Last week I mentioned the release of Peter Singer’s newest book, The Way We Eat, and pointed readers to an interview with the controversial philosopher in Salon. This week, the news is making the rounds on the animal rights lists.

Thought y’all might be interested in this summary of all things Singer-related from DawnWatch.

Enjoy.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch
Date: May 21, 2006 8:47 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: “The Way We Eat” by Peter Singer and Jim Mason — reviews and interviews — May 2006

Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, and Jim Mason, who co-authored with Singer the 1980 book “Animal Factories,” have a new co-written book out on food, titled “The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter.” (In Australia it is titled “The Ethics of What we Eat.”)

It is aimed not at animal rights activists, but at the general public, and gives an entertaining and highly informative overview of what is behind dinner. You’ll find information about it, and some reviews, at http://tinyurl.com/qdmds
where you can also purchase it (for $16.35).

You can hear an Air America interview with Peter Singer about the book, as part of Mother Jones magazine radio, on line at http://www.motherjones.com/radio/2006/05/singer_bio.html. It includes some fascinating information.
Peter Singer’s portion of the show starts at 18:15.

And Mother Jones has a web interview with Peter Singer at http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2006/04/peter_singer.html

The online magazine “Salon” also has an interview with Singer. It is on line at http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/08/singer/index_np.html
At the bottom of the page is a place where you can post a letter about the article, and you can read the other letters that have been posted.

Melbourne’s daily newspaper, The Age, published an except from the book last week (May 18) — a particularly fun section about freeganism, or dumpster diving for food. It is headed, “Food for Nought.” You can read it on line at http://tinyurl.com/ethhp

And this weekend, Australia’s national paper, The Weekend Australian, published a favorable review of the book. The review is informative and insightful, and I will paste it below. Aussies might wish to respond with a letter, about what we eat, to the Australian at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/files/aus_letters.htm

Weekend Australian
May 20, 2006 Saturday
REVIEW; Books; Pg. 14

Chew on this

Stephen Romei

Peter Singer’s new book is a cerebral Super Size Me, writes Stephen Romei

The Ethics of What We Eat

By Peter Singer and Jim Mason

Text Publishing, 303pp, $32.95

LET’S start with some good news: the consumption of veal — calves separated from their mothers a few days after birth and slaughtered about three months later — has fallen to about a quarter of what it was 30 years ago.

While this remains extremely bad news for the calves concerned, it’s good news in a broader sense because it shows attitudes to what we eat can change dramatically. Many carnivores refuse to eat veal, drawing the line at the suffering involved in rendering a baby cow into a wiener schnitzel.

Another example: in several European countries, free-range eggs outsell eggs from caged hens, and two British supermarket chains, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose, stock only the free-range variety. It may take another 50 years but the end of the battery hen industry, which accounts for 85 per cent of eggs produced in Australia, is a real possibility.

And it’s not just about animals. Sales of fair-trade coffee and chocolate are booming as increasing numbers of consumers decide it’s worth paying more to ensure their simple pleasures are not produced by slave labour.

Consumer education is at the heart of such shifts — it’s said that if abattoirs were made of glass, not even Sam Neill could save the meat industry — and Australian philosopher Peter Singer has been at the forefront of that effort since his 1975 book Animal Liberation.

The Ethics of What We Eat is a less harrowing read than that landmark tract. Singer and his co-author Jim Mason, a lawyer, animal rights advocate and vegan who grew up on a farm in the US, do not judge or preach; they accept that for many people, for many reasons, ethical considerations do not loom large when deciding how to feed their families.

Although there are some descriptions of the extreme animal cruelty that is the hourly reality of factory farming, Singer and Mason by and large holster the stun gun. That ground has been well covered, including by the authors in their 1980 book Animal Factories, and more recently by George W. Bush’s former speechwriter Matthew Scully in the superb Dominion (St Martin’s Press, 2002). Perhaps Singer and Mason believe public opinion slowly is turning against factory farming and that gentle persuasion — in the form of information — is what is most needed.

Even so, I must contest their use of the word ”humane” when discussing ways of raising and slaughtering animals. It’s not more humane to decapitate a chicken rather than scald it to death (as happens all too often in factory farming); it’s just less cruel.

