I have eaten more than my share of Whoppers in my forty-one years. As a teenager I liked them so much I’d worry about whether I could afford another one while still eating the first. As I got older, my concerns centered less on the cost to my wallet than to my waistline. Today, thanks to two new books, I have a new fear: the prospect of everlasting damnation.
Eric Schlosser’s Fast-Food Nation is a frightening and disturbing update of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Spend a few hours with Schlosser and you’ll become more intimately acquainted with your ground beef than you ever wanted to be. Consider the people who get the meat into your waiting fingers. The injury rate among meatpackers is the highest of any US occupation. Every year about one-third of all slaughterhouse workers–roughly 43,000 men and women–suffer an injury or an illness that requires first aid on the job. Given the inevitable exchange of blood and other bodily fluids in which these injuries result, their oppression is your health hazard. The same goes for the burger-flippers behind the grill. Fast-food employees are the largest group of low-paid workers in the United States today, earning on average $5.74 an hour. One-quarter of the workers in the restaurant industry are estimated to earn the minimum wage–a higher proportion than in any other US industry. (No wonder the National Restaurant Association is perhaps this nation’s most vociferous opponent of living-wage laws.) Again, worker oppression results in consumer health peril. Reading Schlosser, we hear stories of teenage workers serving meat after dropping it on the floor, picking their noses into the food, smoking on the job and watching cockroaches and rats feed and defecate on unprepared foods.
A single hamburger often contains beef from dozens up to hundreds of cattle from as many as six countries. If just one morsel becomes infected with the E. coli microbe, the burger can kill you. For the luckier ones, it can result in kidney failure, anemia, internal bleeding, seizure, stroke and coma. As company lawyers pay victims in exchange for their silence, in the past eight years some half-million Americans, mostly kids, have become seriously ill from E. coli infections. Every week, a few of them die.
I’ve not even said a word about the economic and environmental destruction the industry routinely wreaks on the farmland it controls, the neighborhood mom and pop operations it destroys, and the evil mind-games it plays with our children. (The McDonald’s corporation, the world’s largest owner of retail property, is also its leading spender on advertising and marketing, much of it directed at small children.) And forget mad cow.
Still hungry? Peter Singer’s new collection, Writings on an Ethical Life, asks you to think again. Singer, whose musings on “speciesism” single-handedly jump-started the animal rights movement a quarter-century ago, wants to know what right you have to be eating what was once a conscious being in the first place. “All consumers of animal products are responsible for the existence of cruel practices involved in producing them. Our moral responsibility should compel us to avoid hamburgers because every time we eat one we are contributing to a cycle of suffering not only of animals, but also of humans, for the grain used to feed the animals we consume is more than enough to end hunger in many less industrialized and affluent countries.” (If you want stomach-turning evidence of rampant anti-animal sadism in the beef industry, check out Schlosser’s account of a visit to a slaughterhouse “somewhere in the high plains.”)
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All right, let’s say you do decide to transform your life, swearing off not only animals and fish but also dairy. You are now a vegan, and you decide to celebrate by taking your family out to a fancy new neighborhood health-food restaurant serving only the most high-minded meals of vegetables, fruit, nuts and berries. Not so fast, says Singer. The $200 or so you are about to spend on a meal you don’t really need would help transform a sickly 2-year-old into a healthy 6-year-old somewhere in the Third World–offering safe passage through childhood’s most dangerous years. If instead of going out to dinner, you dial either (800) 367-5437 for UNICEF or (800) 693-2687 for Oxfam and give them your credit card number and 200 bucks, that child will live instead of die. If you go out to dinner instead–well, sorry, but the kid is dead.
OK, now let’s say you donated the money–I hope you did–and decide to go out to dinner anyway. Is that enough? Not really, I’m afraid. There are millions more starving kids out there, and I’m guessing you’ve got more than $200 you don’t really need. I know your friends and relatives don’t seem to be giving away their extra money, but most people didn’t resist the Nazis or Stalinists when they had the chance, either. Does that make it right?
Here’s the problem. I can’t answer any of these arguments, but I can ignore them. At least I intend to (except for the $200 one–I did stop in the middle of writing this article to fork over $200 to Oxfam). The trouble seems to be that I’m a massive hypocrite. I make sacrifices for my principles but not, apparently, ones involving hamburgers and steaks. I like them too much, torture or no torture, starving kids or no starving kids, E. coli risk or no E. coli risk.
Being an American, you are probably no better. We are the wealthiest people in all human history, and yet our government does not even come close to meeting the extremely modest United Nations-recommended target of a set-aside of 0.7 percent of GDP to overseas aid agencies. Our piddling 0.1 percent is less than one-third of Japan’s contribution and a tenth of Denmark’s. Don’t tell me that these organizations are inefficient at feeding people. Everybody is inefficient at everything. They are good enough. Singer, a vegan who gives away 20 percent of his salary as a tenured faculty member at Princeton, insists that there is “something incoherent about living a life where the conclusions you came to in ethics did not make any difference to your life.” He’s right. We’re living a morally incoherent life, you and I. And as Schlosser demonstrates ad nauseam, it’s even pretty stupid from the standpoint of our own self-interest. So how do we justify it?
I wish I knew.
