[I submitted this book review article to the Globe and Mail a while back; they decided not to run it, so I'll post it here.]Should humans eat other animals? The argument continues unabated, and continues to find rich expression in the world of books. Every season brings something new, from philosophical and political treatises, to cookbooks, to personal accounts of culinary experience, to cultural and anthropological studies. Together, these three recently-published books offer something of all those.
BY PETER SINGER, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY YUVAL HARARI (HARPER COLLINS, 348 PAGES)
No one has done more than Peter Singer to persuade human animals to shift from eating other sentient animals to eating plants. The arguments for consuming less meat and dairy—or none at all—have only gotten stronger since the landmark first edition of Singer’s Animal Liberation appeared in 1975. Each year brings new studies showing that a plant-based diet can offer extraordinary health benefits, and is in myriad ways better for the environment. Singer’s substantially revised and updated new edition, Animal Liberation Now, may well be the twenty-first-century’s most important book on the relationship between humans and other species—just as the original was the most important late twentieth-century book on the topic. In the new edition Singer reviews recent developments in philosophy and within various institutions (notably, the Catholic Church), and he details the ways in which animal agriculture contributes hugely to climate change. He debunks many misconceptions-not least of all the notion that the Amazon is being deforested in order to grow soybeans that will be consumed as tofu, and the suggestion that switching to a plant-based diet might cause more rather than less suffering (on the grounds that plants as well as animals may be capable of feeling). As Singer points out, “77% of global soy production is fed to animals and thus converted to meat and dairy products…. It’s not tofu that is driving deforestation but the meat and dairy industries.” It follows that, if it is the case that plants can feel pain, “those who eat meat are responsible for the destruction of vastly more plants than vegans are.”
Much of Singer’s classic work remains unchanged in the new edition. His extraordinarily insightful historical overview of the ways in which we humans have rationalized our mistreatment of other species remains substantively the same, as does his overview of the horrific realities of today’s factory farming. Gone, though, are the photographs documenting those realities that were a feature of previous editions. No doubt it is deemed more important these days to shield the sensibilities of the reader from horrific photographic evidence than it is to use images (as well as words) to draw attention to the animals’ suffering. I suspect, though, that the photographs included in previous editions played a real part in shocking readers out of their complacency; certainly they did for me when I first read Animal Liberation in the early 1990s.
Singer is often imagined by non-philosophers to be an animal rights activist. What he in fact argues is that we must recognize other sentient creatures’ capacity to feel (and to suffer), and that we are thus obligated to take their interests into account, and treat them well. “The language of rights is a convenient political shorthand that [becomes] even more valuable in the era of the eight-second soundbite,” he writes, “but it is not essential to the argument for a radical change in our attitude toward animals.” That “eight-second soundbite” phrase, incidentally, is one of Singer’s many small updates; in the previous two editions of the book, he wrote instead of “the era of thirty-second TV newsclips.”
BY MARIE KACOUCHIA (THE EXPERIMENT PUBLISHING, 192 PAGES)
People often imagine that it’s mainly university-educated white people who adopt a plant-based diet; nothing could be further from the truth. In the US, for example, about 8% of African Americans are now vegan—more than double the percentage of whites. And interest in plant-based diets has been growing worldwide—as is reflected in the tremendous outpouring of cookbooks focused on vegan soul food, vegan Korean food, vegan Mexican dishes, and so on. One of the most successful recent offerings is Marie Kacouchia’s Vegan Africa: Plant-Based Recipes from Ethiopia to Senegal, which appeared late last year; it’s made it onto many “Best of” lists. Kacouchia explains in her introduction that one of her aims is “to show that moving toward a plant-based diet doesn’t have to be boring or restrictive”—and in that she surely succeeds; the dishes are wonderfully varied, even though most are easy to make with readily available ingredients.
The title is slightly misleading—it might be taken to suggest that the recipes represent only an east-west spectrum, whereas southern Africa is also well represented here. For Kacouchia (who claims two homelands herself, France and the Ivory Coast), researching and writing the book was in part a way of reconnecting with the Ivory Coast culture she had left as an eight-year-old child. In all, she draws on the culinary traditions of over a dozen nations. In some cases, the dishes are entirely traditional; in others she has adapted and combined to create original recipes. Two that my partner and I have tried and particularly recommend: creamy carrot-ginger soup and "Red Red"--Ghanian Red Stew.
BY JAMIE LOFTUS (A FORGE BOOK / TOR PUBLISHING, 302 PAGES)
Like Peter Singer's recent book, Jamie Loftus's recent book has been the subject of a feature interview on CBC Radio’s Sunday Magazine. There, though, the similarities end. Unlike Animal Liberation, Loftus’s Raw Dog is something of a muddle—interesting and entertaining at times, but disorganized and poorly argued. “Hot dogs,” Loftus writes, “are the kind of American that you know there is something deeply wrong with but still find endearing.” Readers may find the hot dog less endearing after reading Loftus’s descriptions of how hot dogs are made, how workers in the sausage factories suffer, and how the animals whose less desirable parts go into hot dogs are treated. “The choice not to eat meat is the correct one,” she concedes, but she gives little space to any reflection on that conclusion, which she does not allow to interfere with her project of sampling varieties of hot dog across America. “If you’ve got the stomach to eat it,” she writes, “then you should know who suffers for you to do so”—as if knowing the truth were somehow enough, and humans have no obligation to consider changing what they do on the basis of what they know. Strangely, Loftus seems entirely uninterested in vegetarian or vegan variants of the hot dog.
When the underpinnings of an ideological position have been knocked away, as Peter Singer writes of the rationalizations humans have traditionally advanced for using and abusing other species, sometimes “the ideological position will just hang there, defying the logical equivalent of the laws of gravity.” In the case of our “attitudes towards animals,” he suggests, that is exactly what “seems to have happened.” It would be hard to find a book that illustrates this point any better than does Loftus’s Raw Dog.
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