That complaint aside, this is an accessible and well-researched book, with extensive footnotes for readers who want to check the authors’ sources for themselves or learn more about the topics discussed.

”Food choices are only one aspect of what people do and not a sufficient basis for judging their moral character,” Singer and Mason write. ”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 information they need to make good choices.”

They also emphasise that there is not one right way and that compromises are understandable, that ”you can be ethical without being fanatical”. This approach is sensible — animal rights extremists turn people off — and an acknowledgment of the complexity of the terrain.

Take free-range eggs, which have such a feel-good factor, yet male chicks suffer the same fate on free-range farms as on battery operations: they are killed immediately.

Singer, who moved to the US in 1999 to become professor of bioethics at Princeton University, and Mason cleverly humanise their story by looking at food ethics through the shopping and eating habits of three American families.

The options available to them and the choices they make will be familiar to Australian readers. For good measure, most chapters also contain specific discussion of the comparable situation in Australia.

Here the news is mixed: Australian standards on animal welfare and environmental protection are better in many respects but there is vast room for improvement. And we have some peculiarly home-grown problems, such as the joeys left to die of thirst and hunger when their mothers are shot to become trendy steaks and cat food. Singer and Mason estimate three million joeys have suffered this fate in the past decade.

This is a more obvious example of the hidden costs of food production that can complicate our choices. Many people consider eating roo an ethical decision — the animals are plentiful, live in their natural habitat and are killed quickly — but will learning about the little Skippies change their minds?

Similarly, say you like chicken and are indifferent to the welfare of the birds. Might you nevertheless reconsider buying factory-farmed drumsticks if you knew the waste discharged by the plant means people living nearby ”can’t enjoy being in their yard because of the flies and have to keep their windows shut because of the stench … [that] kids can’t swim in the local streams [and] their drinking water is polluted”?

Even more taxing, say you have $1 to spend on coffee beans and the choice is between a local producer who will receive the whole dollar and a Kenyan grower who will receive 2c in the dollar. Singer and Mason have a surprising suggestion.

There is no doubt that consumer attitudes towards food are shifting, not least for health reasons. In the US, the Whole Foods Market chain, which specialises in organic produce, is a Fortune 500 company, with 180 stores and an annual turnover of $US5billion.

Founder John Mackey, who started with one store in Texas in 1978, predicts factory farming will be illegal in the US within 20 years.

In Australia, Pierce Cody, who made his fortune in outdoor advertising, has big expansion plans for his Macro Wholefoods supermarket business.

The publicity guff compares this book with Morgan Spurlock’s anti-McDonald’s documentary Super Size Me. But Singer and Mason operate on a higher plane, and don’t resort to vomiting on their pages to make a point.

Irrespective of where you stand on ethical eating — and, as Singer and Mason point out, most people don’t stand anywhere because they have not thought about it — this book will provide, yes, here it comes, serious food for thought.

Peter Singer will be a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, which starts on Monday.
(END OF WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN REVIEW)

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(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi If you forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts, please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)

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In today’s edition of Grist, a reader queries advice columnist Umbra about the price of organic food:

How come it’s so expensive to go organic? I could swing it by myself by eating a bare minimum of food, but I’m charged with feeding consume-mass-quantity types who favor the traditional American diet, and they eat meat. I would be in debt buying just half the monthly food consumption. One would have to be rich to go organic.

The short answer?:

The usual answer to your question from organic proponents is: organic isn’t expensive, conventional is unrealistically cheap. Not that helpful, but it’s true. […]

Organic food is more expensive because it costs more to produce, has less support from the government, supply is less than demand, and in general we pay the true cost of food when we buy organic. When we buy conventional, we pay the fake cost of food.

Surf on over to Grist for a more detailed explanation!

This week, Grist Magazine features an excerpt from Samuel Fromartz’s Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew.

Here’s a brief summary, as seen on their Daily Grist wrapup:

Chews Wisely: Is it better to buy organic or local?

Does locally grown food trump pesticide-free produce, or vice versa? Farmers’ markets and produce aisles are chock-full of earnest foodies agonizing over the green conundrum du jour. In a piece adapted from his book Organic, Inc., Samuel Fromartz addresses the local/organic dilemma — and his advice may surprise you.

Fromartz’s answer?

