The ethics of what we eat peter singer pdf

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION: FOOD AND ETHICS

PART I: EATING THE STANDARD AMERICAN DIET

1. Jake and Lee

2. The Hidden Cost of Cheap Chicken

3. Behind the Label: “Animal Care Certified” Eggs

4. Meat and Milk Factories

5. Can Bigger Get Better?

PART II: THE CONSCIENTIOUS OMNIVORES

6. Jim and Mary Ann

7. Behind the Label: Niman Ranch Bacon

8. Behind the Label: “Organic” and “Certified Humane” Eggs

9. Seafood

10. Eating Locally

11. Trade, Fair Trade, and Workers’ Rights

12. Eating Out and Eating In, Ethically

PART III: THE VEGANS

13. JoAnn and Joe

14. Going Organic

15. Is It Unethical to Raise Children Vegan?

16. Are Vegans Better for the Environment?

17. The Ethics of Eating Meat

18. What Should We Eat?

WHERE TO FIND ETHICAL FOOD

WHERE TO FIND INFORMATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ENDNOTES

INDEX

A

PREFACE

nimal Factories, the first book that Jim and I wrote together, was released in 1980 and sparked a wave of publicity about factory farming in major newspapers across the country. We

appeared on CNN and on NBC’s Today. The book’s warnings about the harm factory farming inflicts on the environment, on rural communities, and on animals have been echoed by many others since. And yet the publicity that Animal Factories stirred up subsided without any significant changes taking place.

Although the new animal movement, which some say was triggered by my earlier book, Animal Liberation, was starting to make an impact, in America most activists were still very much focused on animals used in research, for fur, and in circuses. Given the numbers of animals affected by these issues, that was an odd set of priorities. In the United States somewhere between 20 and 40 million birds and mammals are killed for research every year. That may seem like a lot —and it far exceeds the number of animals killed for their fur, let alone the relatively tiny number used in circuses—but even the figure of 40 million represents less than two days’ toll in America’s slaughterhouses, which kill around 10 billion each year.

In the course of working on Animal Factories, Jim, who had grown up on a farm in Missouri as the fifth generation in a family of farmers, became curious about the process of domestication of animals, particularly farmed animals, and its impact on the early development of human civilization. After twelve years of reading and revising his thinking, he wrote An Unnatural Order, which Publishers Weekly called a “powerfully argued manifesto” in its starred review. The book contends that animal agriculture destroyed our ancient sense of kinship with animals and the living world and replaced it with a belief in dominion—a God-given license to use them as we see fit—and a sense of alienation from nature that is at the root of many of our social and environmental crises.

While Jim was writing his book, I was back in Australia, raising a family and writing and teaching about such ethical issues as global poverty, new reproductive technologies, life-and-death decisions in medicine, and, of course, the treatment of animals. I became a close adviser, through lengthy international phone calls, of Henry Spira, a remarkable activist who had campaigned successfully to persuade the major cosmetics corporations to find alternatives to testing their products on animals, and now was turning his attention to corporations like McDonald’s and the treatment of farm animals. Jim and I kept in touch, and we met occasionally when I visited the States.

Then in 1999 I was appointed professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In America I found a sharply increased awareness of factory farming. Some of the largest animal organizations, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the Humane Society of the United States, the Humane Farming Association, and Farm Sanctuary were working to bring changes for farm animals. The Washington Post ran a shocking series of articles on conditions in the nation’s slaughterhouses. In 2001 Senator Robert Byrd, a senior and influential member of the U.S. Senate, made a passionate speech denouncing the “disgusting cruelty” of “profit-driven factory farms”— the first time in decades that these issues had even been raised in Congress.1 The following year a

coalition of animal organizations succeeded in getting an initiative on the ballot in Florida to amend the constitution of the state to require that every sow kept on a farm should have enough space to turn around. Despite objections that this was not a fit subject for a constitutional amendment (there was no other way, in Florida, to get a proposal before the voters), Floridians voted on the substance of the measure, rather than the procedures, and gave it clear majority support.

For the first time in the United States, a major form of factory farming had been outlawed by popular demand. The air and water pollution caused by factory farming was also in the news, sparked partly by the legal efforts of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Waterkeeper Alliance, and the Sierra Club. Kennedy, acting for several farm and fishermen’s groups, won a major victory against Smithfield Foods that suggested that almost all American factory farms were violating the Clean Water Act. (The Bush administration thereupon instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken the rules and curtail its investigations of factory farms.)2

Naturally, when I came back to the States, Jim and I met again and talked about this new surge of interest in the issues we had raised in our earlier book. We had revised Animal Factories in 1990 and we thought of revising it again, but gradually the discussion moved from the growing concern about factory farming to broader issues, including the organic food movement, the fair trade movement, and ethical consumerism in general. We therefore decided to write a book that would respond to the widespread interest in taking an ethical approach to all our food choices. This book is the outcome of that discussion.

