Sunday links

Times Haiku: Serendipitous Poetry from the New York Times

This New York Times piece talks about the power of citizen lobbying and the hurdles that citizen lobby groups must overcome. In the words of Captain Planet, "The power is YOURS."



One of my first posts on this blog was about the Peter Singer book, The Life You Can Save. In his recent TED talk on Effective Altruism, he argues the ethics behind that book. I think it's worth 20 minutes of your time.

Bigger Than Yourself is starting a letter-writing campaign to Australian fashion labels, asking about the ethics behind their clothing production. She's starting out with popular brands Sportsgirl, Review, Portmans, Alannah Hill and Witchery and she's had a few typically vague responses. I'm going to write to a few of the brands I no longer purchase because I'm not confident they're sweat-shop free.

Three Australian-based, ethical fashion/lifestyle blogs I discovered this week: Indigo Bazaar, Green Flings and Eco Warrior Princess.

One of my food heroes, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, is heading to Australia for a River Cottage Australia. Unfortunately, it's on Foxtel. I may need to find a friend with Foxtel...or wait until it comes out on DVD. I'm hoping there will be a River Cottage Australia cookbook.

Another of my food heroes, Michael Pollan, was on ABC Radio National this week along with celebrity chef Peter Kuruvita and "Salt Sugar Fat" author Michael Moss. They talk about taking back control of cooking (from food corporations) as a source of pleasure and self-reliance. (Thanks to @timsenior for the link.)

Fat City: What can stop obesity? is a long, but eloquent and thorough, read by Australian physician Karen Hitchcock. (Illustrated by a faceless fatty, I see.) She discusses the individual and societal factors leading to obesity, and the costs to the individual and to the public.  She concludes, "If you come to me, your doctor, and you ask me to make you thin, for now I will have to cut you or drug you, as these are the only weapons I have to ward off the sirens." We (not just doctors but everyone) need to tackle obesity at a societal level because as Dr Hitchcock says, our options are limited at an individual level.
 
Please comment if you find these links of interest and would like to discuss their content.

Easy, ethical resolutions for 2013

I'm calling these resolutions "easy" because I think they are definitely achievable without sacrificing quality of life. I am already doing several of them and want to continue them in 2013. I have blogged about some previously; I will blog about the others during 2013.

1. Donate greater than 5% of my income to humanitarian charities, as guided by The Life You Can Save.

2. Follow Michael Pollan's Food Rules. (N.B. One of the rules is to "break the rules once in a while.")

3. Purchase and eat only free-range meat, increase meat-free days to 4 per week and buy from farmers' markets as much as possible. (As per Michael Pollan's food rules, "treat meat as a flavouring or special occasion food.")

4. Continue to use the Shop Ethical! app to guide supermarket purchases (and remember to take those reusable grocery bags).

5. Have old clothes and shoes mended and re-soled, instead of throwing them away. If unable to be mended or donated, use old clothes as rags. If buying clothes (or other textiles), buy only second-hand, fair trade or ethically-made products and buy less overall. Host a Clothes Swap Party.

6. Participate in at least a couple of my own "Buy Nothing New" months.

7. Don't buy bottled water.

8. Increase the amount of regular exercise that I do. (You may wonder how this is an ethical resolution. It's probably the best thing most people can do for their physical and mental health, which increases their chance of being a productive member of society for as long as possible, and reduces present and future burden on the health system.) Sleep enough every night.

9. Get a bicycle and start cycling for transport, fun and health; continue to use public transport and walk as well.

10. Give away at least seven items per week.

11. Further reduce electricity and water consumption.

12. Successfully grow at least one plant on my balcony, preferably edible!

13. Continue blogging here at least once per fortnight and engaging with like-minded people.

What are your resolutions for 2013? Can you suggest others I can add to my list?

Meat Eater

This is the first of a series of posts about food. My diet has changed considerably over the past few years, largely informed by various books and documentaries about food politics and food ethics. I postponed reading Peter Singer and Jim Mason's The Ethics of What We Eat until last year, concerned that it would "turn me vegan" (in the way that I was moved by Singer's The Life You Can Save). I admire my vegan friends but I'm still eating meat, despite compelling arguments against it and pretty unsubstantial arguments in support of it. Here I try to figure out why.

Growing up, I ate what was probably a standard Aussie diet - meat and two veg every evening and the occasional meat product in my lunchtime sandwich (although polony and chicken loaf are stretching the definition of "meat"). Typical dinner offerings from mum's kitchen included pork chops, lamb chops, spaghetti bolognese, fish fingers, grilled chicken wings and, for special occasions, steak and eggs. For most of my life, I felt that a lunch or dinner without meat was incomplete.

I remember the meat industry TV advertisements of my childhood. like the catchy "Get Some Pork on Your Fork" (and the less catchy "Pork - The Other White Meat"). There was the one featuring a before-she-was-famous Naomi Watts turning down dinner with Tom Cruise* because "Mum's doing a lamb roast." Then there was Sam the sexist butcher and the dorky Dad cooking an exotic beef stir-fry.

I don't notice as many meat ads now (except a dancing Sam Neill praising red meat for its "evolutionary benefits" and that angry racist lamb guy) but I guess the meat companies don't need to push themselves in TV ads because they can get to us through our voracious appetite for fast food and TV cooking shows. In the Masterchef All Stars Finale (one of the highest-rating TV shows in Australia), the first challenge was to cook a "family feast". When eventual winner Callum Hann announces that he is cooking a vegetarian feast (because his sister is a vegetarian and they always have vegetarian meals at family gatherings), some of the other contestants are incredulous (skip to 10:25 in this video). The judges eventually persuade him to cook a meat dish, insinuating that he cannot win if he cooks a vegetarian meal. I was very disappointed by this. Surely it would demonstrate superior skill to cook a vegetarian feast to satisfy fourteen meat-eating judges?

