Peter Singer: "The Ethics of What We Eat"

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.

Peter Singer and Richard Dawkins Discuss Animals and Our Society

Richard Dawkins interviews Peter Singer for "The Genius of Charles Darwin", the Channel 4 UK TV program which won British Broadcasting Awards' "Best Documentary Series" of 2008. Buy the full 3-DVD set of uncut interviews, over 18 hours, in the RichardDawkins.net store

Recipe: Banana Pecan Rice Pudding Pie

This is listed in Eat, Drink and be Vegan by Dreena Burton as a breakfast meal, but I think it is a great dessert too!

Makes 4-6 Servings | Wheat-Free

Pudding Ingredients:
1 tbsp arrowroot powder (we got it at Kroger)
2/3 cup coconut milk (regular or light)
1/4 cup brown rice syrup
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 - 1/2 tsp fresh nutmeg
1/4 tsp (rounded) sea salt
3 cups cooked short-grain brown rice (When cooking the rice, I suggest letting it sit longer to make it mushier and less chewy as instructed here)
1 cup ripe (but not overripe) banana, sliced

Topping Ingredients:
1/4 cup pecans, crushed
3 tbsp unrefined sugar
1/4-1/2 tsp cinnamon
1-2 pinches sea salt

1/2- 1 tsp canola oil (for coating pie plate)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 C). In a large bowl, combine arrowroot powder with 3 tbsp coconut milk and whisk until arrowroot is fully dissolved. Add remaining coconut milk and stir until well combined. Whisk in syrup until well combined. Stir in vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt, and then stir in rice and banana. Lightly oil bottom and sides of a 9 and 1/2 inch glass pie plate. Transfer pudding into pie plate. In a small bowl, combine topping ingredients, working mixture with your fingers until crumbly. Sprinkle topping over pudding. Bake for 17-20 minutes, until pudding is bubbly and has thickened. Remove from oven and let cool for about 20 minutes or longer. (The pudding will thicken more as it cools.) Spoon pudding into bowls and serve, topping with a little vanilla non-dairy milk if you like. I also like adding fresh banana slices on top too.

Notes:
• Coconut milk, whether light or regular, gives a buttery richness to this pudding, though you can use any non-dairy milk you like, including rice, soy, almond, or oat. If using vanilla non-dairy milk, you may not need as much brown rice syrup to sweeten the mixture.

Recipe From Eat, Drink and be Vegan by Dreena Burton

Reasons to be Vegan

Coalition to Fight Factory Farming: www.cfff.info

A Pledge to Planet Earth

We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us.
We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins.
We are the breath of the forests of the land, and the plants of the sea.
We are human animals, related to all other life as descendants of the firstborn cell.

Our home, planet Earth, is finite; all life shares its resources and the energy from the sun, and therefore has limits to growth.
For the first time, we have touched those limits.
When we compromise the air, the water, the soil and the variety of life, we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.

Our comfort is paid for by the suffering of millions.

We see that economic activities that benefit the few while shrinking the inheritance of many are wrong. And since environmental degradation erodes biological capital forever, full ecological and social cost must enter all equations of development.

We are one brief generation in the long march of time; the future is not ours to erase.

From dominance to partnership; from fragmentation to connection; from insecurity, to interdependence.

Get Excited and Change Things

Mick Ebeling: The invention that unlocked a locked-in artist
The nerve disease ALS left graffiti artist TEMPT paralyzed from head to toe, forced to communicate blink by blink. In a remarkable talk at TEDActive, entrepreneur Mick Ebeling shares how he and a team of collaborators built an open-source invention that gave the artist -- and gives others in his circumstance -- the means to make art again.

Mick Ebeling founded the Not Impossible Foundation, a nonprofit that develops creative solutions to real-world problems.

"If not now, then when? If not me, then who?"