DawnWatch: NY Times write-up on “The Way We Eat” 6/27/06
July 12th, 2006 5:58 pm by Kelly G.———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch – news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Jun 27, 2006 9:37 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: NY Times write-up on “The Way We Eat” 6/27/06
The Health section of the Tuesday, June 27, New York Times (pg F5) has a positive write-up on two new similarly named books, “What to Eat,” by Marion Nestle and “The Way We Eat,” by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. The article’s headline reads, “On Special At Your Local Supermarket: Moral Choices.”
The review explains that Nestle’s book “focuses on how much food we need, what kind, and how to find it” while in their book “Peter Singer, a bioethicist at Princeton, and his co-author, Jim Mason, an animal rights activist, make the case that food choices are ethical choices.”
We read:
“Dr. Singer and Mr. Mason organize their book around food shopping by three very different households: an Arkansas family eating ‘the Standard American Diet,’ much of it bought at Wal-Mart; a Connecticut family striving to eat only organic food; and a Kansas family of vegans who eat nothing animal-based, not even cheese or eggs.
“Both books end up in the same place on a number of issues.
“Both advise eating organic food. Not because it’s better for you — though it might be — but because it’s better for the environment and far kinder to animals. And both pile up evidence that profit pressures in agribusiness are detrimental to society at large.
“The examples the authors use to bolster their arguments are not for the weak of stomach. Dr. Singer’s and Mr. Mason’s gruesome description of industrial pig farming ought to turn any sentient reader away from anything but organic bacon. As Dr. Nestle puts it, ‘If you think too much about what is involved in the raising and killing of animals, you may find meat hard to eat.’
“In ‘The Way We Eat,’ the description of industrial chicken production actually comes with a warning that it may be ‘disturbing to some readers.’”
The review discusses the impact of the glut of corn syrup on the market, and touches on the environmental impact of factory farming. We read:
“For example, any doubt that industrial pig farming can have disastrous environmental impacts was removed a few years ago, with the failure of a so-called lagoon holding vast amounts of manure from a North Carolina hog factory. The resulting pollution was widespread and long lasting.”
And it returns to animal cruelty issues:
“Dr. Singer and Mr. Mason dismiss the cost argument as insufficient to justify what they regard as chronic cruelty, much of it inflicted on highly intelligent creatures…. And, while it is true that if a pig’s tail is chopped off, another pig cannot gnaw it off, and that chickens whose beaks are seared off cannot peck one another to death, the authors say these steps are unnecessary when pigs are allowed to forage and nest naturally and chickens are not crammed into sheds where each has less than 80 square inches of space — an area smaller than a sheet of typing paper — as is typical in chicken production sheds.”
You can read the whole piece on line at
www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/health/27book.html
It presents a nice opportunity for veg-friendly letters to the editor. The New York Times takes letters at letters [at] nytimes.com
Always include your full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Shorter letters are more likely to be published.
You can read other reviews and buy Singer and Mason’s book on Amazon at tinyurl.com/qdmds. I highly recommend it.
Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi
You are encouraged to forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts but please do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)
—————————————-
