Food, Inc. and the Conscientious Omnivore

We spent a lot of time in class the other day talking about Singer’s different classifications of ethical eaters regarding meat. Food, Inc. covered a lot of ground, so I’m only going to focus on the sections on meat, since that’s the subject on which we’ve been discussing and reading. While I didn’t rank the conscientious omnivore as the most ethical of the choices (I don’t know if anyone did), after watching the film I am convinced that they are the most important group in enacting change in the modern practice of meat farming, and, by extension, the most optimal in a utilitarian context.

We discussed how dumpster divers have essentially “opted out” of the entire system by eating the waste that would be there either way. When it comes to the meat industry, Vegans and Vegetarians (for the most part) have essentially opted out as well, along with responsible hunters who get their meat by their own means. The meat industry would obviously not be interested in serving their needs and listening to their preferences since they have no financial interest to do so. The only relevant groups to the multinational meat producers, then, are factory farm omnivores and conscientious omnivores.

The large mega-slaughterhouses that were displayed in the film not only create more hazards to the consumer (i.e., an increased risk of E. Coli) but also inflict upon the animals substantial pains both in their lives and their deaths. The film also showed an alternative to these slaughterhouses in the farmer guy wearing a goofy hat whose farm was substantially more humane and still economically viable. The animals raised and slaughtered under those circumstances were also shown to be healthier for the consumer. The brief section of the film on the growing organic branch of the food industry clearly showed that the large food companies are only as tied to certain practices as they are to the profits those practices produce, as corporations like Wal-Mart were jumping onto the organic bandwagon with both feet. If conscientious omnivores become numerous and vociferous enough to make changing the method of raising and slaughtering animals economically appealing, the same large meat companies that treat animals so deplorably now will change those practices and laugh all the way to the bank. How is that transformation going to happen? Probably very slowly, with media like Food, Inc., which exposes those current practices that the large meat companies take great pains to hide.

The only important things to measure in the utilitarian calculus are pleasures and pains that an action causes. While vegans, vegetarians, responsible hunters, and dumpster divers are all well and good, the vast majority of Americans, the factory farm omnivores, have little interest in converting to any of those. The chance for a good amount of them to become conscientious omnivores, however, seems entirely feasible. That conversion on a large scale, I think, would be the best way to reduce a large amount of pain while increasing pleasure as well, not only for the animals, but also for us.