THE ETHICS OF WHAT WE EAT

The Ethics of What We Eat

The Ethics of What We Eat

Ethics of our world-famous food and animal liberation ethicist Peter Singer and Jim Mason, a journalist, a lawyer and animal rights activist, is a compelling, complex and very readable book that should be done to disturb many people, their food choices.

In recent years, a resurgence of awareness and concern about the hidden nature of capitalist industrial production of food. Food scares the 1990's that mad cow disease is the most famous being our lack of knowledge about the origin of food. Increasingly, we have to ask how our food is produced, by whom and under what conditions (Singer, Mason, 2007).

Singer and Mason provide us with some disturbing answers, by sharing a meal with three families in the U.S., and then trace the food they ate in their origins of production.

Disclosure of the reality behind the marketing of healthy image, however, is not easy. Factory farming industry is very secretive about their practices, and the authors repeatedly refused entry to the farm, despite claims that the industry has nothing to hide. When the turkey farm deny authors access, they seek work, as Turkey inseminators work, which is now necessary because intensively farmed turkeys are bred with breasts so large that they can no longer reproduce naturally.

The book is a scathing indictment of the capitalist food system, which reduces the nature and animals, vehicles for profit. It depicts the food system based on rationally calculated torture animals and plunder of precious natural resources. This will be familiar territory Singer fans. For the uninitiated, violence, bloody reality of poultry farms will shock resistance and resentment (Singer, Mason, 2007).

However, the book is not primarily intended as a denunciation of the economy of the plant. On the contrary, the authors aim to connect the hidden suffering of production in our daily food choices. The main idea is that there is a moral act and our choice of food ethical implications.

As in Singer's earlier works, "Animal Liberation" and "Practical Ethics, this latest work argues from utilitarianist philosophical point of view. In Singer, all living creatures capable of suffering have interests worthy of equal attention. People and animals have common interests to avoid pain, so that the moral act of one that maximizes the interests and minimize the suffering of all sentient beings.

Eating Big Mac so can be regarded as an immoral act: it is not possible interests, it causes suffering to animals and environmental degradation. If the alternative supply may be, there is a Big Mac is giving his own selfish desires over the interests of animals (and all of our interests in environmental sustainability).

The authors, however, not as moralizing or fanatic, as it may seem. They allow for some flexibility, depending on the actual conditions. "A little pampering will not do you a moral monster," they admit. So, what is "ethical" look like? Singer and Mason answer "vegan". But not before they reviewed the ethics of a number of other ways ...