Peter Singer: How to Make Ethical Food Choices and Respect Animal Rights

Key takeaways:

• The reason why we eat meat is because we evolved with a taste for high density food. From most of our evolutionary history, we had a struggle to get enough food to be healthy, to thrive, to be active and to reproduce and bring up our children. So we developed a taste for meat in particular because it is a high density food and if you could catch and kill a large animal and eat it, then you were meeting your nutritional needs for some time. We still have this taste for meat because evolution works slowly and it doesn’t take account of the fact that now we can walk into a supermarket and choose for a wide variety of foods, including nourishing ourselves very well by plant based foods.

• We are price conscious, hence why factory farming is a real thing. Factory farming is the combination of the idea that we want animal products, that we’d like to eat them and we want them as cheaply as possible. And factory farming has developed over roughly the past century to produce these foods more cheaply, to apply technology to them, to apply basically industrial production processes to them, standardizing things, getting cheap labor. This has created a disaster of  a situation for the animals, for the climate, and for our own health.

• Factory farming causes harm to local people too. Anybody who lives near a factory farm knows that they’re terrible neighbors. For one thing, when the wind blows to you from them, the manure smell is awful. They also attract millions of flies which are around your place and of course they also pollute the water around. It also runs when there’s unusual rainfall. It runs into the rivers, kills thousands of fish, makes the rivers unswimable.