In Salon.com, “The Way We Eat author Peter Singer explains the advantage of wingless chickens, how humans discriminate against animals, and the downside of buying locally grown food.”

It’s a long piece, but here are a few brief excerpts.

Some background on the book:

Singer’s new book, The Way We Eat, co-written with Jim Mason, looks at the eating habits of three different American families: vegans, “conscientious omnivores” and a family eating the “standard American diet.” The elements of each diet and the production chain that brought it to the table are then carefully considered in light of environmental impact, fair trade, the organic movement, the grow-local movement, genetically modified foods, animal rights and the depredations of agribusiness.

Singer on “organic chicken farms”:

When I got to this place, although it was in a beautiful green valley in New Hampshire, and it was a fine, sunny fall day, there were no hens outside at all. The hens were all in these huge sheds, about 20,000 hens in a single shed, and they were pretty crowded. The floor of the shed was basically a sea of brown hens, and when we asked about access to outdoors, we were shown a small dirt run which at the best of times I don’t think the hens would be very interested in. In any case the doors were closed, and when we asked why, we were told that the producer was worried about bird flu. So, yes, it was not really what I expected. It was still a kind of a factory farm production — although undoubtedly it was much better than a caged operation.

On the occasional perils of buying locally:

This is in reference to the local food movement, and the idea that you can save fossil fuels by not transporting food long distances. This is a widespread belief, and of course it has some basis. Other things being equal, if your food is grown locally, you will save on fossil fuels. But other things are often not equal. California rice is produced using artificial irrigation and fertilizer that involves energy use. Bangladeshi rice takes advantage of the natural flooding of the rivers and doesn’t require artificial irrigation. It also doesn’t involve as much synthetic fertilizer because the rivers wash down nutrients, so it’s significantly less energy intensive to produce. Now, it’s then shipped across the world, but shipping is an extremely fuel-efficient form of transport. You can ship something 10,000 miles for the same amount of fuel necessary to truck it 1,000 miles. So if you’re getting your rice shipped to San Francisco from Bangladesh, fewer fossil fuels were used to get it there than if you bought it in California.

And on the inefficiency of meat “production”:

The fossil fuel goes into the fertilizer used to fertilize these acres of grain, which are then harvested and processed and transported to the cattle for feed. We get back, at most, 10 percent of the food value of the grain that we put into the cattle. So we are just skimming this concentrated product off the top of a mountain of grain into which all this fossil fuel has gone.

Go check it out, it’s well worth a read.

Finally, a caveat: though Singer is often referred to as the “godfather” of the modern animal rights movement, he is actually an animal welfarist as opposed to an animal rights advocate (hey, the man’s a utilitarian). (For more on the rights vs. welfare distinction, click here.)

You can read my review of his most famous AR tome, Animal Liberation, on Amazon.com (as of this writing, mine is the top “Spotlight” review and is posted under the alias “easyvegan”).