—Peter Singer, Princeton, New Jersey

I was delighted when Peter returned to the United States so that we could continue our work together exploring the issues surrounding food, farming, and fishing—subjects dear to my heart. I was raised in the forties and fifties on a 160-acre family farm in the southwest Missouri Ozarks, living and working beside my parents, my father’s parents, his sister, Wilma, and my two older brothers. The family maintained an orchard, a large vegetable garden, and separate “patches” for asparagus, potatoes, and strawberries. We grew wheat and soybeans to sell, and corn and hay for our animals: chickens, beef cattle, milk cows, and pigs. We sold eggs and milk at local markets. Everyone worked, for there was a lot to do: build fences, cut firewood, plow fields (then go back and pick up wagon-loads of rocks), weed gardens, harvest hay and crops, clean pens, haul manure, slaughter animals, and other occasional chores. Then there were the twice-daily chores: feed and water animals, gather eggs, and milk the cows. I milked cows by hand for 12 years; that’s about 8,700 milkings. It motivated me to go to college and law school.

My family left farming behind, as did most of our neighbors, because, as my father put it, “There’s no money in it.” I was 32 before I discovered why: Factory farming had taken over and no one had noticed. That shocked me. I went to work on learning more about it for Friends of Animals. That put me in touch with Peter, who was living in New York at the time. As soon as his book, Animal Liberation, came out in 1975, I suggested that we write a book on factory farming. Peter agreed and proposed that we include photographs as they would vividly verify the unbelievable factory conditions. Joe Keller, a professional photographer, and I traveled more than 10,000 miles in a van visiting factory farms. We spent whole days inside egg and hog factories, and afterward the smell would linger for days—even after scrubbing ourselves and our gear.

As Peter says, Animal Factories came out with a bang and faded to a whimper. By the time the revised edition was released, I was writing An Unnatural Order and contributing articles and

photographs to magazines. My story “Going, Going, Gone!” for Audubon (July/August 1993) documented the wide-open trade in exotic and endangered animals at livestock auctions and got me on CBS This Morning to explain it all to Harry Smith. My environmental activism continues to this day in the form of research, writing, and speaking about animals and farming.

We’re an odd couple, Peter and I—the philosopher and the farm boy—but a good team; we have complementary backgrounds in geography, ethnicity, education, family history, etc., and we work well together. Peter owns up to abstract philosophical arguments that test our ethical judgments. I’m the down-to-earth guy—true to my roots in Missouri. For my part, I tend to have wild and crazy ideas about people, places, and subjects to pursue. Whenever I would go off on these tangents, Peter brought me down to earth and back to the scheme of the book.

For simplicity we have used the first person plural throughout, although it was not possible for us to be together at every farm visit or interview. The use of we, therefore, should be read to refer to both of us, or either one of us.

—Jim Mason, Exmore, Virginia

W

INTRODUCTION

FOOD AND ETHICS

e don’t usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. 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 eating—an activity that is even more essential than sex, and in which everyone participates—is generally seen quite differently. Try to think of a politician whose prospects have been damaged by revelations about what he or she eats.

It was not always so. Many indigenous hunter-gatherers have elaborate codes about who may kill which animals, and when. Some have rituals in which they ask forgiveness of the animals for killing them. In ancient Greece and Rome, ethical choices about food were considered at least as significant as ethical choices about sex.1 Temperance and self-restraint in diet, as elsewhere in life, were seen as virtues. Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, advocates a simple diet of bread, cheese, vegetables, and olives, with figs for dessert, and wine in moderation.2 In traditional Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist ethics, discussions of what should and should not be eaten occupy a prominent place. In the Christian era, however, less attention was paid to what we eat—the major concern being to avoid gluttony, which, according to Catholic teaching, is one of the seven cardinal sins.

The way food is sold and advertised doesn’t help. Despite the recent upsurge of farmers’ markets, the overwhelming majority of America’s food is purchased from supermarkets. Shoppers are not presented with relevant information about the ethical choices that surround food. Instead, the food industry spends more than $11 billion annually trying to make us crave their products.3 That buys an avalanche of advertising that sweeps down on us from all sides but tells us only what the advertisers want us to know. Marion Nestle, a nutritionist who worked in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and on the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health (1988), has described how the food industry has crossed ethical lines in bringing political pressure to bear on what should be dispassionate scientific government advice on how Americans can eat a healthy diet.4 Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me raised serious ethical questions about the contribution of fast-food chains like McDonald’s to America’s epidemic of obesity.5 Our focus is not on these issues. There is already plenty of information out there about them. If you enjoy unhealthy food so much that you are prepared to accept the risk of disease and premature death, then, like a decision to smoke or climb Himalayan peaks, that is primarily your own business. Our focus is on the impact of your food choices on others.

