Feast or Famine: Peter Singer on the Ethics of Eating

With the book and now film "Fast Food Nation," Walmart's recent switch to organic produce, Slow Food restaurants popping up all over the country and what seems to be a growing hunger for inconvenient truths, a much more substantive wave of ethical eating is emerging. Although he might not be a household name, Australian philosopher Peter Singer possesses perhaps the most authoritative voice on the subject.

Singer, a Princeton professor, has worked for over three decades to address complex moral questions, and ethical eating has always been at the heart of his philosophy. There is no shortage of books about how food can make us feel good, but Singer writes about how food can make us do good. It all started with his 1975 publication, Animal Liberation, now considered the Bible for the animal rights movement. Since then, Singer has pioneered the argument that we have a moral obligation to those starving in distant nations, giving voice to a nascent European Humanitarian movement in the '80s and pushing that movement forward in recent decades. He has written on death, Darwin, bioethics and globalization, as well as on lis own grandfather's life in interwar Vienna. In his most recent book (written with activist Jim Mason), The Way We Pat, Singer shifts his incisive eye to the environmental ramifications of consumption. Heeb Contributing Editor, Elliot Ratzman, sat down to talk with the man who has been fighting the good fight since Morgan Spurlock was eating Gerber’s.

You're considered the father of the animal rights movement.

Well, let's get the terms down clearly. What people generally call the 'animal rights' movement is a broad movement for radical change in the moral status of animals, and therefore radical change in how we treat them. I am very much for that. When people say, 'the basis for this is that animals have rights,' philosophically I can't agree with that because I don't think it's a question of rights. I think it's a question of equal consideration of their interests. The ethical foundation of my view is based on interests and on looking at the consequences of what we do. So in a narrow sense, I am not a supporter of 'animal rights.'

I am reminded of an episode of Beverly Hills 90210: Brenda gets involved with a radical animal rights organization that breaks into a laboratory to liberate the animals.

I think the issue of the use of animals for food just dwarfs that of the use of animals for research. 30 or 40 million animals are used for research in the U.S., but there are almost 10 billion animals used for food, and because most of them are factory farmed they actually suffer for much longer than the animals used in experimentation. It's a vastly greater issue.

You have a new book out: The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Can you explain how this latest work is a departure from your previous books on animal liberation?

This book is not just about the ethics of treating animals. Of course that comes into it—–you can't avoid it when you're talking about food. But it's a much broader book. It tries to look at a whole range of ethical issues about what we eat. Including environmental issues, which are pretty central: the greenhouse effect, pollution, pesticides. The book looks at the difference between organic and conventional agriculture in environmental terms, debates about whether we should buy locally, and fair trade issues.