Willfully Ignorant: Exploring the Issue of Ethical Food Choices

Learning "good" and "bad" and "right" and "wrong" used to be a pretty clear-cut business. Every Disney movie had its black-clad villain and every cartoon had its morally consistent hero. However, the version of morality presented to us in our youth is not the whole story. The moral construct by which we function is in constant flux, due to changes in society and our personal experiences. Determining the ethical way to act, even in the basic act of eating, is not very clear-cut at all.

Indeed, ethics proves to be more than a choice between arbitrary definitions of "right" and "wrong"-it involves complicated decisions between vastly complex issues. Unfortunately, the easiest (and often selected) response to facing the perils of making moral decisions is to make no decision at all: to accept the futility of perfecting the world and declare that because we cannot fix everything-we shouldn't bother fixing anything at all. It is through such an attitude that serious ethical issues remain unconfronted, and are therefore exacerbated.

Individuals must avoid the easy choice to remain inactive despite having the ability to act ethically and the knowledge to know that they ought-regardless of whether or not the actions they choose to take are completely comprehensive from a moral standpoint. When discussing or attempting to justify "unethical" behavior, it is important to draw the line between those who are genuinely uneducated on issues with ethical implications, and those who merely elect not to act on the education they have received; that is to say, there are the "ignorant," and then there are the "willfully ignorant."

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However, although individuals can be categorized as either "educated" or "uneducated," it is perhaps more appropriate to align the human race along a sort of ignorance gradient, ranging from I had absolutely no idea that this was happening to I read everything from Pollan's Journalism, to Singer's Philosophy, to McKibben's Environmental Expertise on the subject. I recently traversed from some in-between place (perhaps something along the lines of Oh, yeah, I think I heard something about that) to the upper end of the gradient described above.

From personal experience, I can say that this isn't the most graceful of journeys. But despite my state of existence six weeks ago being equal parts ignorance and bliss, I can't say that I'd trade it in for the knowledge I have now. The question of whether or not individuals ought to be further and more broadly educated on the array of moral compunctions now presented to us at the dinner table has more-or-less been answered by society with a staggering outpouring of information, contention, and opinion on what consumers should concern themselves with when they choose what to or what not to eat.

It is through the exploration of such information that the previously un-or-less-educated individual becomes tempted to escape making tough moral decisions by "playing dumb" (Ozeki 334). The first thing one is confronted with on the path from ignorance to knowledge is the sheer amount of moral components that come into play in the matters of food and eating. But along with each of these ethical issues, there also exist possible and often proposed actions that consumers can take in an attempt to remedy the situation.

The most prominent and well published of these issues include: world hunger, personal/societal health, animal rights, worker's rights, and environmental issues. In her article "The Changing Significance of Food," Margret Mead argues: "We cannot live with hunger and malnutrition in one part of the world while people in another part are not only well nourished, but over-nourished" (176). It is difficult to argue against Mead on this point, as there is clearly an ethical failing in a world where plentifully produced food exists alongside the continued presence of starving people.

Consumers can take action to end world hunger by eating less meat, which is an inefficient way of obtaining energy, by not supporting food and other products dependent on the production of biofuels, as they use valuable crops for uses other than consumption, and by encouraging the responsible advancement of biotech, which increases the rate and efficiency of food production (Renton). America's premier food academic Michael Pollan draws attention to another moral issue: the dominance of food corporations that create "food systems that can cheat by exaggerating their energy density, tricking a sensory apparatus that evolved to deal with markedly less dense whole foods," and have led to the food-related health issues, such as type II diabetes, that abound in our society.

Although it may be the corporations that are presenting us with these poor food options, it is our buying power that supports and fosters their operation and, as Barbra Kingsolver argues, the deference of blame to big, bad corporations has become less defensible in today's food economy, which now offers more nutritious and sustainable options (228). By encouraging the development and proliferation of healthier food products, consumers can create a more positive eating environment for themselves and for future generations.

Philosopher Peter Singer uses utilitarianism to make a moral argument against the consumption of meat and, in particular, meat produced in factory farms. Through the "principle of equal consideration of interests," he reasons that the pains, pleasures, and lives of animals—as sentient beings ought to be considered in an egalitarian manner in relation to human beings (62). That is, it is morally indefensible to subject animals to a lifetime of pain and displeasure only to kill them, as most factory farms across America do.

