The food we eat, where it comes from & How it is Produced
Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne, Peter Singer takes a hard look at the food we eat, where it comes from, and how it is produced.
Is modern farming compatible with the mainstream view
of how we are entitled to treat animals?
Is there something wrong with a society that doesn't know
how it's most common foods are produced?
"If most urban meat-eaters were to visit an industrial broiler house, to see how the birds are raised, and could see the birds being "harvested" and then being "processed" in a poultry processing plant, some, perhaps many of them, would swear off eating chicken and perhaps all meat." - Peter R. Cheeke, Professor of Animal Science, Oregon State University
The industry has actually made it it's business not to be transparent.
We've bred turkeys to have such large breasts that they are now physically unable to mate. (The typical turkey that is sold in super markets that is.)
99% of the turkeys that Americans eat at Thanksgiving are the result of artificial insemination. Which means there are people whose job it is throughout the week to masturbate male turkeys and collect the semen and there are generally other people whose job it is to take the females, put them in an uncomfortable position where it is possible to inject the semen into them and do that all day with thousands of birds, where the more birds they get through obviously in a day, the more economical it is.
It seems to me that you can take from the idea that we shouldn't be cruel to animals that it is wrong to cause pain to animals without a good enough reason, and yet I think it's clear that they do suffer in these forms of production that I just showed you... There is a lot of evidence that they are suffering.
It's not necessary- we can certainly nourish ourselves in other ways.
So why are we doing it? Well, we enjoy the way meat tastes I suppose and this is the cheapest way to produce it. But I don't think enjoyment of the taste is a good enough reason to justify the amount of suffering that the animals endure. If enjoyment is a good enough reason to justify making animal suffering, then why were we so hard on Michael Vick (the quarterback who was convicted of dog fighting)- no doubt the fans who go to dog fights enjoy the dog fights. And, there might be lots of fans and only a few dogs who suffer, so why is their enjoyment in some way doesn't justify the suffering, but the enjoyment of the way animal meat tastes is supposed to justify the much longer and drawn out suffering of the animals involved.
