The dilemma — and disagreement between co-owners — was whether to offer the standard range of sweeteners and whiteners with their coffees, or whether to impose a vision of what counts as healthy additions for coffee. Oversimplifying: should they offer artificial sweeteners or not?

It’s a real-life case. And it sounds like a small matter, but with the recent politicization of and moralizing about food, the question not surprisingly became a bone of contention for the people involved.

My argument is essentially this:
1) The evidence is thin for any health advantage for “real” sugar. In fact, “real” sugar is known to be unhealthy, whereas for artificial sweeteners the question is still up in the air.
2) The quantities involved are tiny, so relax.
3) If it’s even a close call, go for consumer autonomy — the freedom to choose.

That’s not to say that a coffee shop can’t make “all natural” a part of its branding, and choose condiments accordingly. It’s just that no one should confuse that with making a clear-cut ethical decision.

See this blog entry about how artificial insemination has allowed the turkey industry to triple the average size of a turkey over the last 50 years: Give Thanks? Science Supersized Your Turkey Dinner. (The problem for turkeys has to do with limiting their “normal” behaviour. At 30 pounds or more, “It’s difficult for them to actually perform the natural mating act.”)

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Via Marginal Revolution

The only thing I’ll add here is a very brief response to a piece by Michael Pollan, which appeared in NYT Magazine. The piece is called “Vote for the Dinner Party: Is this the year that the food movement finally enters politics?” Pollan’s argument is essentially that Big Ag has too much power, and that voting “Yes” on Prop 37 is a way for voters to show Big Ag who is really boss. I usually like Pollan’s work, but this is a very weak argument. There’s plenty of reason to complain about Big Ag, but passing a bad piece of legislation just to stick it to them is a very bad idea. Food is important, so let’s pass legislation on issues that really matter, grounded in sound reasoning instead.

In a free society, you don’t pass laws requiring other people to change their behaviour unless their current behaviour is doing some harm or violating some right. There is still no evidence that GM foods do any harm, and requiring their labelling does not effectively protect anyone’s right to anything.

As Andrew Potter (no relation to the Mr. Potter mentioned below) points out, there’s a lot more going on here than a tussle over definitions.

What is interesting about the debate as it plays out in this article is that the question of whether these various “synthetics” should be allowed or not is entirely political. That is, Strom goes the entire article without ever confronting what should be the central issue, which is whether any of the controversial ingredients or inputs are healthy, or good for the environment, or contribute to the taste of the product. It’s clearly seen as irrelevant to the debate: the term “sustainability” is never used in the article, which is sort of like writing about the Occupy movement withouth once using the term “inequality”.

To see what Andrew means, check out this passage from the NYT article:

Ingredients like carrageenan, a seaweed-derived thickener with a somewhat controversial health record. Or synthetic inositol, which is manufactured using chemical processes.

Mr. [Michael J.] Potter [a seller of organic foods and an advocate of tougher standards] was allowed to voice his objections to carrageenan for three minutes before the group, the National Organic Standards Board.

“Someone said, ‘Thank you,’” Mr. Potter recalls.

And that was that.

Two days later, the board voted 10 to 5 to keep carrageenan on the growing list of nonorganic ingredients that can be used in products with the coveted “certified organic” label. To organic purists like Mr. Potter, it was just another sign that Big Food has co-opted — or perhaps corrupted — the organic food business.

What the article never makes clear is just what is wrong with carrageenan in food. (Carrageenan is an additive, derived from seaweed, that has been used in foods for hundreds of years.) There’s mention in the article of a “controversial health record” but that’s pretty vague. A quick search online suggests that there are some specific worries, but none of those worries seems, as far as I can tell, to imply that the stuff shouldn’t be considered non-organic or ineligible for inclusion in organic foods.

It’s important to note that this was the result of good old-fashioned hybridization, the kind of cross-breeding of plants that humans have been doing for thousands of years, the kind that has given us pretty much all of the fruits and vegetables that our species has lived on for generations.

But the LA Times mentions that the technologies of laboratory genetic engineering could be used to reverse, in a precise way, this clumsy error. In fact, scientists have done so in the lab, but such reverse-engineered tomatoes are unlikely to make it to grocery store shelves.

But what if — however unlikely, given regulatory hurdles and problems of public acceptance — tomatoes genetically engineered in a way that reversed this error made it onto grocery store shelves? What if we could buy tomatoes genetically engineered to include a gene their tasty ancestors originally had? In a sense, the result would be, far from something “unnatural,” a more authentic tomato than the ones currently available.

