Growers and Grocers

Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation created the modern animal rights movement, and he remains an influential thinker about livestock treatment and other ethical eating issues.

Salon.com interviews Singer today, touching on a number of issues familiar to Growers and Grocers readers: factory farms, the cost of food, and myths about the benefits of local foods. He argues against buying local, at least as a universal rule, because it ignores larger global issues:

Other things being equal, if your food is grown locally, you will save on fossil fuels. But other things are often not equal. California rice is produced using artificial irrigation and fertilizer that involves energy use. Bangladeshi rice takes advantage of the natural flooding of the rivers and doesn’t require artificial irrigation. It also doesn’t involve as much synthetic fertilizer because the rivers wash down nutrients, so it’s significantly less energy intensive to produce. Now, it’s then shipped across the world, but shipping is an extremely fuel-efficient form of transport.

Some of his arguments induce eye-rolls, as when he compares livestock to the Jews in Nazi Germany, but he offers some thought-provoking ideas nonetheless.