A NEW AWARENESS

Over the last thirty years we’ve seen the first stirrings of a different kind of concern about what we

eat. Many people have stopped eating veal after learning that veal calves are separated from their mothers soon after birth, deliberately made anemic, denied roughage or the possibility of exercise, and kept in stalls so narrow they cannot turn around. In the United States, veal consumption has fallen to less than a quarter of what it was in 1975.6 Consumers also increasingly seek out organically produced food, for reasons that range from an ethical concern for the environment to a desire to avoid ingesting pesticides and the conviction that organic food tastes better than food from conventional sources. Today, organic foods can easily be found in supermarkets and are the fastest growing section of the food industry.7

Buying organic isn’t enough, however, for the millions of vegetarians all over the world who refuse to eat any meat or fish. In the United States, a 2003 Harris poll found that almost 3 percent of the population says they never eat meat, poultry, fish, or other seafood.8 Avoiding meat and fish used to be as far as anyone went. Now vegans, who eat no animal products at all, are as common as vegetarians once were. In fact, the same Harris poll found that half of those who said they never eat meat, poultry, fish, or other seafood also said they never eat dairy products, eggs, or honey. And it’s not just the vegans who are conscious of food. Throughout developed countries, people are learning to ask tough questions about where their food comes from and how it was produced. Is the food grown without pesticides or herbicides? Are the farm workers paid a living wage? Do the animals involved suffer needlessly?

Questions like these are part of a growing movement toward ethical food consumption. In 2005 two major U.S. supermarket chains, Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats, announced that they would not sell eggs from caged hens, and Trader Joe’s said it would not use caged eggs for its own brand of eggs. As John Mackey, Whole Foods Market’s CEO, has said, these changes were the result of customer demand.9 Nor is this concern limited to highly educated people in upper-income brackets. It affects all forms of food consumption, right down to McDonald’s, Burger King, and even Wal-Mart—all of which have, as we shall see, recently taken steps that show them to be sensitive to ethical criticism of their products.

Virtually anyone, irrespective of income, can make a positive contribution to this movement. Making better food choices doesn’t require hours spent reading labels or rigid adherence to any particular diet. All it takes is the information we provide in this book, which we hope will bring a little more awareness about the significance of the food choices we all make.

VOTING AT THE SUPERMARKET

Increasingly, people are regarding their food choices as a form of political action. One of the conscientious consumers we interviewed for this book said, “I try to vote with my dollar and not enrich those who are doing bad things in the world.”10

In Europe, ethical consumption has gone much further than in the United States. Since the 1980s, non-government organizations have been campaigning to persuade supermarkets to stock products that are fairly traded, free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and, in the case of animal products, from producers who avoid the most restrictive forms of confinement. Most major supermarkets in Europe carry free-range eggs, a wide variety of GMO-free products and fairly- traded coffee, tea, chocolate, and bananas. McDonald’s introduced organic milk to its British restaurants in 2003.11 The Co-Op, a national British supermarket chain, now buys its house brand of chocolate from growers who meet fair-trade standards. Because the cocoa growers in Ghana receive a higher price for fair-trade cocoa, the price of the Co-Op’s house brand chocolate increased. The conservative Daily Telegraph predicted that consumers would resist paying higher

prices for fair-trade products. Instead, sales of Co-Op brand chocolate have doubled, while sales of the other brands of chocolate the store stocks have declined. In 2003 the Co-Op converted its own brand coffee to fair trade and in the next year saw Co-Op brand coffee sales rise 20 percent, while sales of other brands fell 14 percent.12

The extent to which British consumers choose ethically when buying food is, by American standards, quite astonishing. In Britain, sales of free-range eggs—that is, eggs that are not only from “cage-free” hens, but from hens able to walk outside—have now surpassed in value sales of eggs from caged hens.13 Since 2002, two major British supermarket chains, Marks and Spencer and Waitrose, have sold only free-range whole eggs. In the United States, not even Whole Food Markets or Wild Oats have gone that far, although they cater to more environmentally conscious and affluent consumers than the more mainstream British chains. Marks and Spencer has also eliminated eggs from caged hens from its entire food range, requiring every manufacturer from whom they purchase food products to source their eggs from a list of approved and inspected egg producers. Now Tesco is also phasing out eggs from caged hens, and ASDA, the British Wal-Mart affiliate, does not use eggs from caged hens in its own brand eggs. In the United States, in contrast, 98 percent of eggs are still from caged hens, and, as we shall see, of the remaining 2 percent, very few of these are truly free-range.14

Given the strong British concern for ethical consumption, it is hardly surprising that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, became the first major Christian leader to affirm that ethics extend to food choices. Under his leadership the Church of England has issued a report entitled Sharing God’s Planet that recommends sustainable consumption and says every Christian has a duty to “care for every part of God’s creation.” The Church recommends that clergy themselves make eco-friendly consumption choices, selling fairly traded products at church fêtes and using organic bread and wine for communion services.15

In this book we’ll see some of the opportunities that American consumers have to become more conscientious about what they eat. We’ll also see, however, that progress on that front will be tougher in America than it was in Britain and much of Europe. In a number of discouraging ways, America’s food industry seeks to keep Americans in the dark about the ethical components of their food choices.