The concept of authenticity is a vexed one. For some it has to do with “naturalness.” For some it has to do with pedigree, with where a thing came from. In his terrific 2010 book, The Authenticity Hoax, Andrew Potter suggests that in at least some instances, people regard authenticity as having something to do with being true to some vision of what a thing ought to be. From this point of view, genetically engineering the tomato to reactivate the GLK2 gene would result in a more authentic tomato, one truer to what tomatoes used to be, truer to the tomatoes your great-grandmother used to enjoy as a child.

The main point of the article, however, is to make an attempt to marshall a range of arguments specifically in favour of meat eating, generally. It’s a valiant effort; unfortunately none of the arguments put forward holds any water.

I’ll offer here just a few quick points of rebuttal, before offering some thoughts of my own:

1) The fact that “all animals die” anyway doesn’t count for much, when we are the ones who raise them in vast numbers just in order to kill them. Aside from wild animals killed by hunters, animals we eat only die because we raise them for that purpose.

2) The fact that animals are slaughtered more-or-less humanely is, in itself, a good thing, but does little to respond to several key arguments against eating meat.

3) No, eating meat is not just a “personal choice.” At very least, the environmental impact of meat makes it a social issue. So yes, you personally have to choose, but you have an obligation to choose well. It’s no more a mere personal choice than the choice of whether to drive a gas-guzzling car.

4) No, we don’t need meat, nutritionally. Yes, it’s still in Canada’s food guide, but as the article notes the food guide lists “meat and alternatives” as the relevant category.

5) The fact that there is some evidence some plants can communicate in some ways is not relevant. It doesn’t imply biologically that they can feel pain. Even if (if!) plants can feel pain, we would still have reason to stick to eating whatever things feel pain least, or least intensively, etc. That is, plants would likely still be the least-cruel option.

6) Chimpanzee diet isn’t relevant. Chimps do lots of things that would be considered unethical if we humans did them. Infanticide, for starters.

7) The fact that we’ve got certain physiological features that suggest we are built for hunting and/or eating meat doesn’t mean that eating meat is right. The fact that something is “natural” doesn’t make it healthy or good. Counter-examples are easy to generate.

8) The fact that meat is in certain ways highly nutritious doesn’t count for much, given that it is very well established by now that humans can eat very high-quality diets low or lacking in animal proteins. That goes for competitive athletes as well.

OK, so much for critique. Let’s move on to the arguments against meat.

There are three or four main kinds of ethical objections to meat, different reasons given by different people in advancing either philosophical or casual arguments against eating animals:

1) If animals have rights (e.g., a right to life), then it would be wrong to eat them. Rights are essentially a moral line drawn in the sand. When someone has a right to something, it is generally unethical to violate that right.

2) If animals deserve moral consideration (even in the absence of rights) then we might have an obligation to minimize their suffering. That is, if pain — all pain — is bad, then we should try to reduce it (and not to cause it). Despite efforts to render slaughter more humane, animal agriculture still causes plenty of suffering.

3) The meat industry is notoriously bad environmentally. Millions of acres are dedicated to growing crops to feed animals — and those millions of acres require gazillions of gallons of water and immense quantities of pesticides. Oh, and raising those crops requires immense petroleum inputs. From an energy point of view, meat is an incredibly inefficient way to feed people. So even if animals don’t matter, eating (much) meat might be a failure of your obligations to your fellow humans.

4) Eating large quantities of meat isn’t particularly good for you. That in itself isn’t really an ethical issue — you can do whatever you want to yourself. But how you treat your kids, for example, is certainly an ethical issue. So you might have an ethical obligation to limit your kids’ consumption of meat, just as you have an obligation to limit their consumption of sugary foods.

So, is eating meat ethical? I don’t think it can be declared categorically unethical, because I don’t think the animal rights argument works: there’s no sound philosophical foundation for attributing rights to animals. Feel free to disagree. In fact, I think the environmental argument is the most compelling. But that means that it’s not a black-or-white issue. If you think about meat as an environmental issue, then it’s a matter of degree. You should eat less, rather than more, the same as you should use less, rather than more, gasoline. Is eating any meat at all unethical? No. Are we all obligated to reduce or minimize? I think clearly yes.

Public outrage has followed the revelation that LFTB is finding its way into school lunches and into packaged ground beef. There have been calls for a ban, and calls to require that products containing LFTB be labeled. Both ideas are unwarranted.

(I should point out I have no personal stake in this debate. I haven’t eaten beef in over 20 years. As far as I can tell, the complaint is very roughly that producers of ground beef are mixing in a little bit of what is essentially all-beef hot dog meat.)