When I shop, visiting the Dupont Circle farmers’ market in Washington on Sunday morning and then going to the supermarket, I make choices too. I buy local, organic, and conventional foods too, because each meets a need. Is the local product better than the organic one? No. Both are good choices because they move the food market in a small way. In choosing them, I can insert my values into an equation that for too long has been determined only by volume, convenience, and price. While I have nothing against low prices and convenient shopping, the blind pursuit of these two values can wreak a lot of damage — damage that we ultimately pay for in water pollution, toxic pesticide exposure, unhealthy livestock, the quality of food, and the loss of small farms. The total bill may not show up at the cash register, but it’s one we pay nonetheless.

You can read the whole piece here.

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”).

Looking for ways to help America get the oil monkey off her back? Here’s one - join the Eat Local Challenge.

Blogger Chris Clarke ’splains:

Most of the food that most of us eat travels farther than you might think from farm to table. I’m not just talking about ripe fruit from Chile in the winter here. I myself have unwittingly bought tomatoes that were picked in California, shipped to Massachusetts for packaging, and then brought back to California for sale. Figuring a diesel semi gets around 5 miles per gallon, that’s about 1200 gallons of fuel for one truckload’s round trip. The US burns millions of gallons of fuel each year just moving food cross-country, and the notion of eating seasonal produce seems to be dying out with the local family farm. And produce picked early eanough that it can travel cross country before it ripens just tastes bad. Compare the best supermarket tomato you can find with an ordinary one from a backyard garden. The difference is astonishing. […]

So what’s got me stoked? More and more people are trying to eat food grown as close to locally as possible. Some of them have issued the Eat Local Challenge, which runs through May.

The lesson: try your hand at veggie gardening, and buy your produce from local growers whenever possible. Good for you, your wallet, and the environment.

Just in time for Earth Day, an interesting article from ABC News - Meat-Eaters Aiding Global Warming?: New Research Suggests What You Eat as Important as What You Drive. Copied below is a summary from a recent DawnWatch alert.

Go, read, and then veg out. Hey, it’s easier than giving up your Hummer, right?

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch
Date: Apr 19, 2006 5:19 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: ABC News site article, “Meat-Eaters Aiding Global Warming?” 4/19/06

The ABC News website has an interesting piece, posted April 19, headed, “Meat-Eaters Aiding Global Warming?” and sub-headed, “New Research Suggests What You Eat as Important as What You Drive. Your personal impact on global warming may be influenced as much by what you eat as by what you drive.

It continues:

“That surprising conclusion comes from a couple of scientists who have taken an unusual look at the production of greenhouse gases from an angle that not many folks have even thought about. Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, assistant professors of geophysics at the University of Chicago, have found that our consumption of red meat may be as bad for the planet as it is for our bodies.

“If you want to help lower greenhouse gas emissions, they conclude in a report to be published in the journal Earth Interactions, become a vegetarian.

“In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that both researchers are vegetarians, although they admit to cheating a little with an occasional sardine. They say their conclusions are backed up by hard data.

“Eshel and Martin collected that data from a wide range of sources, and they examined the amount of fossil-fuel energy — and thus the level of production of greenhouse gases — required for five different diets. The vegetarian diet turned out to be the most energy efficient, followed by poultry, and what they call the ‘mean American diet,’ which consists of a little bit of everything.

“There was a surprising tie for last place. In terms of energy required for harvesting and processing, fish and red meat ended up in a ‘virtual tie,’ but that’s just in terms of energy consumed. When you toss in all those other factors, such as bovine flatulence and gas released by manure, red meat comes in dead last. Fish remains in fourth place, some distance behind poultry and the mean American diet, chiefly because the type of fish preferred by Americans requires a lot of energy to catch.”

On the impact of changing your diet, Eshel says, “It is comparable to the difference between driving an SUV and driving a reasonable sedan.”

You can read the full article on line at:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1856817&page=1

On that page, at the end of the article, you’ll find, “What Do You Think? Chat About the Issue.” That gives vegetarians a great opportunity to chat about the many reasons for choosing a plant based diet besides the environmental issues. For example the consumption chicken, which rates higher than beef for environmental protection, involves some of the most gratuitous cruelty as birds are exempt from humane slaughter laws.

You can learn more about the impact of meat-based diets on animals, and see photos of their living conditions at www.FactoryFarming.com

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi If you forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts, please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)