I had the good fortune spend a bit of time with Professor Singer when I was in Melbourne and starting to work on a story on animal welfare in China. I read his seminal book Animal Liberation at that time and, more recently, The Ethics of What We Eat, and his views have really influenced me. One thing I was struck by in the introduction to Animal Liberation was the fact that Professor Singer isn’t a particular animal lover per se—he just feels strongly that our views on animals are a form of speciesism that we need to rethink. His views made me question the way I eat, something that has been an ongoing process. Lately I’ve been reading reviews of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” and I was struck by something I read by him in an essay on the Huffington Post. He talked about how eating ethically doesn’t have to be a zero sum game—you can strive to eat ethically without going vegan, or even fully vegetarian. He compares it to an environmentalist who accepts that he/she will sometimes drive in a car. That was really an epiphany for me. People sneer at the term, but I like the idea of the conscientious omnivore and that is what I strive for these days, trying to avoid eating meat that has been intensively raised.

I’d love to do a Junta on this issue. People so frequently just snicker or denigrate these ideas, but I think they are being defensive and there is a lot to explore philisophically about it and it has such a direct impact on our health and how we live.