THREE FAMILIES

The issues raised by our food choices are clearly illustrated by three families we’re about to meet. We’ll start with the Hillard-Nierstheimer family, who live in Mabelvale, Arkansas: Lee Nierstheimer; his wife Jake; and their two children, Katie and Max. Their food choices exemplify the Standard American Diet. Jake, who does the family shopping, generally goes to her local Wal- Mart Supercenter because it is hard to beat their prices, and she can get everything in one stop. When they want to go out to eat, the family picks one of the many fast-food chains in the area.

Halfway across the country, in Fairfield, Connecticut, we’ll sit down to dinner with the Masarech-Motavalli family: Jim Motavalli; his wife, Mary Ann Masarech; and their daughters Maya and Delia. Jim and Mary Ann are concerned about their family’s health and about the impact their food purchases have on the environment. Much of the food they buy is organically produced, so they know it is relatively free of pesticides and has not been grown with synthetic fertilizers. In summer and fall Mary Ann likes to go to a local farm to get fresh, locally grown vegetables. But Jim and Mary lead busy lives, and convenience is a factor too, so their purchases don’t always quite match up to their ideals.

And in Olathe, Kansas, an outer suburb of Kansas City, we’ll talk with the Farb family: Joe; his wife JoAnn; and their daughters Sarina and Samantha. Of our three families, the Farbs follow the strictest ethical principles. Theirs is a vegan household; everything they eat is purely plant- based, and nothing comes from an animal. The Farbs also seek out organically grown food whenever possible.

In getting to know our families, we come to appreciate the individual circumstances in which each of us chooses what to buy and what to eat and the complex personal, social, and economic factors that go into these decisions. As we have already said, we think that these choices have ethical significance, and we will later criticize some of the food choices made by our families. Obviously, though, food choices are only one aspect of what people do and not a sufficient basis for judging their moral character. Indeed, since food ethics has been such a neglected topic in our culture, it is quite likely that otherwise good people are making bad choices in this area simply because they have not really focused on it, or do not have access to the information they need to make good choices.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

Our plan was to note the foods that our families chose and then trace them back through the production process to see what ethical issues arose. Once we found out what our three families ate, we wrote to 87 corporations who had manufactured at least one product that a family had bought. We informed each corporation of our project and asked for their assistance in identifying and facilitating our visits to the farm or facility from which the product came. Few companies bothered to reply. So we sent follow-up letters, adding that we were keen to get the producers’ side of the story. After all this, only 14 companies indicated that they were willing to assist us in any way. Most of these companies were relatively small producers of organic foods.

We were disappointed but not surprised. As recently as the 1970s, the food industry was proud to show its farming practices to the public. No more. Not long ago, the producer of an Australian current-affairs program suggested doing an interview with Peter in a setting involving animals, somewhere not too far from Princeton, New Jersey. Peter said: “Fine, let’s do it inside an intensive farm so that viewers can see where their meals come from.” The producer agreed and said he’d find a location. Several days later he called back to admit defeat. He’d contacted several intensive producers and not one of them would let the television cameras in. He had even turned for assistance to the Animal Industry Foundation, headed by Steve Kopperud, probably America’s most forceful defender of the animal production industries.

Kopperud travels the country giving speeches at animal industry conferences, telling producers that they must take the offensive against the animal-rights movement by communicating with the public and giving consumers accurate information about the way producers treat their animals. In a column in Florida Agriculture, Kopperud blamed the media for being out of touch with rural life. “The CBS brass should set the corporate jet down in rural America and take a look around,” he wrote. “Follow a farmer around for a season, or have a group of city dwellers try to tackle the hard work of farming or ranching. Now that would be a dose of reality!”16 But the farmer won’t let the CBS brass follow him around—not when he goes inside the factory farm doors, anyway. Kopperud was unable—or unwilling—to help the television producer find a single egg, chicken, veal, or pig operation that would let the cameras in.

We contacted Kopperud again while we were working on this book. The email correspondence went like this:

January 24, 2005

Hello Steve Kopperud,

Perhaps you remember my name from my book with Peter Singer, Animal Factories. We’re at work on a new book now that will cover a wide range of ethical concerns that consumers have today about farming and food production. It will include discussions of current concerns about plant agriculture as well, such as labor, environment, fair trade, corporate responsibility, and so on … Would you be willing to give us an on-the-record interview for our book? If so, I live just a few hours outside of Washington, D.C., and could meet you to talk in person.

Jim Mason

Kopperud replied promptly, saying that he wasn’t sure of his schedule and asking Jim to contact him again in a week or so. Jim did that but got no reply, so he wrote again a week later. Another week passed without reply, so Jim wrote a fourth time. This time Kopperud did reply, but only to say that it was a hectic time of year and he was going out of town, so perhaps it would be better if we sought out “another whose views are similar to mine.” Jim replied that we were particularly keen to talk to Kopperud himself and referred to Kopperud’s column in Florida Agriculture taking the media to task for being out of touch with rural life. There was no response to that message, nor to any of four further reminders sent over the next six weeks.