Being against the use of LFTB in the food system is more or less equivalent to being in favour of waste. In producing LFTB, the beef industry is being efficient in harvesting every last shred of meat from a carcass. So banning pink slime could even be bad for the planet, since if you ban something used as a filler in ground beef, and if you don’t at the same time reduce the demand for ground beef, you need to raise more cattle in order to meet demand. And beef cattle, as we all know by now, are ecologically pretty bad.

And while we’re on the topic of alternatives, it’s worth reading what the Consumer Federation of America has to say. The CFA has released a statement (PDF) advocating for LFTB. The CFA notes that while LFTB may be “icky”, it is at least safe, and whatever filler hamburger makers use to replace it may well be less safe.

Still, even if LFTB is safe, and good for the planet, what about the right to choose? Why not label products containing LFTB so that consumers can choose? After all, in a free society it’s good for people to have choices, even if they are liable to make bad ones sometimes.

But as I’ve written before, there’s no blanket right to know what’s in the food you’re eating. Wanting something — including some piece of information — isn’t the same as having a right to it. If high-end food companies and retailers want proudly to label their products as “LFTB Free” or “Pink Slime Free,” they have (and should have) the right to. But that’s a far cry from forcing labelling, and even further from banning a product that is yucky, but useful.

When a Dutch scientist declared last month that he could have the world’s first lab-grown hamburger on the grill by October, the Internet was abuzz with “Frankenmeat” discussions….

I’m quoted in the story, noting that the effectiveness of lab-grown meat as a solution to the ethical objections to raising animals depends, naturally enough, on the specific nature of your ethical objections. If your main objection to animal agriculture has to do with animal welfare, or the environment, then lab-grown meat sounds great. If your objection is rather the consumption of animal flesh per se, or to the industrialization of food, then growing meat in a vat isn’t going to satisfy you. That much is pretty obvious.

The more interesting point, I think, has to do with in vitro (lab-grown) meat as a kind of enabling technology. That is, some people may be worried not about “plain” in vitro meat, but about the far-out creations the in vitro meat process might enable. The most obvious possibilities have to do with genetic modification. Once you can grow meat in a lab — grow a vat of meat from just a few cells — then it becomes pretty tempting to do some genetic tinkering. You can imagine lots of reasons for such tinkering: improved nutrition, improved taste, or improved growth rates. But lots of people have objections to such tinkering, either because they worry about the risk of unintended consequences, or because they think it’s some sort of violation of nature.

(Some have made the same point about in vitro fertilization in humans. The worry, they say, is not so much the technology itself, or its most basic uses, but the more controversial procedures — including human genetic modifications — it could enable in the future.)

So in other words, the ethical worries about in vitro meat aren’t all worries about producing or consuming the meat itself.

By the way, though Puzic didn’t ask me directly, my answer is “yes.” Yes, I would eat lab-grown meat, or at least try it!
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I’ve blogged about the ethics of in vitro meat before, including:

• Ethics, Ideology, & Synthetic Meat
• Would You Like Your Synthetic Meat GM or Non-GM?

I’ve repeatedly argued that supporting alternatives to the industrial production of animal products serves the ultimate interest of industrial producers. The decision to eat animal products sourced from small, local, and sustainable farms might seem like a fundamental rejection of big business as usual. It is, however, an implicit but powerful confirmation of the single most critical behavior necessary to the perpetuation of factory farming: eating animals….

One of the most interesting points McWilliams makes here has to do with the complexity of interests in this area. The ethical pros and cons of eating meat — or of different levels or styles of meat consumption — is far from a simple matter of “us vs. them.” The key players here include:

• regular consumers
• self-professed foodies
• big ag
• The Humane Society (and other similar groups)
• industry front groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom

And of course, there’s plenty of diversity of intentions and values within each of those groups. Each of these groups has interests that overlap with those of other groups, but that overlap is always very incomplete. And as McWilliams points out, it’s entirely possible for one group (e.g., big ag) to point to the sliver of overlap that it has with some other group as a way of promoting its own interests.

(For those who don’t know, McWilliams is author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.)

And if the exact source doesn’t matter much, then it doesn’t make much sense to force yourself not to eat things you enjoy just because they contain whichever nutrient (carbs, protein, fats, etc.) some supposed diet guru tells you is evil.

Of course, this study doesn’t prove that certain sources of calories don’t have a biological tendency to promote fat storage, etc. That might still be true. What the study does support is that in the lives of real people trying to lose weight, the source of calories doesn’t matter nearly as much as the total calorie count does. And surely that’s what really matters.

This finding raises interesting ethical questions, naturally, for those who promote particular diets, especially ones that have as their foundation an attempt to demonize particular sources of calories. If you’re promoting a low-carb diet, for example, this new evidence should give you pause.