Book Review

Last night I finished reading The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.  I could not put it down. While not as harrowing as Why We Love Dogs, this is still a very eye opening book that traces the food sources of three very different families.

The first family has no real regard for what they put on their plates, purchasing animal products without sourcing them or even really paying attention to labels and what those labels mean. The second family is more consciences and tends to buy organic and free range meats, eggs and dairy and gets most of their vegetables from a local CSA.  The third family is Vegan.

The authors trace the food backwards from plate to farm (or factory) and explore not only the lives of the animals that two of the families eat but also the environmental impact of each of their choices as well the impact on other human beings.  They explore an intensive pig farm, spend a day working as turkey inseminators, and spend some time at Pete and Jerry’s eggs to view what “Free-range” means first hand.  The only place they don’t really take the reader…the slaughterhouse.  No one would let them in. All they can provide regarding slaughter is information garnered from others undercover research of a so-called kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa and a few Congressional reports.

This book was published in 2006 and therefore some of the info is a bit outdated (for example, they mention Gold Kist, a chicken and egg producer that no longer exists as they were bought out several years ago) and since this publication we have learned even more of the horrible lives of factory farmed animals and of the abuse that takes place on some factory farms and in slaughterhouses, but I still highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in learning more about what you eat, where it comes from and how to make choices that are ethical and kind to the animals, yourself and others and the environment.