AnimalRighter
Promoting compassion and respect for animals
Book Reviews
By Peter Singer and Jim Mason
Rodale Books, New York, 2006, 288 pages
Book review by Mat Thomas for VegNews magazine, July 2006
As the global marketplace expands, consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of their purchases on the world, from animals and the environment to workers and indigenous cultures. The steadily rising demand for organic, fair trade and “humanely-raised” food is a r
eflection of this values-based consumerism that infuses grocery shopping with an important ethical component. In this context, Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s new book, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, serves as a primer on making dietary choices that benefit the world at large. As co-authors of the groundbreaking Animal Factories (1980), Singer and Mason have again teamed up to provide a cogent study of food ethics from the perspective of real people. That is, they profile in detail the dietary choices of three American families occupying different places on the food spectrum. At one end of the scale is a family whose diet relies heavily on meat, dairy and eggs. The second family represents the concerns of “conscientious omnivores” – those who strive to choose foods that are healthy and environmentally sustainable, including animal products from companies that claim to treat animals humanely. The third family, being completely vegan, occupies the other end of the continuum. Using this novel structure, the authors trace each family’s food purchases back to their origins and compare the impact of each diet on animal welfare, the environment, worker’s rights, famine and other social factors. The families’ stories are interwoven with a wealth of studiously researched historical and statistical information, as well as philosophical reasoning, that mutually complement and strengthen one another.
General readers unfamiliar with factory farming will get a dose of reality from the authors’ straightforward explanations of what battery cages, farrowing crates, feedlots and other staples of intensive animal agriculture do to the living creatures raised for meat, milk and eggs. Yet the book is also wide-ranging and substantial enough to satisfy the intellectual cravings of even the most educated ethicist. Singer and Mason analyze everything from the amount of petroleum used to transport food to the underlying economics of buying local vs. supporting farmers in developing countries. They convey facts, figures and essential concepts in an objective, nonjudgmental tone that fosters open dialogue about the ethics of eating without compromising their central aim of encouraging more humane consumerism.
The Way We Eat is at heart a practical guide to reducing one’s dietary footprint on the world. Singer and Mason generally conclude that eating lower on the food chain (i.e., consuming plants instead of animals) helps conserve resources and reduce animal suffering, yet acknowledge that one need not be completely vegan to eat ethically. This stance will attract caring people who are not quite ready to stop eating animal products altogether. The authors emphasize, however, that conscientious omnivores need to invest an enormous amount of effort in ensuring that their animal-derived purchases come from sustainable farms or fisheries, and that some amount of animal suffering is unavoidable no matter how humanely livestock are raised. Ironically, the time and energy that is typically needed to find producers who meet acceptable ethical standards and the fundamental uncertainty of such an endeavor make going vegan sound like a cakewalk. Whatever foods people choose, the underlying connections between what we eat and the state of the world are of primary importance.
Peter Singer is one of the best-known contemporary philosophers and a central figure in animal rights. His classic book Animal Liberation, first published in 1975, is widely hailed as the catalyst for the modern animal rights movement. He is also the author of many other books on a range of subjects related to ethics and responsibility. Singer was an early inductee into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame, and currently teaches Bioethics at Princeton University.
Jim Mason is an author, lecturer, journalist, environmentalist and attorney who spent his formative years working on his family’s farm in Missouri. Mason is the author of An Unnatural Order: Why We Are Destroying the Planet and Each Other and founding editor of The Animals’ Agenda, a pioneering animal rights news magazine. He has also written numerous articles for prominent newspapers and magazines, and was inducted into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2001.