Around the time we were trying to talk to Kopperud, we read in the farm journal Feedstuffs that the National Pork Board was in the process of training more than 200 producers to help them better communicate with neighbors and communities about modern pork production. The article quoted Danita Rodibaugh, a vice president of the National Pork Board and a pork producer, as saying, “One way to tell the industry’s story is from a producer armed with the facts. It’s difficult to maintain a negative view of an industry if you put a face on it and tell your side of the story when misinformed critics attack it.”17 Great, we thought, here is a pork producer who will be keen to show us how she keeps her pigs. But when we contacted her, she told us that it wouldn’t be possible for us to visit her farm, because of concern that we might spread diseases among her pigs. She offered to send us a Pork Facts book instead. We declined that offer and instead offered to buy sterile, disposable full-length gowns, overboots, caps, and surgical masks for visiting her farm and to meet, or exceed, whatever biosecurity procedures she required for her employees, visiting veterinarians, or others who she may admit to her farm. We received no response to this message, nor to two further follow-up messages.

We don’t take this personally. Journalists looking into how our food is produced have had the door slammed in their faces over and over again. When Moark, which boasts of being the Nation’s #1 Egg Marketer, announced plans to build an egg-production unit housing 2.6 million hens in Cherokee County, Kansas, local residents protested. Roger McKinney, a staff writer for the local newspaper the Joplin Globe, contacted the company and asked to see one of its existing farms. McKinney was granted permission but was not allowed to bring a photographer. According to McKinney, a company official told him that “the company doesn’t allow photographs inside the barn because many people would not understand why the birds are in cages.”

In St. Louis, Missouri, news channel KSDK-TV ran into the same problem with its coverage of the way in which two of the nation’s biggest pork producers, Cargill Pork and Premium Standard Farms, had managed to get pigs raised in Missouri despite that state’s laws against corporate farm ownership. KSDK was denied access to any of the pig farms. Spokesmen for both Cargill and

Premium Standard declined to go on the record about their activities. The Cargill Pork spokesman said “a television story is not the best way for the company to tell its story.” The Missouri Pork Association, an affiliation of pork producers in the state, took three days to return the reporter’s telephone calls and then said that the association would be “unlikely” to be able to help.18 Kevin Murphy, vice president of Vance Publishing, publisher of Food Systems Insider, a monthly magazine for the food industry, has found the same secretive mentality all the way up the chain that leads from producer to consumer: “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in rooms where people say, ‘Well, our objective is just to be quiet, to just get out of the public eye as quickly as possible.’”19

There are rare exceptions. In a pig-industry magazine we read about an Iowa pork producer who was quoted as saying that the only way to stop attacks on intensive farming by animal-rights organizations was “to get in front of the public and tell them our story: the real story, not their lies.” We called him, expecting to be given the usual excuses. After a couple of cautious phone calls, he agreed to allow us to visit. “What about biosecurity?” we asked. “It’s not an issue if you’re not coming from other farms,” he replied. We assured him we wouldn’t go near any pigs before visiting his farm, and that was it. He turned out to be a blunt man who didn’t see any reason to hide what he was doing. While he showed us the various stages of intensive pig production on his property, he forthrightly defended what he was doing, both in terms of producing pork at a price everyone can afford and in terms of keeping the pigs comfortable.

Within animal agriculture, a few people speak frankly about why the industry is so secretive. Peter Cheeke is a professor of animal science and the author of the widely used textbook Contemporary Issues in Animal Agriculture, in which he writes: “For modern animal agriculture, the less the consumer knows about what’s happening before the meat hits the plate, the better…. One of the best things modern animal agriculture has going for it is that most people in the developed countries are several generations removed from the farm and haven’t a clue how animals are raised and processed.” Cheeke then gets more specific, stating that if urban meat eaters were to see the raising and processing of industrially produced chickens, “they would not be impressed.” Many of them might even “swear off eating chicken and perhaps all meat.”20 Another agriculture professor, Wes Jamison, agrees that “There is a gulf between the reality of animal production and the perception of animal production in the non-farming American public.” But Jamison, who teaches at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, doesn’t think that this gulf will ever be bridged. “You’re not going to see a beef-packing plant be transparent. They can’t. It’s so shocking to the average person.”21

After suggesting that animal agriculture benefits from public ignorance about production methods, Professor Cheeke invites readers of his textbook—who are mostly university agriculture students—to ask themselves a crucial question: “Is this an ethical situation?” Industry officials who would resist contemplating Cheeke’s question would do well to heed the counsel of Lord Acton, who said, “Everything secret degenerates … nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.”

Just as the food industry resists disclosing general information about its food production, so it has resisted offering us information about the foods purchased by the three families we monitored. Yet even without the industry’s cooperation, we were able to discover a great deal about how these families’ foods were produced, and this can help food consumers—that is, all of us—make better, more ethical food choices for ourselves and for our families.

PART I

EATING THE STANDARD AMERICAN DIET

T

1 JAKE AND LEE

here is no downtown, no bustling public square, no quaint historic district in Mabelvale, Arkansas. The “main drag” is Baseline Road—four lanes of traffic running through a corridor

of gas stations, convenience stores, and strip malls in the urban sprawl southwest of Little Rock, to which it was annexed in 1980. Sixty percent of Mabelvale’s 5,000 inhabitants are white, 25 percent are African-American, and 10 percent are Latino; they live in homes worth around $75,000 and earn about $30,000 annually.

