Americans Start Taking a New Look at the Ethics of Meat Eating

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Americans Start Taking a New Look at the Ethics of Meat Eating

 

www.nytimes.com

UNITED STATES, June 25, 2006: This month Whole Foods announced that it would no longer sell live lobsters, saying that keeping them in crammed tanks for long periods doesn't demonstrate a proper concern for animal welfare. The Chicago City Council recently outlawed the sale of foie gras to protest the force-feeding of the ducks and geese that yield it. California passed a similar law, which doesn't take effect until 2012, and other states and cities are considering such measures. All of these developments dovetail with a heightened awareness in these food-obsessed times of what we eat: where it came from, what it was fed, how it was penned, and how it perished, says this insightful and informative article. If the success of best sellers like "Fast Food Nation" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and stores like Whole Foods is any indication, more Americans are spending more time mulling the nutritional, environmental and ethical implications of their diets. They prefer that their beef carry the tag "grass fed," which evokes a verdant pasture rather than a squalid feed lot, and that their poultry knew the glories of a "free range."

 

But the concerns are riddled with intellectual inconsistencies and prompt infinite questions. Are the calls for fundamental changes in the mass production of food simply elitist, the privilege of people wealthy enough to pay more at the checkout counter? Does fretting about ducks give people a pass on chicken? "Foie gras and lobster are not at the heart of the real tough issues of animal welfare, which are feed lots and pigs and cattle and chickens and how billions of animals are treated," said Michael Pollan author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," which traces the messy back story of our meals. "On the other hand, the fact that we're having this conversation at all--that we're talking about ethics in relation to what we're eating every day--strikes me as a very healthy thing," he said last wee k.