The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter

Peter Singer and Jim Mason
Rodale (2006)
Reviewed by Richard Kahn
Reprinted with Permission from the Journal for Critical Animal Studies

Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s book, The Way We Eat, examines the unintended negative impacts that individual American’s food choices have upon others. Reducing those impacts, they believe, should be the basis of a new dietary ethics. In that Singer and Mason sense little desire from agribusiness to willingly limit the negative affects of mass agriculture on animals, human health, and the environment (for doing so would incur additional production costs and thus limit profit), and as they also have little faith that the American government will take the initiative to force the food industry to change without massive public pressure, they examine how consumers can be the driving force for reformed market behavior through their demand for ethical foodstuffs. Thus, while the book spends considerable time exposing problems in production and poor agribusiness practices, its main emphasis is on what individual consumers can do immediately to become a small, but potentially powerful, vehicle for transformation en route to the realization of a more just and humane society.

Previous consumer pressure has resulted in the passage of government regulations that ensure food producers provide more information about their products. Food labels must contain ingredient listings and basic nutritional information breakdowns, animal flesh (i.e., “meat”) is quality graded, as are some restaurants, depending on the city in which one lives. But this information is largely provided to allow individual consumers to make more informed choices as to the type and quality of the food they intend to purchase. Nowhere on most supermarket items and restaurant menus is there information provided as to the costs that others must bear for the food products themselves to be produced, distributed, and ultimately consumed or wasted. Thus, The Way We Eat engages in some detective work to find out the actual stories behind the grocery lists of three different families whose food preferences constitute what Singer and Mason call the Standard American Diet (SAD) (p. 15-20), the diet of “conscientious omnivores” (p. 83-91) and veganism (p. 187-196), respectively. Though not mentioned in reviews of the book to date, there is also an unforgettable vignette of the authors dumpster diving with house-squatting freegans in Melbourne (p. 260-68).

 The Way We Eat should serve scholars and teachers in fields such as philosophy, public health, and environmental studies who are looking for a serious but very readable critique of the current state of corporate, industrialized agriculture (i.e., factory farming). The book surveys the ethical reasons for vegan and vegetarian diets, the rise of organic foodstuffs, the movement for locally grown food, and a variety of other food issues from “progressive” restaurants to obesity. Though not an academic text – it is pedagogically pitched towards a popular audience that lacks the knowledge of food issues that many environmental scholars, hardcore vegans, animal advocates, or radical greens will have at least in part – The Way We Eat cites a number of recent studies and relevant literature in the attempt to demonstrate why American dietary habits promote ecological crisis and produce great suffering for both nonhuman and human animals.