The Ethics of Food

Here's an interesting New York Times piece called
Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too:

“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.

Read it for yourself. In an earlier New York Times piece, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued that...

...people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” ... avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,”... [an] “eternal Treblinka.”

These articles are a mix of "is" and "ought". By "is" I mean the articles describe facts and make empirical claims about the nature of plants and animals that we may not have thought about before. Just what we ought to do in light of this information is a problem for philosophical ethics and ethical reasoning.

“I’m amazed at how fast some of these things happen,” said Consuelo M. De Moraes of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues did labeling experiments to clock a plant’s systemic response time and found that, in less than 20 minutes from the moment the caterpillar had begun feeding on its leaves, the plant had plucked carbon from the air and forged defensive compounds from scratch.

Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

February 23rd, 2010 the Parr Center for Ethics is conducting a panel discussion:

How Should We Eat? Policy and Ethics. Factory farms. Immigrant labor. Sustainability. Food democracy. World Hunger. Access. Environmental impacts. Nutrition. Genetic modification. Organic vs. Conventional. How do we navigate the food industry and make ethical choices about our food consumption? How do we prioritize our ethical concerns? Join a panel of food experts to discuss these questions and determine the issues at stake. This event is free and open to the public. Location: TBA, 6:30 pm.