I believe that there will come a day when future generations will look back on their carnivorous ancestors and shake their heads – just as we shake our heads when we look back at earlier, more primitive cultures that pursued war, slavery, or violence against those who were different from them. But to shake ones head is not to say “I don’t understand how they could do that.” We do understand. We understand that our forbears lived in an earlier stage of civilization wherein their behaviors were acceptable. We don’t judge Thomas Jefferson a bad man because he owned slaves. Nor will our heirs look back at our carnivorous culture without an understanding of our times.

Evolution is an unstoppable force. As the human soul evolves it will eventually shed the remnants of density created by our belief in scarcity. One can lead a life premised upon a reverence for all forms of consciousness without sacrificing any personal happiness. Yet I understand that the idea of venturing into the unknown world of vegetarianism is frightening for those who are accustomed to meat. No doubt many Southern slaveholders in 1861 could not imagine having personal happiness without their slaves. Yet all of us who enjoy happiness today without owning slaves can see how little one has to do with the other.

This issue evokes such intense emotional outrage, because it is unbearable for people to accept the premise that they might be wrong about eating animals. Many people who become vegetarian for moral reasons do so because their eyes are opened in an instant. And once you see the truth of the premise you can never go back. But we cannot judge anyone who has not yet arrived at this insight. Because getting to that insight is a spiritual and ethical journey.

It is, however, the journey that those on the left are already on. I am always struck by the hypocrisy of those who call themselves “pro life.” While they defend the life of a fetus – they have no hesitation to go to war, they believe in the death penalty, and they gorge themselves with animals killed for their pleasure without the slightest compunction. A true, spiritual, deeply felt reverence for life will lead those who achieve it to the same conclusion—it is inappropriate to kill humans or animals under any circumstances. Death is inevitable, killing is not.

Many people will instantly construct straw arguments, presenting theoretical moral choices from which they will conclude that sometimes it is proper to kill—and from this they will make the leap that killing animals for food is fine. ‘Everybody eats meat,’ they will think, so how can it be wrong. The morality of a given moment in history is essentially democratic. The majority sets the moral standard. And yet, we can see the circle of inclusion that Mr. Singer describes moving ever outward. There is no stopping it. It is evolution.

In fact, it's only about 150 miles from San Francisco, in the northern Central Valley above Sacramento. Has this guy ever looked at a map? His argument about shipping California rice MIGHT make sense for a consumer in New York, but San Francisco? It doesn't make any sense.

Peter Singers arguements for not eating locally is flawed. Singer brings up the issue of Rice and the different systems that are used by two farmers a California Farmer and a Bangladeshi farmer and contrasts the system that they use in order to produce the rice. What fails in this argument is the source of the local food movement. Know your farmer, and understand the system they use. Singer tries to pin the local food movement to the fact that you will buy food solely from the label of origin on the product. When people buy locally they have a good idea about the source of their food and know the farmers. I live in Wisconsin and we are surrounded by industrial Corn agriculture, I don't consider it a local purchase when i stop by my local corn farmer who is farming over 10,000 acres of land with harmful pesticides and monoculture and pick up a bushel of corn to make tamales with. Obviously the eating locally movement strives for more then just mileage in its ethics. I know the farmers i buy my food from, I see there farms and know how the raise their products, i trust them. So in the end the usage of a sustainable locally grown product is many times more efficient then a product that is shipped from 10,000 miles away.

Secondly as agriculture becomes a global product that is shipped from different countries the most powerful element of the the agro business will have its way. The people who sell the seed, the pesticides/herbicides and the equipment. Where the real money is made. These people will move into the markets like Bangladesh and start to control the system like they have in the US. They will destroy the sustainable systems that have been set up by thousands of years of work and implement modern systems that leave the farmers in debt and destroy the land. Monoculture and fossil fuel based systems will become the norm and we will be buying our chemically raised foods from bangladesh instead of California. Already you see this happening with the control of seed markets and the work that agro-business has done in convincing other governments to modernize their agriculture systems. The only reason that California even competes on the level of food prices is because of subsidized water and immigrant labor. If we start buying our food globally it will only in the end make the the price of labor go down for those who need it most. Singers argument about buying globally will only create a system that further destroys itself. The tenant of local food is too create systems that help everyone and it helps no one to globalize the food market.

Another flaw in Singer's argument is that he uses a grain as an example instead of a more perishable product like strawberries or even Asparagus. Grains are incredibly efficient to ship and move long distances. They have long storage lives are harvested mechanically and is harvested at one particular time. This system does allow for utilization of the most efficient means of shipping, such as trains and ship freight. But when you have a product that is perishable you have to use much less efficient systems to ship them out and get them into the consumers hands. They are harvested in much less efficient methods (mostly using marginalized labor and unethical practices). Because of this the methods used are many times Truck Freight and air freight which uses incredible amounts of fossil fuels. The agriculture systems have destroyed land many times over because of harmful farming practices that have no accountability to the consumer or government regulations. The only systems of accountability that has been set up are the organic standards which are weak at best. Then many times the product such as tomato is shipped to a processing plant that uses ethanol to turn them red which again is an inefficient usage of natural resources. When we eat asparagus or blueberries grown in argentina that is flown up and then trucked out to different grocery stores versus the local asparagus we are eating thousands of times more efficiently. I do think that grains have a much greater likely hood of being globalized and ethical using systems such as a stronger fair trade standards but for produce our choice is local.

Singer points out that we can help the kenyan farmer by buying from him even though he only recieves pennies back on his labor. I think that this is the greatest flaw in the globalized food system. We are not helping him and his utilitarian structure here is compromised. Because there is no way that a Kenyan farmer should be using the best land to grow food for americans. Land and farmers should grow food for their own people. The two cents he receives back is nothing in comparison to the amount of food he could be growing for his own country even continent in this situation. In countries like Indonesia where the majority of the production is shipped out to other countries and little is left for the poorest of those countries we are really hurting those countries by buying our food from them. The situation is such that we buy the food from these countries (many times destroying the land) then we give aid back to these countries in the form of US subsidized corn. What logic does that have. The american farmer is priced out of the market buy a cheaper globalized product then the US government provides subsidies that go back to the Kenyan poor instead of each market taking care of their own.

We can't expect that these issues will be taken care of through our consumer dollars alone but rather we must look for political answers that hold these agro-businesses accountable for their actions instead of just trying to create consumer labels.