Among the residents of Mabelvale is the family of Jake Hillard, 36, and Lee Nierstheimer, 26. We chose them for their basic meat-and-potatoes diet—sometimes called the Standard American Diet, or SAD. Though the term lacks a precise definition, it is the most widely eaten diet in America. The Standard American Diet is high in meat, eggs, and dairy products. Carbohydrates such as bread, sugar, and rice are usually eaten in refined form, which, combined with a low intake of fruit and vegetables, means that the diet is low in fiber. Frequent consumption of fried foods contributes to a high intake of fat, with as much as 35 percent of calories coming from fat, most of it saturated and much of it animal fat. A burger on a bun with a serving of french fries, followed by an ice-cream sundae and washed down with a can of cola, fits squarely in this American tradition. It’s a quick and easy way of putting enough food in your stomach to feel satisfied. With America’s low prices for meat, eggs and dairy products, it’s not expensive either.

We met Lee Nierstheimer at his place of work, a local firm that makes custom-made handling systems and conveyors for major manufacturers. A man of medium height and build, he has a boyish face and a full head of straight brown hair. He tells us that had we come a few months earlier, he would have been at work in the machine shop, welding and bending metal into the sizes and shapes called for in customers’ specifications. But he has recently been promoted and is now an engineer, designing and drawing plans for the equipment manufactured by his company. It’s the end of the working day and he takes us back to his home, where he lives with his wife, Jake, and their two children, Katie, 2, and Max, 6 months. They are at the end of a dead-end street in a neighborhood of modest homes that date from the 1950s and 1960s. On the corner is a little old house renewed by white vinyl siding, next to a tattered blue mobile home, then a neat, small, brick house, then a couple more clad in vinyl, and so on. At their gate we’re greeted by a couple of very friendly dogs: one looks like a mid-sized St. Bernard—large, fluffy, brown-and-white. “That’s Baggie,” Lee says. The other one, Annie, a Border collie with maybe a bit of Australian shepherd mixed in, is the current neighborhood hero—she roused several people in time to catch a burglar in the act of breaking and entering a house up the street.

The yard, walkway, and stoop are cluttered with bright, primary-colored plastic tricycles, wagons, miniature chairs, balls, and toys. Inside, there’s more of the same, with Jake—snugly

curled up in an overstuffed chair—breast-feeding baby Max. At her feet, Katie is engrossed in watching Finding Nemo on the VCR. A black-and-white cat dozes among the toys on the sofa. Lee immediately goes over to Katie, kisses her, then Jake, and takes the baby in his arms.

Jake gets up apologizing for “the mess,” saying she’s tired from being up all night with Max, who has been fussy with teething and allergies lately. She’s nearly Lee’s height, with a full, pretty face. She wears her auburn hair long and straight, with a thick hank of bangs that curl down to her eyes. They show us around the house, including the kids’ room, which they have painted and decorated. Then it’s time for dinner. Jake serves Katie her favorite meal: macaroni and cheese, green beans, and a slice of bread and butter. Katie, between giggles, sips from her glass of milk and takes bites of the macaroni and cheese. Lee adjusts Max’s highchair and then spoon-feeds him bites of pureed spinach lasagna and green beans with potatoes. Meanwhile, Jake puts food on plates for herself and her husband. Tonight they’re having barbequed chicken breasts, a lettuce and tomato salad, and some of the green beans that Katie is also eating, but seasoned in the Southern way with bits of bacon and onion.

There is a small plate of paprika-sprinkled deviled eggs on the table, which Lee had snitched from a large platter in the refrigerator while Jake was tending to the chicken under the broiler. Jake takes one, and in a tone more teasing than scolding, tells Lee that she made them for tomorrow’s family picnic with her parents. Then she takes a bite, which sends Katie into a fit of giggles.

Lee is drinking a Samuel Adams beer and Jake a Diet Coke. After dinner, Lee clears the table and rinses the dishes while Jake tends to Max. “Can we have some ice cream now?” Katie burbles, and, seeing her mother’s look, quickly

adds, “Please?” “Only if we have some strawberries too,” Jake says. “And chocolate sauce,” chimes in Lee from the sink. “Oh, brother,” Jake says, rolling her eyes. “It’s chocolate chip.” Lee takes a tub of ice cream from the freezer and puts it on the table. “The berries are in that

white bowl on the bottom shelf,’ Jake says, and after two beats she adds, “You’ve got to be kidding about that chocolate sauce, right?”

GROCERY SHOPPING AT WAL-MART

The next day, Jake arranges for child care and takes us on her shopping trip to the Wal-Mart Supercenter on Baseline Road. As we enter the store we find the manager and explain our project. When we tell him that we want to use a video camera to tape Jake’s shopping trip, he becomes agitated and tells us that this is against company policy. Permission to do so “would have to come from Bentonville,” he says, referring to the national head office, and indicates that it is rarely given. After assuring him that we will be leaving the video recorder outside, we ask about using a small pocket audiotape recorder. He becomes even more agitated and emphasizes the company’s policy against recording of any kind in its stores. Defeated, we go back to Jake’s car, lock up the equipment, gather pens and a notebook, and get on with the shopping.

