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Food and Drink

Death Aquatic

Can science tell us how chefs should treat lobsters? The Independent this week implies it can. It seems that this is important to diners who want reassurance that their dinner has not been killed in a “barbaric” manner.

Science may of course discover the quickest or easiest method of killing. Norwegian researchers in particular have dedicated significant time to this research. Of methods including ice, nitrogen gas, freezing, gradual or rapid heating, piercing of ganglia, salt baths and carbon dioxide gas, apparently electricity is best. A commercial product, “Crustastun” offers the ability to replicate this in the kitchen. However, the retail cost of £2,500, puts this out of the reach of all but the richest, most gadget obsessed or humanitarian seafood lovers. But there is a more basic question: do lobsters really feel pain?

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Should we rid the world of carnivores if we could?

by Alexandre Erler

In a provocative piece for the New York Times, Jeff McMahan remarks that cruelty pervades the natural world: he stresses the vast amount of suffering and the violent deaths inflicted by predators on their innocent victims. He then invites us to consider a daring way of preventing such suffering and deaths: “Suppose that we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones.  Or suppose that we could intervene genetically, so that currently carnivorous species would gradually evolve into herbivorous ones, thereby fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy.  If we could bring about the end of predation by one or the other of these means at little cost to ourselves, ought we to do it?” McMahan’s conclusion, which he describes himself as “heretical”, is that we do have a moral reason to desire the extinction of carnivorous species, and that it would be good to bring about their extinction if this could be done “without ecological upheaval involving more harm than would be prevented by the end of predation”.

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Morality: what’s disgust got to do with it?

Kathleen
Taylor has got an interesting recent piece in the Guardian about the importance
of the emotion of disgust for our moral lives. “If you had a dog”, she asks,
“and it died a natural death, how would you feel about roasting and eating it?”
Most of us would be revulsed by such an idea. And yet by hypothesis we
would not be causing the dog any harm whatsoever; suppose also we made sure
that the meat was adequately prepared so that it did not pose a health risk to
us and our children. Why should eating the dog raise any moral issue at all?

 

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Anaesthe-steak™: pain-free meat and the welfare paradox

A recent article in the New Scientist raises the prospect that alongside ‘gluten-free’, ‘GM free’, ‘sugar free’, and ‘dairy free’ our supermarket shelves may soon contain ‘pain-free’ meat. American philosopher Adam Shriver, writing in Neuroethics, argues that everyone concerned with animal welfare should support the replacement of animals used in factory farming with livestock genetically modified to have reduced sensitivity to pain. (See here and here for blogs discussing Shriver's suggestion). However, many find the idea of developing ‘pain knockout’ animals disquieting or frankly disturbing. In a survey of attitudes towards the development of pain-free animals (for laboratory experimentation) vegetarians and members of the animal protection community were strongly opposed to such an idea. The strongest opposition to the development of pain-free animals may, paradoxically, come from those who have traditionally been most concerned about animal suffering.

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Should we forget about organic food?

A recent
report by the Food Standards Agency argues that organic food doesn’t bring any
substantial nutritional benefits compared to conventionally produced food.
This contradicts the conclusions of previous studies suggesting organic food to
be nutritionally superior. As one might have expected, supporters of organic
farming have been critical of the report, yet it is unfortunate that the media
coverage on this issue often gives the impression that organic food has been
shown to be a sham (some consumer groups thus expect shoppers to now “think
twice before buying organic”)
and that its advocates are now reduced to using any bad argument they can think
of to prove the contrary. This impression is understandable but misleading.

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Animal experimentation vs factory farming

Recent figures showing a large increase in the number of animal experiments in the UK have spurred strong complaints from animal rights campaigners (link). Nearly 3.7 million experiments were performed on animals last year, an increase of 14% over last year and the largest yearly increase since the 1980s. 

There has been a longstanding debate in the UK about whether medical experiments upon animals can be ethically justified and this debate shows no signs of ending soon. However, even setting aside this question, there is a strong argument that animal rights campaigners would better meet their own objectives by devoting most of their energy to combatting factory farming. 

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Hunger for long life: the ethics of caloric restriction experiments

This has been a good week for life extension research, with the Nature paper Rapamycin fed late in life extends lifespan in genetically heterogeneous mice by Harrison et al. (free News and Views) showing that the drug boosts lifespan in middle aged mice, and Science countering with Caloric Restriction Delays Disease Onset and Mortality in Rhesus Monkeys by Colman et al. showing that in a 20-year longitudinal study rhesus monkeys do seem to benefit from caloric restriction (CR). CR involves keeping the energy intake low, but not so low that it induces starvation.

Not everybody seems to like the experiment. The Swedish major newspaper Dagens Nyheter had an article by Per Snaprud
that appeared to criticise the monkey experiment on ethical grounds. He
quotes Mats Spångberg, chief veterinarian at the Swedish Institute for
Infectious Disease Control, who doubts the experiment would have been
approved in Sweden. The only use of monkeys in Swedish research is AIDS
vaccine research. The article concludes by stating that the virus kills
2 million people every year, 270,000 of whose are children.

But ageing kills 100,000 people worldwide each day directly or indirectly. 100% of humans and monkeys are "infected".

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A ‘bonkers waste of money’?

The University of Oxford and the British government have come under fire for spending £300,000 on a study showing that 'ducks like water' (see e.g. The Guardian). The Taxpayer's Alliance has issued a statement pillorying this 'bonkers waste of money', and on surface it sounds like they're right. However, when you look deeper it becomes apparent that the type of research which was performed may well be of great value.

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Be mindful of results, not the method

David King warns that we should modify society, not childrens' brains. This is a response to a recent Radio 4 documentary on "the criminal mind", which discussed recent evidence for biological underpinnings of some forms of antisocial behaviour and the possibility of reducing it using vitamins, drugs or early interventions. Dr King quite rightly points out that the image given by the program tends to oversimplify things and promote a reductionistic view of the causes of crime. But he also appears to contend that complex social problems cannot be solved through biological interventions. In this he is likely wrong.

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Educating children on matters of food

As evidenced by recent declarations by the Children’s Secretary (see here and here),
the British government is determined to fight childhood obesity and to initiate
nothing less than a “lifestyle revolution”, resulting in more children leading
a healthy and active life. With this aim in view, a free cookbook was recently distributed to 11
year-olds by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. In
addition to that, from 2011
cookery lessons will be compulsory in England's secondary schools for children
aged 11 to 14, and £3.3 million will be invested in order to
recruit and train people capable of teaching cooking skills to children.
Parents are also urged to teach their children how to prepare meals from
scratch.

These are certainly sensible steps to take. With nine out of 10 British adults
and two-thirds of children expected to be overweight or obese by the year 2050
unless action is taken (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/30/obesity),
we are clearly dealing with an important public health issue. And given the
significance of the link between excess weight and an unhealthy diet (lack of
exercise being another major contributing factor), it seems clear that we should
teach children what a healthy diet consists in and equip them not to be dependent on
the local fast-food chain when the time of the next meal comes. We can hope
that the government’s scheme will help to achieve this, and that parents will
follow the lead – though it is also necessary that the meals provided in school
canteens be in keeping with those aims. However, I would like to suggest that
these steps should form part of a wider project meant to educate children on
matters of food. We want our children to be healthy, but we should also want
them to become autonomous and ethically responsible eaters (and, more
generally, consumers).

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