Eating and the Question of Ethics1 By Elaine Reeves `TRY to think of a politician whose prospects have been damaged

by revelations about what he or she eats,'' says the introduction to The Ethics of What We Eat. True, it hasn't happened yet, but perhaps the day is not far off when it will be exposure as a serial consumer of GE vegetables grown unsustainably by exploited workers or meat from animals that were treated cruelly while they were alive that will force a pollie to quit in disgrace. More and more we are asked to look at whether our food was produced ethically. Peter Singer and Kim Mason approach the subject directly in The Ethics of What We Eat. Michael Pollan is led there by answering his own question ``What should we eat for dinner?'' in The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a FastFood World. ``We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too,'' he says. Singer and Mason join three American families for dinner, one that shops as cheaply as it can, one that tries to buy mostly organic food and one that, like Singer, follows a vegan diet, excluding flesh, eggs, dairy foods and honey. Then Singer and Mason attempt to trace back the families' food choicesnot easy; only 14 of 87 corporations they wrote to asking to visit farms or factories responded, and they were mostly small organic producers. Pollan starts at the front end. He buys a calf and follows it through to the feedlot, and tries to follow a bushel of corn, but as corn is mostly broken down into its constituent molecules, it becomes impossible to track. He looks at ``big'' and ``little'', or barcode-free, organic and hunter-gathering, and then buys an ``industrial'' meal and makes a meal from the other sources. I had not realised how powerful and distorting to US agriculture and the economy was the subsidised corn industry -- a mountain of surplus corn is moved by feeding as much of it as possible to animals who can convert it to protein -- or that most of the antibiotics in the US today end up in animal feed because otherwise ruminants evolved to eat grass would get sick on a diet of corn and chemicals. Pollan's ``industrial'' meal comes from McDonald's and he writes that of the 38 ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, 13 could be derived from corn (including the corn-fed chicken) and there are several completely synthetic ingredients that come from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. Both books pose dilemmas in relation to ``big'' and ``efficient'' organic production versus small family farms where a philosophy as well as a set of rules is embraced. Marks & Spencer in the UK and the Whole Foods chain in the US both refuse to sell eggs from caged hens, or bakery or other items with such eggs as ingredients. Ethics points out that the price of a dozen eggs from caged hens at Wal-Mart is $1.08 but truly organic and freerange eggs are between $4 and $5 a half-dozen. When there are such premiums and so much demand, big business becomes involved and small business get bigger. Singer and Mason say it is OK in the US for eggs to carry an ``Animal Care Certified'' label even when the hens are kept in tiny cages and have been debeaked by having the ends of their sensitive beaks cut off with a hot blade. Eggs labelled organic may actually come from uncaged but debeaked hens in sheds of 20,000 birds, which means
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Elaine, Reeves. "Eating and the Question of Ethics." Mercury, The (Hobart) (n.d.): Newspaper Source. EBSCO. Web. 28 Oct. 2011.
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it is very difficult even to see the floor. In the US one million hens is a ``small'' farm in the conventional industry, but an organic egg farmer can make a living with a mere 100,000. The birds must have access to the outdoors, but as both books discover, they are locked inside until five weeks old, and by then the urge to range in the 3m-wide strip alongside the shed is gone. ``Not unlike the American front lawn it [the run] resembles -- it's a kind of ritual space, intended not so much for the use of the local residents as a symbolic offering,'' says Pollan. Ethics notes standards for organic eggs in Australia are much stricter than in the US -- hens have access to grassed pasture and debeaking is prohibited. Pollan had to wear a biohazard suit to go inside the sheds because the organic hens are ``exquisitely vulnerable to infection''. ``Maintaining a single-species animal farm on an industrial scale isn't easy without pharmaceuticals and pesticides,'' he says. Ethics says the most expensive organic eggs did come from birds with full beaks able to get outside each day, but they were flown in from New Zealand -- and it took about four litres of fuel to get each three dozen eggs across the Pacific. Growing food organically uses about one-third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally but flying it about the world negates that benefit. Singer and Mason talk about a new movement, locavores, which first manifested itself around San Francisco and comprises people who will not eat anything not grown within 100 miles (160km) of where they live. Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia is nearer the picture we have of organic farming. When Pollan wanted to buy one of his organic chickens, Salatin said he would have to drive down and pick it up, because he did not believe in ``Fed-exing'' food across the country. Polyface Farm produces eggs, chickens, pork, turkeys, rabbits and beef. The cattle range on clean pasture, to which Salatin brings his ``sanitation crew''chooks that ``pick insect larvae and parasites . . . breaking the cycle of infestation and diseases''. You would think when it came to organic milk it would go without saying that the cows grazed on pasture, but while the US Department of Agriculture has the vague stipulation that cattle ``must have access to pasture'', that can be excused for some stages in life. Pollan writes that ``Some have decided lactation constitutes one such stage, and thus far the USDA has not objected''. The cows are kept in sheds and eat grain and silage that is shipped in. The spectre of endless hectares of organic lettuce or oranges makes one wonder too, but one large Californian organic grower argued that the 10,000ha it had under an organic system kept 120,000kg of pesticide and 3.5 million kilograms of petrochemical fertiliser out of the land. Pollan concludes that his $14 industrial meal from McDonald's and the ``perfect meal'' of pork and morel mushrooms, hunted and gathered in the woods, and home-grown vegetables were ``equally unreal and equally unsustainable''. Still, one does not have to be especially ethical or idealistic to go along with him when he says ``Imagine for a moment if we once again knew these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.''