We begin at the dairy case, where Jake picks up a half-gallon of milk. “Skim milk for momma. Great Value—that’s a Wal-Mart brand. I get Coleman Dairy whole milk for Katie; it’s kind of a local brand. They’re down in Batesville.” Next she picks up a carton of a dozen “Country Creek” eggs. The fine print says: “Moark Productions, Inc., 1100 Blair Avenue, Neosho, MO.” There is a logo on it as well—it has the words “Animal Care Certified” in a semi-circle, and there is a big check mark in the middle. Jake moves along the dairy case pulling out products and putting them in the shopping cart: Oscar Mayer bacon, Daisy Sour Cream, Great Value Extra Sharp Cheddar, and

Kraft 100 percent parmesan cheese. From the meats, Jake picks out Armour pepperoni, Petit Jean brand peppered bacon, Jimmy Dean sausage, some store brand skinless chicken breasts, an unlabeled package of “beef loin porterhouse steak,” Ball Park corn dogs, and Advance Brand “steak fingers.” She gets orange juice, too, and some vegetables, including an iceberg lettuce and tomatoes. So it goes, aisle after aisle, until we have enough of the favorite foods to feed this family of four for the next two weeks.

We pick up the kids from Jake’s sitter, and by the time we get back to the house, Lee is home from work. As we unpack the groceries and put them away, we talk about the family’s food choices at both supermarkets and restaurants. When they want a dinner out as a family, they go to El Chico for Mexican food, Smokey Joe’s Barbeque, or Larry’s Pizza. When Jake and Lee are by themselves and in a hurry, Lee goes to Sonic and Popeye’s; Jake likes McDonald’s, Burger King, and Arby’s, where she favors the turkey sandwich.

After the kids are put to bed, we drink beer and talk. The main thing on their minds is the time consumed by Lee’s job and the needs of two small children. Before she became a mother, Jake had a busy job as a lobbyist and administrator for an association of insurance and financial advisors. Lee used to play guitar in a local rock and roll band. They no longer have time for the boating, skiing, and camping that they once enjoyed. But there’s no tone of complaining or nostalgia for more carefree days; now with a toddler and an infant they have new joys and new responsibilities. It’s as simple as that.

Eventually we get around to talking about what drives their food choices. “Price and convenience are way up there, especially now with the kids,” Jake says. She goes

on to explain how pregnancy made her appetites shift, how she hated eggs, had little appetite for red meat, but craved cookies. Now she’s starting to eat more meat again, except for sausage. “I have sort of a disdain for pig meat,” she says. Lee reminds her of bacon, which she admits to enjoying. We ask them what they know about the origins of these products and the controversies about some of the modern ways of raising cattle, pigs, and chickens.

Lee knows about the chicken farms. “They’re just big, long shacks packed full of chickens. You know that just from driving around the state.” Arkansas is the home base of Tyson Foods, the world’s largest producer of meat chickens. Neither of them knows much about pig farms or cattle feedlots. “We don’t hear much about that around here,” Lee says. “Most of the cattle around here are free-range, as far as I know.”

For Jake, the controversy over veal calves sticks out in her mind. “That’s the first one that came up when I was growing up. Veal was definitely out, without question. I mean, it was so well covered in the media, how the calves could barely move. Eating it just didn’t seem worth it for the cost to the animals … and the horror.” She admits that she, too, is not very aware of any controversies over pig farming methods. “But the chickens concern me, because I’m well aware of that, living here in Arkansas. But there’s the rub, you see. We’re told by dieticians to choose chicken over red meat, for health reasons.”

Jake stops for a moment, obviously thinking about something related. “To be perfectly honest about it, I do think there’s a hierarchy of animals. I believe I would favor mammals over birds. I think I probably feel sorrier for a cow than I would for a chicken.”

“Honestly, I don’t think about it that much,” Lee adds. “I guess I’m pretty absorbed in my life and my family most of the time and I don’t think very much about the welfare of the meat I’m eating.” Lee grew up near Little Rock, and meat was always the center of the family meals. “It was either fried chicken, mashed potatoes, fried okra, or it was sweet-and-sour meatballs or rump roast, pork loins. There was always a side of vegetables, but it was the meat that was the center of any meal.” For school lunches there was usually hamburger or pizza.

Jake’s formative years were spent in Florida and Washington, D.C. Her mother cooked a lot

from scratch, not liking pre-packaged food. There was usually some kind of meat with vegetables and potatoes on the side, but Jake’s mother also made spaghetti and a lot of Chinese stir-frys, usually with chicken, beef, or shrimp. Though Jake and Lee have started to eat more vegetables than they used to, Lee doesn’t anticipate any significant change in his consumption of meat: “My own philosophy is that we evolved to become omnivores, which was one of our steps in survival and in becoming what we are today. Being opportunists, we could survive the longest winters or the desert or whatever, because we ate meat. We would eat anything. It just seems like a natural order to me.”

