http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...524874515.html

Katherine Wilson
May 27, 2006

AuthorPeter Singer and Jim MasonGenreSociety/PoliticsPublisherText PublishingRRP$32.95'You don't have to be fanatical," write Peter Singer and Jim Mason. "A little self-indulgence doesn't make you a moral monster." Joining the dots from producer to plate, their book, The Ethics of What we Eat, is a moral compass for those who care about the impact of their food choices.
Without proselytising, Singer and Mason navigate questions of cruelty, the environment, economics, culture and social justice. Tracing groceries of three families to their sources, they arrive at unexpected positions. Is it better to buy farmed fish to protect ocean stocks? Not if they're fed with fishmeal. Is locally grown the best choice? Not for reducing world poverty. Can ethical choices be convenient, carnivorous and cheap? Yes.
Mason and Singer are utilitarian realists. Mason is a lawyer, teacher and journalist. Singer, an expatriate Australian, is probably the world's most renowned ethicist, considered the godfather of the animal welfare and vegan movements.
Like US essayist Michael Pollan, whose elegant The Omnivore's Dilemma is published at the same time as their book, Singer and Mason believe we tolerate the sins of industrialised food production because its "secretive" practices are "invisible to the public". As Pollan puts it: "Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it."
Most American factory farms that Singer and Mason approached denied their requests to visit. Still, the authors were able to document - Fast Food Nation-style - agribusiness's dirty secrets (if you find these implausible, view them at goveg.com/factoryFarming.asp).
To Singer and Mason, meat is not so much murder as torture. Inside piggeries are animals with lives spent in small concrete and steel pens. They cannot turn around, roll, root or exercise. The stench from their excrement is so sharp that people wear masks, while the pigs suffer damaged lungs and eyes.
Piglets are taken from their mothers and mutilated without anaesthetic. Fattened too quickly, they suffer lameness, heart attacks and insanity. Their excrement leaks into waterways, promoting blue-green algae and poisoning fish. In transit to the slaughterhouse they suffocate, or face agonising death before being transported around the world using inestimable quantities of fossil fuel. Farm labour conditions are abysmal. Taxpayers' dollars are spent cleaning up environmental damage, building infrastructure, and subsidising fodder production (itself unsustainable).
This is one example of the cost of food not itemised on our supermarket dockets. Cheap, industrial agriculture is false economy. "Economists - even those who are loudest in extolling the virtues of the free market - agree that the existence of such externalities is a sign of market failure."
Unless you pay the real price of production with local certified organic (in which case the pig has roamed, was not fed antibiotics or hormones and had limited transport), eating pork products is ethically indefensible.
Singer and Mason then visit an organic pig farm, revealing that pigs are sentient and delightful, at least as intelligent as domestic pets.
What about chickens? We can guess how smart chickens are, but the question, say the authors, is whether they can suffer. Clearly they can. Detailing the cruelty in factory chicken farms, the authors conclude that organic or free-range poultry products are the only ethical choice.
By many measures, Australia's beef report card is good. Our organic and conventional farming regulations far exceed those of the US. But the greenhouse costs of grazed and grainfed beef are equally applicable here (as New Scientist recently pointed out, by giving up beef and dairy we would do more to reduce global warming than if we sold the family car).
Many pages detail sickening beef feedlot (mass pens) conditions not present in Australia. The book acknowledges this, but reference to the Australian situation is piecemeal and uneven, with figures not always converted to metric and not applicable to our industry.
The authors acknowledge that Australia's feedlot industry is relatively small, mainly for "finishing" export beef. Their reckoning is 70-day confinement for 25 per cent of the beef industry. In fact, most of the 29 per cent of feedlot cattle here are "medium-fed" for 120 days, or "long-fed" for 200 days, according to the Australian Lot Feeders Association.
For the most part, The Ethics of What we Eat is an excellent, detailed and engaging guide. But real moral accounting can only be done when the facts are laid out accurately. In applying its ethical calculus to Australian fish farming, it errs.
Unlike the cruel, chemically polluted aquaculture depicted, Australian fish farming must comply with strict codes. We don't tolerate any pesticide level in farmed fish, and farmers must apply to government bodies before administering chemicals under veterinary supervision. Fish must be transported or killed with a "stun" agent derived from clove oil. Further, our fish farmers are starting to use alternatives to ocean fishmeal.
In Australia, write the authors, "there is some genetically modified canola (grown). GM corn, soy and potato products may be imported into Australia". In fact, no GM potato is commercially grown anywhere, and moratoriums in all Australian canola-growing states prohibit commercial GM canola crops.