The pleasure experienced through human consumption of meat does not even close to outweigh the collective amount of pain experienced by animals, making meat eating from factory farms a huge utilitarian no-no. Singer concedes that "in some circumstances when animals lead pleasant lives, are killed painlessly, their deaths do not cause suffering to other animals and the killing of one animal makes possible its replacement by another that would not otherwise have lived the killing of animals without self-awareness is not wrong," but also points out that the application of this circumstance is not entirely practical, as to ensure all of these conditions were met would be very difficult for consumers. What Singer proposes to consumers, then, is to lead a life of limited meat eating, and to indulge in carnivorism only when one is certain that the meat hails from an animal who lived a life without suffering.

Political organizer Sally Kohn suggests a different way of thinking through the ethics of eating. Her focus more on people than animals, Kohn distains that "so- called foodies who are outraged at the idea of inhumanely raised pigs are remarkably uninterested in the inhumane work conditions of those who help get their pork to the table." She further cites that "an estimated 79 percent of food-service workers don't have paid sick days, 52 percent don't receive health and safety training from their employers, 35 percent experience wage theft on a weekly basis, and 75 percent have never had an opportunity to apply for a better position" (Kohn).

Kohn, then, suggests that individuals place more concern and attention on the condition of the human beings who work with our food, rather than the condition of the animals who become our food. Again, consumers play an ethical role in this issue by exerting their buying power in a way that either supports or discourages food produced by these poorly treated service workers. The last primary moral consideration implicit in the act of eating is the result of industrial food production on the environment.

In his article "The Only Way to Have a Cow," environmentalist Bill McKibben explains that with the production of meat, "[t]here's the carbon that comes from cutting down the forest to start the farm, and from the fertilizer and diesel fuel it takes to grow the corn, there's the truck exhaust from shipping cows hither and yon, and most of all the methane that emanates from the cows themselves," which all increase methane emissions and accelerate global warming.

Consumers who buy and eat unsustainably produced processed foods and factory-farmed meats are in effect endorsing their production, and are therefore implicated in the ethical consequences on the environment and future generations. Indeed, in all of the moral implications of eating discussed above, consumers play a key role in perpetuating the moral trends (good and bad) that are present in our society. It cannot be said that the individual consumer is incapable of taking action to effect any of these issues in a significant way, for it is the consumer who ultimately holds the power in determining what and how products are produced.

In the realm of ethical eating, there are the ignorant consumers and the willfully ignorant consumers. The ignorant will inevitably continue acting in ethically undesirable ways if they don't learn otherwise, but the willfully ignorant may continue living their morally questionable lifestyles merely because they are struck by qualm after qualm in the mere act of obtaining dinner. The regression of the morally informed into conscious ignorance is certainly understandable, but is it justifiable?

Journalist and English professor Eric Alterman expresses the "willfully ignorant" attitude in his response to Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Peter Singer's Writings on Ethical Life by lamenting the difficulty of making morally sound food choices in an environment riddled with many diverse and at times contradictory ethical issues. Alterman says of competing ethical claims: "Here's the problem. I can't answer any of these arguments, but I can ignore them. At least I intend to...

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." Indeed, it is often difficult for us, as Americans (and as human beings), to be motivated by information that doesn't have a direct effect on us. Our difficulty in combating willful ignorance is only increased by the complexity of ethical eating, and the many factors that we must consider when moralizing about our food.

As Alterman says, "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?" An individual attempting to find coherence in our incoherent world, and to take action despite various competing values is likely to ask: Is it possible to eat in a way that gives equal part ethical consideration to people, animals, and the environment? And, if it is possible, can it be done in a way that doesn't require ceaseless agonizing over each and every meal? There are no simple, always-applicable answers to these questions.

Many of the arguments made concerning the various ethical issues in eating present a solution that includes some form of pastoral farming, or at least a movement against industrial, factory farming, as well as substantially decreased meat consumption. Buying food from healthy, sustainable sources might be the best first-step in eating ethically. However, when trying to develop a truly comprehensive solution to the moral dilemmas presented by eating, we would end up in a similar position to Singer in his endeavored qualification of meat eating-stringing along a lengthy series of conditions, whose summation result in a very difficult and unlikely circumstance to obtain.

That is to say, ideally, in order to eat ethically we would have to purchase and consume foods that do not encourage a disparate food economy, decrease the quality of health in our society, cause animals suffering, diminish worker's rights, or harm the environment. Such an exhaustive list of "musts" is, admittedly, a pretty intimidating thing for consumers to have to deal with every time they get hungry. But does the difficulty of being entirely ethical excuse one from acting in an ethical manner at all?

This is perhaps the simplest moral question presented yet, and it certainly has the simplest answer: No. Regardless of how incomplete one's effort is to improve the world-be it ending world hunger, bettering personal health, securing the rights of workers or animals, or preserving the environment for future generations—the fact that an effort is made at all endows one with a moral integrity that would be altogether absent if that effort were abandoned for the ease and irresponsibility of a conscious ignorance.

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