“Well, I have more qualms about it.” Jake says. “There’s a feeling in me that says, okay, yeah, we’re adapted to eat meat, but if we don’t have to, then why do it? If it was a matter of necessity, that would be one thing. Like if we’re stuck in a cave and starving to death, I’m going to cut off your leg and chow down, you know?”

“Don’t go hiking with her,” Lee laughs. We talk about the demands of marriage and children and how other considerations affect their

food choices. Would they choose differently if they had more information about how their food was produced? Probably not—the alternatives are inconvenient and cost more. “Laziness is part of it, too,” Jake says. “There’s one store here where you can be assured that everything you buy is organically grown and all the meats are free-range. Everything is politically correct for the ethical meat eater, the careful carnivore. But it’s about a twenty-five-minute drive from here … in nasty traffic. And all of the meat there is two or three times more expensive than what I get at Wal-Mart, which is only about five minutes away.” Then she pauses a moment before saying: “Isn’t it a sad thing when our morals become so disposable?”

Later, driving on from Mabelvale, we ponder that line. It’s easy to understand why Jake and Lee make the food choices they do. They are, as Lee said, absorbed in their family and, in his case, his work, too. Making different choices would take time and add to their food bills. It’s reasonable for a couple in their situation to recoil from the prospect of paying substantially more for their food, especially when buying organically grown vegetables and free-range meats would take more time as well. Is organic food really better for you, or for the environment? It’s not easy to be sure. Nothing in the television they watch or the newspapers they read suggests that there is anything unethical about the choices they are making. Doesn’t all of America shop at Wal-Mart? How can it be wrong to do as everyone else does?

A

2 THE HIDDEN COSTS OF CHEAP CHICKEN

mong the items that Jake bought on her grocery shopping trip is an icon of modern American food production: chicken. Americans eat a phenomenal amount of chicken, more than any other

meat. Those of us over 50 can still remember when chicken was a treat for special occasions because it was more expensive than beef. Today chicken is the cheapest meat, and its consumption has doubled since 1970.1 Advocates of factory farming boast that their techniques have brought chicken within the reach of working families.

The chicken breasts Jake bought were produced by Tyson Foods, a corporation that proudly calls itself “the largest provider of protein products on the planet,” as well as “the world leader in producing and marketing beef, pork, and chicken.”2 Tyson now produces more than 2 billion chickens a year, and if you are shopping in a typical American supermarket, close to a quarter of the chicken you see on the shelves will have been produced by Tyson.3 Although the corporation contracts out the actual growing of its chickens to “independent” growers who own their own land and sheds, Tyson controls every aspect of production. It hatches the chicks, delivers them to the growers, tells the growers exactly how to raise them, buys back the grown chickens, and then slaughters and processes them.

Virtually all the chicken sold in America—more than 99 percent, according to Bill Roenigk, vice president of the National Chicken Council—comes from factory-farm production similar to that used by Tyson Foods.4 The ethical issues raised by its production of chicken therefore exemplify issues raised by modern intensive chicken production in general. We can divide these issues into three categories, according to whether they most immediately impact the chickens, the environment, or humans.

AN ETHICAL WAY OF TREATING CHICKENS?

To call someone a “birdbrain” is to suggest exceptional stupidity. But chickens can recognize up to 90 other individual chickens and know whether each one of those birds is higher or lower in the pecking order than they are themselves. Researchers have shown that if chickens get a small amount of food when they immediately peck at a colored button, but a larger amount if they wait 22 seconds, they can learn to wait before pecking.5 Moreover, after thousands of generations of domestic breeding, chickens still retain the ability to give and to understand distinct alarm calls, depending on whether there is a threat from above, like a hawk, or from the ground, like a raccoon.

When scientists play back a recording of an “aerial” alarm call, chickens respond differently than when they hear a recording of a “ground” alarm call.6

Interesting as these studies are, the point of real ethical significance is not how clever chickens are, but whether they can suffer—and of that there can be no serious doubt. Chickens have nervous systems similar to ours, and when we do things to them that are likely to hurt a sensitive creature, they show behavioral and physiological responses that are like ours. When stressed or bored, chickens show what scientists call “stereotypical behavior,” or repeated futile movements, like caged animals who pace back and forth. When they have become acquainted with two different habitats and find one preferable to the other, they will work hard to get to the living quarters they prefer. Lame chickens will choose food to which painkillers have been added; the drug evidently relieves the pain they feel and allows them to be more active.7

Most people readily agree that we should avoid inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals. Summarizing the recent research on the mental lives of chickens and other farmed animals, Christine Nicol, professor of animal welfare at Bristol University, in England, has said: “Our challenge is to teach others that every animal we intend to eat or use is a complex individual, and to adjust our farming culture accordingly.”8 We are about to see how far that farming culture would have to change to achieve this.