"In Australia," they write, "30 per cent of all cotton grown is genetically modified," but last year, 80-90 per cent of cotton grown was GM, according to industry figures. Antibiotic resistance marker genes in crops "are usually removed before release", they write.
Many of the 23 GM foods approved in Australia, in fact, do contain antibiotic resistance markers, posing risks not ruled out by current experimental data. Errors in the section on GM are too numerous to address here.
Singer is a professor of bioethics, so his posit of Monsanto's famously discredited "Golden Rice" spin is astounding. Golden Rice was claimed to have vitamin A levels that could save millions of Asian and African children from blindness. Yet other plants and rice varieties in these regions (red rice, for instance) contain higher levels of vitamin A than Golden Rice. One vitamin A pill every six months to each child, at a tiny fraction of the cost of the corporate-patented Golden Rice, could also prevent blindness.
Some ethical consequences are hard to locate in this book. International agribusiness has governments in its palm, and the authors' reasoning assumes potential dangers of GM food crops will be automatically detected in this situation. Evidence suggests otherwise; "leaks" of industry non-disclosure of unwanted results are well-documented.
The recent CSIRO GM pea was abandoned because the peas caused digestion problems; in Britain, a senior experimental biologist fed his rats GM potatoes and found they suffered damaged organs and immune systems. We know about these cases because they weren't subject to commercial-in-confidence and standard industry methods.
Sometimes, as in the Showa Denko EMS case (when thousands of Americans suffered from a GM ingredient in a health product), dangerous GM products can enter the market with devastating consequences.
Still, the authors' acceptance of some industry spin signifies just how far conscious consumer movements have evolved from their anti-industrial roots. Unlike the dumpster-diving "freegans" they describe, Singer and Mason don't advocate opting out of the industrial food chain.
Their solutions are market-driven: buy in-season, sustainable and humane products from trustworthy retailers. This can be supported from almost any ideological position. As they point out, the slow food, fair trade, and conscious consumer movements, along with the rise in farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture, are as much about preserving local cultures and environments as they are about addressing health, gourmet sensibilities and global inequality. All have grown from grassroots movements into confident industries.
Katherine Wilson is former editor of Overland and an editor of UrbanAgriculture Online.
In Australia, write the authors, "there is some genetically modified canola (grown). GM corn, soy and potato products may be imported into Australia". In fact, no GM potato is commercially grown anywhere, and moratoriums in all Australian canola-growing states prohibit commercial GM canola crops.
"In Australia," they write, "30 per cent of all cotton grown is genetically modified," but last year, 80-90 per cent of cotton grown was GM, according to industry figures. Antibiotic resistance marker genes in crops "are usually removed before release", they write.
Many of the 23 GM foods approved in Australia, in fact, do contain antibiotic resistance markers, posing risks not ruled out by current experimental data. Errors in the section on GM are too numerous to address here.
Singer is a professor of bioethics, so his posit of Monsanto's famously discredited "Golden Rice" spin is astounding. Golden Rice was claimed to have vitamin A levels that could save millions of Asian and African children from blindness. Yet other plants and rice varieties in these regions (red rice, for instance) contain higher levels of vitamin A than Golden Rice. One vitamin A pill every six months to each child, at a tiny fraction of the cost of the corporate-patented Golden Rice, could also prevent blindness.
Some ethical consequences are hard to locate in this book. International agribusiness has governments in its palm, and the authors' reasoning assumes potential dangers of GM food crops will be automatically detected in this situation. Evidence suggests otherwise; "leaks" of industry non-disclosure of unwanted results are well-documented.
The recent CSIRO GM pea was abandoned because the peas caused digestion problems; in Britain, a senior experimental biologist fed his rats GM potatoes and found they suffered damaged organs and immune systems. We know about these cases because they weren't subject to commercial-in-confidence and standard industry methods.
Sometimes, as in the Showa Denko EMS case (when thousands of Americans suffered from a GM ingredient in a health product), dangerous GM products can enter the market with devastating consequences.
Still, the authors' acceptance of some industry spin signifies just how far conscious consumer movements have evolved from their anti-industrial roots. Unlike the dumpster-diving "freegans" they describe, Singer and Mason don't advocate opting out of the industrial food chain.
Their solutions are market-driven: buy in-season, sustainable and humane products from trustworthy retailers. This can be supported from almost any ideological position. As they point out, the slow food, fair trade, and conscious consumer movements, along with the rise in farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture, are as much about preserving local cultures and environments as they are about addressing health, gourmet sensibilities and global inequality. All have grown from grassroots movements into confident industries.
Katherine Wilson is former editor of Overland and an editor of UrbanAgriculture Online.