Give Pete Singer and Jim Mason's The Ethics of What We Eat a try.
I have blogged about Singer in an earlier post. He spoke at IC and he even signed my copy of the book after the event. Which also means I have put off reading this until now.
The book is a nice overview of food production as viewed through three American families. There is a "traditional" American diet family who buy all their groceries at Wal-Mart, a sort of Hippie Yuppie couple that frequent Trader Joes and farmer's markets, and a devout vegan couple. If you want a bit more muck racking and shocking imagery then you might want to read some of Singer's older stuff or something like Fast Food Nation or the last chapter in The Botany of Desire.
When I first read that setup, I was a bit nervous. I do not like WalMart as much as the next person (Or maybe not since they are America's largest private employer), but I am tired of the bashing of people that shop there. After reading "What's The Matter With Kansas," I am always leery of when socially progressive people tend to belittle the people they are trying to help. Oh sure, there are Bubbas and Yokels. And WalMart is your place for cheap plastic crap, but it feels like we lose the message.
Singer and Mason allow people to make their own food choices. If there is a theme to the book it is that food and eating have deep impacts on society and the environment. Eating is an ethical decision made by all of us (Hopefully!) several times a day.
Of course, the WalMart couple has the biggest impact since most of their food comes from traditional agribusiness. The vegan couple has the smallest impact. Singer and Mason heap plenty of praise on their diet, but, unlike the preachy veganism of say a small city in Central New York, their conclusions are backed by observation. The chapters are very readable, almost conversational, and you can hear Singer and Mason saying, "Look, pal. If you were to remove all the meat and dairy in your diet, you would lower your impact, just because! Even an organic farmer with 500 head of super happy cows has to find a place for all the manure and keep clearing fields for grazing." Of course, this all sounds better in the book. There was one bit about the vegan family that irked me and that was when the authors mentioned how the couples kids had never broken a bone, taken antibiotics, or developed any allergies. The 43 year old mothr is able to jog three miles without missing a beat! Much can be said about the health benefits of a well thought out vegan diet, but those last observations seem a bit strained. I have never broken a bone and my favorite summertime meal as a child was three hotdogs with plenty of mustard! You can live well on a diet that includes animal products and while the authors probably inserted that for color, it threw up some red flags not used since the move to Lakewood.
The very last bits of the books actually have a header that reads "You don't have to be fanatical about food choices. " Eating is often a communal activity, regardless of the diet and source of the food. The one big thing that vegan couple misses is going out to eat or to a dinner party without the need for elaborate pre-work. The world might be a better place if we all went back to the land and lived like Edward Abbey in some trailer in the Utah desert. It would be a lot less fun and, yes, we can have both! It will take education and work. While the book does not wax about the interconnections and webs of of our food system, it is complex and frustrating. Organic milk can still come from intensive feed lots where cows are stacked on top of each other. It only certifies that the food is free of synthetics, not that the food is treated nicely. Fair trade certification is not a certification of taste or quality, but of production values. A small family farm might give you hamburgers for a steal just to move some of their products. But you just need to be a savvy shopper and it starts to make sense.
Peace!
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