Ethical Eating

Peter Singer urges consumers everywhere to take a closer look at where food comes from.

By: Ilene Dube
   In front of the building that houses the University Center for Human Values, a student kneels on the concrete pathway. Holding two twigs like a set of chopsticks, she picks up an insect and tosses it into the grass where it will be safe from human traffic.
   Behind her, inside the stucco building on Ivy Lane, is the office of Princeton University Professor of Bioethics Peter Singer. Beneath his crisp attire, he wears chemical-free, ecologically grown hemp shoes for which no animals were killed. The vegan — a father of three vegetarians and grandfather of one vegetarian — is at work planning a symposium, Food, Ethics and the Environment, to take place on campus Nov. 16 and 17. He will be joined by food ethic gurus Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle to address how industrial food production affects the air we breathe and the water we drink, as well as how it contributes to global warming.
   Dr. Singer, who received his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, achieved recognition in 1975 after the publication of his book Animal Liberation, at the forefront of the animal rights movement. His newest book, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (Rodale, $25.95), co-written with attorney Jim Mason, takes a broader approach, focusing on the harmful effects of factory farming on human welfare and the environment. Dr. Singer will appear at the Princeton University Store Sept. 27 to discuss the issues raised in the book.
   Meat eaters, be warned: Some of the well-substantiated facts contained here could turn you away from your carnivorous impulses. At the very least, factory farmed chicken will never taste so tender. And more than 99 percent of the chicken sold in this country is factory farmed.
   In order to have a chicken in every pot, giant agribusinesses such as Tyson Foods, which produces more than 2 billion chickens a year, limit each bird to an area the size of an 8½-by-11-inch sheet of paper. When the droppings fall they can remain for a year or more, and the ammonia is so toxic, many of the birds go blind.
   People who live in parts of the country where chicken farms proliferate are not only subject to the stench that won’t go away when they close doors, but develop blisters and intestinal parasites.
   The birds are bred to be three times fatter than chickens of the 1950s, and because of the increased weight cannot stand on their legs. They wind up lying in excrement, developing breast blisters.
   Deep-fried chicken wings, anyone?
   Because of the forced obesity, chickens cannot live to breeding age. Therefore, in order to get them to reproduce, growers must starve the chickens. Once they do breed, male chicks are deemed useless — they do not make tasty broilers, and cannot be used to breed — so are discarded in dumpsters.
   Furthermore, the work involved in raising and breeding chickens is among the dirtiest, low-paid employment, performed under constant pressure to speed up productivity, according to The Way We Eat. In chicken farming, just as with any business, it’s about optimizing profitability at any cost. The birds are not even allowed to mate the natural way — that would be too slow and inefficient. Instead, hens are impregnated in assembly-line fashion.
   In order to get inside the story, Dr. Singer’s co- author, Mr. Mason, hired on as a turkey inseminator for the Butterball Turkey company. Having only to pass a drug test, he went to work collecting semen from "tom houses" and then released it into the hen’s oviduct through a straw — the process is more complicated and gross than can be described in a family newspaper. Five hens a minute are inseminated this way by each worker.
   "It was the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work (I) have ever done," writes Mr. Mason. "…dodging their spurting (feces) while breathing air filled with dust and feathers stirred up by panicked birds." He lasted one day on the job.
   Speaking of poop, on the Delmarva Peninsula alone, more than 600 million chickens a year produce more waste than a city of 4 million people. Human waste at least is treated, but chicken excrement is spread onto fields than can only absorb the waste of one-tenth the number of chickens. It washes off into rivers and streams from where our drinking water comes. Levels of nitrate are so high, there are zones where fish cannot survive.
   A little more barbecue sauce on that chicken thigh?
   So if chicken excrement is one of the worst environmental pollutants, how can the planet cope as the population and demand for cheap food increases? By cutting consumption of animal products, says Dr. Singer. And if you’re worried about the increased cost of a diet of organically grown vegetables, "Dried grains and beans offer more value per penny," he says.
   Those raised in the nuke-it generation will have to learn to cook, and Dr. Singer says there is plenty of information out there, such as the Web site www.goveg.com. He sees a trend in colleges offering more sustainable food.
   It takes much less land to raise vegetables and grains than to raise chickens as well as the grain to feed them. Even if all chickens were raised by organic, free-range standards, it wouldn’t be possible for the planet to accommodate 9 billion chickens. The solution? Eat less meat.
   "The benefits are for health as well as the animals," says Dr. Singer.
   The reason chicken can be produced so cheaply, say Dr. Singer and Mr. Mason, is because of costs passed on. Cheap chicken is paid for by those who can’t go outside and breathe fresh air, and it is paid for by those who are forced to drink bottled water.
   "Tyson should fully compensate everyone adversely affected by its pollution," write the authors. "Then its chicken would no longer be so cheap."
   The situation is not much improved with pork or beef production — issues of animal waste, on the scale needed to meet the demands of the world’s meat eaters, continue to impact the health of the planet. The diet of cows can include fecal matter, dead birds and chicken feathers, among other agricultural waste. You are what you eat — and what you eat eats.
   Born to Viennese Jews who escaped the Holocaust by moving to Australia — three of his grandparents were killed in concentration camps — Dr. Singer doesn’t like to use the words "mission" or "crusade" to refer to his work because of the religious connotations. He believes it is morally wrong to live with abundance while others are starving, and donates 20 percent of his salary to charitable organizations. Suchitra Patel, owner of Masala Grill in Princeton, has observed him arrive at her restaurant by bicycle and order only what he knows he can consume from her vegetarian menu so as not to waste food.
   Called one of the most influential people in America by TIME magazine in 2005, Dr. Singer found himself fishing for food in dumpsters in order to write the chapter "Dumpster Diving: The Ultimate Ethical Cheap Eats." The dumpster divers he accompanies are courteous, being sure to leave plenty for those who come later. From the nearly new food they scavenge the group cooks up a pasta primavera and washes it down with organic apple juice from New Zealand. "We’ve had better meals in restaurants, but we’ve had worse too," Dr. Singer writes.
   The philosophy of the dumpster divers is to live off the excess of capitalism, recycling waste and having a low-impact form of food consumption. Dr. Singer cites a study that found more than 40 percent of the food grown in the United States is lost or thrown away.
   "Freegans (dumpster divers who began as vegans) see happiness as something that comes from doing things, rather than having things," Dr. Singer writes. "If they work at all, it will be because they see the work they are doing as worthwhile in itself."
   When he’s not accompanying Freegans going through dumpsters for his research, Dr. Singer shops at the Whole Earth Center and Wild Oats in Princeton. While buying local is mostly a good idea, there are times he warns against it, such as when warm-weather crops have to be grown with heat that consumes more fuel than if the crops were shipped from a milder climate, or when it involves driving to outlying farms and markets instead of one-stop shopping at a local market.
   Heading off to a dinner of noodle soup with tofu and broccoli in a vegan broth, Dr. Singer makes the point that you don’t have to be fanatical about food in order to make a difference. "Ethical thinking can be sensitive to circumstances," he and his co-author write. "Personal purity isn’t really the issue… A little self-indulgence, if you can keep it under firm control, doesn’t make you a moral monster, and it certainly doesn’t mean that you might as well abandon your principles entirely." In fact, occasional lapses may help to remain true to the cause for the long haul.
The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter author and ethicist Peter Singer
will appear at the Princeton University Store, 36 University Place, Princeton,
Sept. 27, 7 p.m. For information, call (609) 921-8500. Peter Singer on the Web:
www.princeton.edu/~psinger/. For information on the symposium Food, Ethics
and the Environment, on the Web: www.princeton.edu/~eating