Three Recent Books with Something to Say about What We Eat

[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.

Animal Liberation Now

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.”

Vegan Africa: Plant-Based Recipes from Ethiopia to Senegal

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.

Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs

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.

Canada's Green Party - Which Way Forward?

In his Nov. 8 Globe and Mail column, Gary Mason puts forward the interesting argument that the Green Party of Canada should either merge with the NDP or “try to build a broader, more serious platform that is palatable to a greater cross-section of Canadians.” By taking this latter path, Mason suggests, “the Greens in Germany reinvented themselves” to become a major player on that country’s political scene.

Let’s look more closely at the German experience. The Greens in that country have indeed been riding high in the polls, and they have indeed put forward a broad, serious platform. But have they done so primarily in the way that Mason suggests—by watering down their environmentalism in order to make themselves “more attractive to centrist voters”? That's highly debatable.

The German Greens recognize—as, in Canada, even the Green Party is sometimes hesitant to do—that fighting climate change and protecting our future isn’t only a matter of reducing the production and consumption of fossil fuels. In particular, they recognize that industrial animal agriculture is damaging to human health in a wide variety of ways, and is responsible for a very significant percentage of global warming. Here are some highlights from the German Green Party’s set of agricultural policies (which together form a central part of their overall program):

We will replace intensive factory farming over the next twenty years by livestock welfare-centred husbandry. We will enforce higher animal welfare standards by law, based on the needs of animals, and on ending agonising breeding techniques and intensive animal farming. … We will restructure Europe’s tax billions to ensure that environmental protection and animal welfare become new income opportunities for farmers, because the new agriculture will depend on these farmers.

A German Green party spokesperson recently confirmed that the party supports increased taxes on meat consumption, with the proceeds being directed to improving animal welfare. In all this, the German Greens are considerably bolder than the Green Party in Canada—which is currently the only major Canadian party to engage at all seriously with the damage done by industrial agriculture. (The NDP echoes the Liberals, the Conservatives, and the Bloc in their enthusiastic defence of the status quo in the Canadian agriculture sector—including massive subsidies to animal agriculture.)

A few years ago things were different for the Greens in Germany; in 2013 their support fell dramatically when they proposed a once-a-week Veggie Day, on which cafeterias would be required to offer only vegetarian choices. The change in the party’s fortunes is partly a result of having pulled back on coercive policies of that sort. But it’s also a result of real changes in public opinion. Germans may still be opposed to any party trying to tell them they can’t eat meat on any given day. But many seem no longer to be opposed to putting a price on the damage done by industrial animal agriculture.

Slowly—ever so slowly—Canadians may be starting to move in the same direction. A 2018 survey by Sylvain Charlebois of Canadians’ eating habits reported that 7.1% of Canadians self-identify as vegetarian, with over 2% of those being vegan. (By comparison, just 3% self-identified as vegetarian in 2003.) A further 10.2% described themselves as “flexitarian” or as having a “primarily vegetarian diet”; that’s over 17% either vegan, vegetarian, or flexitarian. And of those Canadians who do eat meat, fully 51% reported that they were willing to consider reducing their meat intake.

I would argue that the Canadian Greens should be gently encouraging Canadians to move in just those sorts of directions. The Greens should take the lead not only in calling for an end to government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, but in doing the same when it comes to animal agriculture. And the new Green leader (whoever he or she may be) should speak to us as individuals as well, pointing out that we’re all in this together, that our governments can’t do it all, and that, just as we should all do what we can to reduce our impact when it comes to driving, flying, and heating our homes, so too should we do what we can for our environment, our health, and our children’s future when it comes to choosing what we eat and drink, what we wear, how we live our lives. The German Greens have been doing just that—and public opinion now seems finally to have caught up with them.

Deforestation

I sent the letter below to The Globe and Mail this past week after reading an excellent column by Paul Shapiro. The letter was published in yesterday's paper (along with a very good letter by Anna Pippus, calling for governments to play a much more active role on these issues).

