In their book “ The Ethics of What We Eat“, authors Peter Singer and Jim Mason cover a lot of ground in their discussion of balancing our needs and wants for food with the impacts on others. To help guide suggestions on what we should be eating, at the end of the book they outline five ethical principles that they think most people will share.
- Transparency: we have a right to know how our food is produced.
- Fairness: producing food should not impose unfair costs on others.
- Humanity: inflicting significant suffering on animals for minor reasons is wrong.
- Social responsibility: workers should have decent wages and working conditions.
- Needs: preserving life and health justifies more than other desires.
Based on this, they then look at the main classes of food and determine how well they adhere to these principles. Sadly, little of our supermarket food lives up to these principles. They point out that:
In supermarkets and ordinary grocery stores, you should assume that all food — unless specifically labelled otherwise — comes from the mainstream food industry and has not been produced in a manner that is humane, sustainable, or environmentally friendly. Animal products, in particular, will virtually all be from factory farms unless the package clearly states the contrary.
Remember that it’s not in food producers’ interests for us to know how our food is produced.
With all the potential impacts that food has — on slave labour, animal exploitation, land degradation, wetland pollution, rural depopulation, unfair trade practices, global warming, and the destruction of rainforests — you could easily become paralysed, as in a minefield, afraid to make any decisions. Fortunately, Singer and Mason remind us that ” ethical thinking can be sensitive to circumstances“. You need to weigh up your own interests in food choices, but don’t outweigh the major interests of others affected by your choices.
It’s all about making better choices, and that comes from some knowledge of potential impacts, and of options. Making choices that promote one or more of the five principles above is a positive step.
