most of these companies were relatively small producers of organic foods.
We were disappointed but not surprised. As recently as the 1970s, the food industry was proud to show its farming practices to the public. No more. Not long ago, the producer of an Australian current affairs program suggested doing an interview with Peter in a setting involving animals, somewhere not too far from Princeton, New Jersey. Peter said: ‘Fine, let’s do it inside an intensive farm so that viewers can see where their meals come from.’ The producer agreed and said he’d find a location. Several days later he called back to admit defeat. He’d contacted several intensive producers and not one of them would let the television cameras in. He had even turned for assistance to the Animal Industry Foundation, headed by Steve Kopperud, probably America’s most forceful defender of the animal production industries.
Kopperud travels the country giving speeches at animal industry conferences, telling producers that they must take the offensive against the animal rights movement by communicating with the public and giving consumers accurate information about the way producers treat their animals. In a column in Florida Agriculture, Kopperud blamed the media for being out of touch with rural life. ‘The CBS brass should set the corporate jet down in rural America and take a look around,’ he wrote. ‘Follow a farmer around for a season, or have a group of city dwellers try to tackle the hard work of farming or ranching. Now that would be a dose of reality!’17 But the farmer won’t let the CBS brass follow him around—not when he goes inside the factory farm doors, anyway. Kopperud was unable—or unwilling—to help the television producer find a single egg, chicken, veal or pig operation that would let the cameras in.
We contacted Kopperud again while we were working on this book. The email correspondence went like this:
January 24, 2005
Hello Steve Kopperud,
Perhaps you remember my name from my book with Peter Singer, Animal Factories. We’re at work on a new book now that will cover a wide range of ethical concerns that consumers have today about farming and food production. It will include discussions of current concerns about plant agriculture as well, such as labour, environment, fair trade, corporate responsibility, and so on… Would you be willing to give us an on-the-record interview for our book? If so, I live just a few hours outside of Washington, D.C., and could meet you to talk in person.
Jim Mason
Kopperud replied promptly, saying that he wasn’t sure of his schedule and asking Jim to contact him again in a week or so. Jim did that but got no reply, so he wrote again a week later. Another week passed without reply, so Jim wrote a fourth time. This time Kopperud did reply, but only to say that it was a hectic time of year and he was going out of town, so perhaps it would be better if we sought out ‘another whose views are similar to mine.’ Jim replied that we were particularly keen to talk to Kopperud himself and referred to Kopperud’s column in Florida Agriculture taking the media to task for being out of touch with rural life. There was no response to that message, nor to any of four further reminders sent over the next six weeks.
Around the time we were trying to talk to Kopperud, we read in the farm journal Feedstuffs that the National Pork Board was in the process of training more than 200 producers to help them better communicate with neighbours and communities about modern pork production. The article quoted Danita Rodibaugh, a vice president of the National Pork Board and a pork producer, as saying, ‘One way to tell the industry’s story is from a producer armed with the facts. It’s difficult to maintain a negative view of an industry if you put a face on it and tell your side of the story when misinformed critics attack it.’18 Great, we thought, here is a pork producer who will be keen to show us how she keeps her pigs. But when we contacted her, she told us that it wouldn’t be possible for us to visit her farm, because of concern that we might spread diseases among her pigs. She offered to send us a Pork Facts book instead. We declined that offer and instead offered to buy sterile, disposable full-length gowns, overboots, caps and surgical masks for visiting her farm and to meet, or exceed, whatever biosecurity procedures she required for her employees, visiting veterinarians, or others who she may admit to her farm. We received no response to this message, nor to two further follow-up messages.
We don’t take this personally. Journalists looking into how our food is produced have had the door slammed in their faces over and over again. When Moark, which boasts of being the nation’s number one egg marketer, announced plans to build an egg production unit housing 2.6 million hens in Cherokee County, Kansas, local residents protested. Roger McKinney, a staff writer for the local newspaper the Joplin Globe, contacted the company and asked to see one of its existing farms. McKinney was granted permission but was not allowed to bring a photographer. According to McKinney, a company official told him that ‘the company doesn’t allow photographs inside the barn because many people would not understand why the birds are in cages.’
In St Louis, Missouri, news channel KSDK-TV ran into the same problem with its coverage of the way in which two of the nation’s biggest pork producers, Cargill Pork and Premium Standard Farms, had managed to get pigs raised in Missouri despite that state’s laws against corporate farm ownership. KSDK was denied access to any of the pig farms. Spokesmen for both Cargill and Premium Standard declined to go on the record about their activities. The Cargill Pork spokesman said ‘a television story is not the best way for the company to tell its story.’ The Missouri Pork Association, an affiliation of pork producers in the state, took three days to return the reporter’s telephone calls and then said that the association would be ‘unlikely’ to be able to help.19 Kevin Murphy, vice-president of Vance Publishing, publisher of Food Systems Insider, a monthly magazine for the food industry, has found the same secretive mentality all the way up the chain that leads from producer to consumer: ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in rooms where people say, “Well, our objective is just to be quiet, to just get out of the public eye as quickly as possible.” ’20
There are rare exceptions. In a pig industry magazine we read about an Iowa pork producer who was quoted as saying that the only way to stop attacks on intensive farming by animal rights organisations was ‘to get in front of the public and tell them our story: the real story, not their lies.’ We called him, expecting to be given the usual excuses. After a couple of cautious phone calls, he agreed to allow us to visit. ‘What about biosecurity?’ we asked. ‘It’s not an issue if you’re not coming from other farms,’ he replied. We assured him we wouldn’t go near any pigs before visiting his farm, and that was it. He turned out to be a blunt man who didn’t see any reason to hide what he was doing. While he showed us the various stages of intensive pig production on his property, he forthrightly defended what he was doing, both in terms of producing pork at a price everyone can afford and in terms of keeping the pigs comfortable.
Within animal agriculture, a few people speak frankly about why the industry is so secretive. Peter Cheeke is a professor of animal science and the author of the widely used textbook Contemporary Issues in Animal Agriculture, in which he writes: ‘For modern animal agriculture, the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the meat hits the plate, the better… One of the best things modern animal agriculture has going for it is that most people in the developed countries are several generations removed from the farm and haven’t a clue how animals are raised and processed.’ Cheeke then gets more specific, stating that if urban meat eaters were to see the raising and processing of industrially produced chickens, ‘they would not be impressed.’ Many of them might even ‘swear off eating chicken and perhaps all meat.’21 Another agriculture professor, Wes Jamison, agrees that ‘There is a gulf between the reality of animal production and the perception of animal production in the non-farming American public.’ But Jamison, who teaches at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, doesn’t think that this gulf will ever be bridged. ‘You’re not going to see a beef-packing plant be transparent. They can’t. It’s so shocking to the average person.’22
After suggesting that animal agriculture benefits from public ignorance about production methods, Professor Cheeke invites readers of his textbook— who are mostly university agriculture students—to ask themselves a crucial question: ‘Is this an ethical situation?’ Industry officials who would resist contemplating Cheeke’s question would do well to heed the counsel of Lord Acton, who said, ‘Everything secret degenerates…nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.’
Just as the food industry resists disclosing general information about its food production, so it has resisted offering us information about the foods purchased by the three families we monitored. Yet even without the industry’s cooperation, we were able to discover a great deal about how these families’ foods were produced, and this can help food consumers—that is, all of us— make better, more ethical food choices for ourselves and for our families.