Re If You Don’t Want to Ditch Meat For your own Health, Do It To Avoid Pandemics (April 24): Paul Shapiro’s piece on the many good reasons we should transition away from eating animals mentions the UN’s conclusion that 15% of greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to animal agriculture. But the relevant UN Food and Agriculture Organization study looked only at the agricultural operations themselves. An additional 10-15% is attributable to deforestation, which is primarily also related to animal agriculture; we cut down “carbon sink” forests primarily in order to grow crops that are to be fed not to us, but to animals we will then eat.

When we obtain our nourishment directly from plant sources, far, far fewer forests are destroyed; if we transition away from eating animal products, the net positive effect on climate change will be closer to 30% than 15%.

Voting Green

I've just posted the message below on the Facebook page of Vegans of Nanaimo. (That's a group that had a little over 400 members a year or so ago; now it's well over 1,000--in a city of fewer than 100,000.)

For the past several months I’ve been doing everything I can to lobby two Canadian political parties—the Green Party and the New Democratic Party—on issues relating to the harms caused by animal agriculture to the environment, to human health, and of course to non-human animals.

A couple of weeks ago I urged members of this group to come out to a town-hall style NDP meeting at which federal leader Jagmeet Singh would be speaking. As those of you who were there will know, both he and local candidate Bob Chamberlin spoke at some length about the environment. As is usual for New Democrats, however, they said nothing in that context about animal agriculture. The flyers I started to distribute on this issue were collected by an NDP staffer almost as fast as I could hand them out. When I spoke with Singh one-on-one following the meeting—the second time I had spoken to him on this issue—he said he was thinking about it; he gave no indication that his thoughts might translate into policy recommendations for the party anytime soon. Over the phone, a staffer said local candidate Bob Chamberlin would phone me about this issue; he never has. I had also written Singh (and two other NDP MPs who I thought might have an interest in this area) over 6 months ago; there has been no response whatsoever from any of them.

Over the same period I’ve been in touch with Green Party people; what a contrast! When I wrote Green Party shadow cabinet members last fall on these issues, several responded thoughtfully and at length. Elizabeth May herself eventually wrote to say that she agreed that “we must transition to a more plant-based diet as part of the fight to combat climate change.” And this week local candidate Paul Manly wrote, saying that he “definitely would support policies to encourage Canadians to eat a plant based diet.”

The Green Party as a whole is still very far from fully recognizing the importance of these issues. As my email correspondence with Green shadow cabinet members made clear, there are many in the party who regard it as much more important to support organic meat and dairy operations than it is to encourage Canadians to move away from animal products, period. And there are many Greens too who are reluctant to acknowledge the importance of animal agriculture (and associated deforestation) as a key driver of climate change; under the heading “Solving the Climate Crisis,” the Green Party’s website still says absolutely nothing about animal agriculture and the degree to which it contributes to climate change. At the moment there is nothing on the party’s website supporting policies to encourage Canadians to eat fewer animal products, and more plants and vegetables. But however slowly, the Green Party does seem to be moving in the right direction on these issues—and certainly that seems to be the case for Party leader Elizabeth May and local candidate Paul Manly. Moreover, the Greens are clearly open to hearing us—and to welcoming us into the Green Party and encouraging us to try to influence the shaping of future policies. The NDP, on the other hand, does not seem to be moving at all on these issues—and they don’t even seem willing to listen.

I first joined the NDP in 1978, and I’ve volunteered for the party in dozens of elections since then. I ran as a federal candidate for the New Democrats in 2000. But gradually over the past couple of decades (I started changing my meat-eating habits in the late 1990s, and went vegan in 2011) I’ve come more and more to appreciate just how important and just how interconnected these issues are. On this network of issues—arguably the most important we face today—the NDP has failed completely. I’ll be voting for Paul Manly and the Greens in the May 6 by-election; I urge you to do the same.