Eating ethically
Stealing, lying, hurting - these are obviously relevant to our moral character. But how about what we eat?
by Professor Peter Singer
Stealing, lying, hurting people – these acts are obviously relevant to our moral character. So too, most people would say, is our involvement in community activities, our generosity to others in need, and – especially – our sex life. But how about what we eat? Though eating is even more essential than sex, and everyone does it, usually more than once a day, most people don’t see it as raising ethical issues. Try to think of a politician whose prospects have been damaged by revelations about what he or she eats.
It wasn’t always so. Michel Foucault, the French historian of ideas, has pointed out that in ancient Greece and Rome the ethics of what we eat was considered an important topic, at least as significant as sexual ethics. In traditional Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist ethics, too, discussions of what should and should not be eaten occupy a prominent place. In the Hebrew scriptures, for example, some animals, though edible, are ‘abominable,’ and Jewish law prohibits their consumption.
In the Christian era, however, interest in the ethics of what we eat faded away. Jesus deliberately rejected the Jewish dietary laws, saying, according to Matthew’s account, “What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him 'unclean,' but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him 'unclean.'" As Hub Zwart, who has researched the history of food ethics, comments, “What is so striking in the food ethic proclaimed by Jesus, is the basic atmosphere of carelessness it conveys. All of a sudden, food intake seems to have become completely insignificant, from a moral point of view.” Even the later Roman Catholic tradition of avoiding meat on Fridays, or during Lent, was not intended to suggest that there as anything wrong, in general, with eating meat. True, gluttony is one of the seven cardinal sins. That means that there are ethical concerns about the quantity one eats, but not about what is eaten.
Perhaps the deliberate decision of Jesus and his followers to rebel against the ethics of the Pharisees by repudiating the Jewish dietary laws has led, as such decisions often do, to an opposite extreme, one that goes too far in its disregard of the moral significance of what we eat. Nobody seriously disputes that eating human flesh – at least if you have killed human beings in order to eat them – is wrong. So at least one kind of food is ethically prohibited. In the West, we also disapprove of eating dogs and cats, but that restriction is a minor one and so widely accepted that it scarcely strikes us as an ethical constraint.
With the exception of a few ethical vegetarians, and those who observe religious prohibitions on what they put in their mouths, eating has, until recently, been largely an ‘ethics-free zone.’
Over the last 30 years, however, there have been signs of significant change. Many people show some concern for the treatment of animals in their food choices – avoiding veal because they don’t like what they have heard about the treatment of veal calves, or avoiding all factory farm animal products, or being vegetarian or vegan. Others seek out organically produced food, because they don’t want all those pesticides and synthetic fertilizers getting into their bodies or – and here is the broader ethical concern – our land and water. Sales of organic food in America are now growing at about 20 per cent per annum, as compared to only a three per cent rise in food sales in general. That makes organic food the fastest growing sector of the food market. Then there are trade issues: fair-trade coffee, bought from small growers at a price that assures them a living wage, is increasing its market share. There is a ‘buy local’ movement that points to the fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions required to bring food thousands of miles to your plate. Surveys in several countries have found that more than half of the population claims to have declined to buy something because of conditions under which it was made.
Many citizens of democratic countries are disenchanted with voting because money seems to matter more than votes, and politicians repeatedly fail to live up to promises. By bringing ethics into their shopping, they have a political impact that is otherwise denied to them. A consumer who switches from buying conventionally produced fruit to buying organic fruit is giving organic producers an incentive to maintain or increase their production – and at the same time she is diminishing the resources available to the conventional producer. The message does get through to the producers. In a survey of the biggest US farmers, agribusiness executives, academicians, and environmental leaders taken in the summer of 2003, animal welfare was identified as the seventh ‘megatrend’ out of 12 facing American agriculture – entirely because of consumer concern.
When we eat – or more specifically, when we pay for what we eat, whether at a farmer’s market, a supermarket, or a restaurant – we are taking part in a vast global industry. Americans spend more than a trillion dollars on food every year. That’s more than double what they spendon motor vehicles, and also more than double what the government spends on defense. Food production affects every person on this planet, and untold billions of animals as well. It is important, for the sake of the environment, animals, and future generations, that we see our food choices as raising serious ethical issues and learn the implications of what we eat.
Notes
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Vol. II, The Use of Pleasure, Vintage, New York, 1990, I owe this reference to Hub Zwart, “A Short History of Food Ethics,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 12: 113-126, 2000.
- Matthew, 15:11-17, New International Version.
- Hub Zwart, “A Short History of Food Ethics,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 12: (2000) p.117.
- Jerry Perkins, “Kinder, Gentler Food,” The Des Moines Register, March 7, 2004
This article was provided by Professor Peter Singer and has appeared in Free Inquiry, a small American magazine published by the Council for Secular Humanism.
The University of Melbourne community is fortunate to have many international leaders who are highly esteemed in their disciplines. Distinguished philosopher Professor Peter Singer is one of these leaders.
Appointed as a Laureate Professor in the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics in January 2005, Professor Singer is well known for his work on animal liberation, bioethics and social justice. His main area of research is the ethics of food, a topic which covers not only the ethics of eating animals, but also the environmental and global implications of the way we produce, distribute and market food.
Born in Melbourne, Professor Singer spent his undergraduate years at the University of Melbourne completing a BA(Hons) in 1967, and MA in 1969 followed by a BPhil at the University of Oxford in 1971.
For the last five years Professor Singer has been based in the US where he is Ira W DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the Centre for Human Values at Princeton University. His appointment as a Laureate Professor means he will spend at least three months each year at Melbourne for the next five years, while continuing to hold his Princeton appointment.
Professor Singer gave a lunchtime lecture earlier this year that was so well attended many people were turned away. He has kindly provided us with an article covering a similar topic to reproduce here. An audio recording and slides from his University presentation in April, is available at www.unimelb.edu.au/dvc-academic/events.html
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