So, why should I meat? (Hmm...insert graphic of tumbleweed...crickets chirping too...)

• Um, it tastes good and I enjoy it. Not a very convincing argument. 
• I've heard arguments that farm animals will go extinct if we don't eat them - that seems pretty silly. Some of the animals that have been selectively bred to maximise meat production in the shortest lifespan have horrible, painful lives because of their bizarre anatomy. Also many non-farm animals are made extinct by clearing farmland to farm animals. 
• Yes, meat is a good source of protein but most of us eat many times more meat than is required for adequate protein intake. A vegetarian diet can easily provide adequate protein.
• One of the best arguments I've seen for (or at least to justify) meat eating is one by Jay Bost that won a reader competition in the New York Times earlier this year about the ethics of eating meat (and judged by some of my heroes including Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman and Peter Singer). He sums up the purpose of this entire blog post succinctly (had I known about it earlier, I might not have bothered).

I can think of many arguments against eating meat:

• The cruelty (not just of killing animals but the inhumane conditions under which they are raised). 
• The huge amount of water consumed, when millions of humans don't have access to clean water.
• The huge amount of feed consumed, when millions of people are starving.
• The massive amounts of pollution from factory farms.
• The land cleared for farming.
• The health benefits of a vegetarian diet.

My compromise is to eat less meat - once per week is my current target. I only eat organic or free range poultry, eggs and pig (which does not include "bred free range") and grass-fed beef. (Organic certification in Australia requires the animals to range freely on pasture.) I try to purchase this from farmers' markets, where I can talk directly to the farmer. My next aim is to visit some of the farms. When dining out, if the restaurant cannot guarantee the animal ingredients are free range then I stick to a vegetarian option.

I have not gone into seafood and non-farmed animals here - I'll save those for another time.

I have only been doing this for 18 months or so but I have found it easy to adhere to these rules and I find it has made my diet more interesting. I appreciate meat much more than I did previously. If I'm wavering over (non-free range) bacon and eggs on a breakfast menu, I just picture the cruel conditions under which these animals are raised.

Animals Australia recently launched a "Make It Possible" campaign to end factory farming, featuring (Australian) celebrities. You can take a pledge to refuse factory-farmed meat, eat less meat, go meat-free or donate to the cause.

 
*Younger readers: It is difficult to imagine but in the 1980s, dinner with Tom Cruise was considered a desirable prize for many women.

How I save lives (and not by being a doctor)

I recently read somewhere (I can't remember where but I promise it's true) that we should not be modest about what we donate to charity but instead share the information (and our reasons for donating) so that others are shamed inspired to also donate what they can afford.

The "Charitable Giving Index" published today by the NAB (one of Australia's "big four" banks) analysed charitable donations made by credit card, BPAY or EFTPOS. Charities were divided into seven categories, with "Humanitarian Services" charities (such as World Vision, Oxfam and Red Cross) receiving the largest portion of donations (32%), followed by "Community Services and Children/Family", "Other", "Medical Research and Services", "Health and Disability", "Cancer" and "Animals and Environment".

The analysis also looked at the average charity spend per person by their postcode, looking at donations in dollar terms and as percentage of taxable income. The top 10 postcodes (i.e. those with the highest rate of donations as a percentage of taxable income) from my state, Western Australia , donated just 0.13% of their taxable income. This was worse than any other state or territory in Australia. Obviously, there are limitations to the analysis (eg cash donations aren't included nor are donations of time or services) but at face value, we residents of the boom state of WA can do much better.

Reading Peter Singer's book The Life You Can Save in 2009 motivated me to increase my personal charitable donations. Singer argues that we have a moral obligation to help solve world poverty. The premise is that most of us would not walk past a drowning person without trying to save them, but we allow thousands of impoverished people to die through our passivity, when we could save lives by donating a proportion of our income. (The Life You Can Save website offers suggestions as to the proportion of income you should donate, based on your income and country of residence.) Now, whenever I consider a purchase, I think to myself, "Could I do better by donating this money to humanitarian causes?" I'm far from perfect as I could definitely do more, I still have many treats, holidays and frivolous purchases, and I come from the privileged position of having a comfortable income, not having student debts and not having any dependents.

Since reading The Life You Can Save I have donated at least 5% of my income to charity, increasing the amount each year. This includes regular monthly donations to five charities (including Oxfam, MSF, Red Cross, Amnesty and a sponsor child) and one-off donations to other appeals, such as for disaster relief or if an acquaintance is fundraising for a particular cause (such as One Girl's Do It In A Dress). Not all of my donations go to humanitarian causes (some are medical charities such as the Cancer Council). I also donate to arts charities and scholarships at my university but do not include these in my 5% target. Sometimes, I may feel that I'm throwing money at charities to alleviate my First World guilt (or my lack of hands-on contributions to charities) but every bit helps and even one life saved or made more comfortable makes it worthwhile.

I'll do a longer post on The Life You Can Save (and its evidence-based suggestions as to which charities you should donate) in the future but for now will leave you with these reasons why I donate to charity:

1. I can improve more lives indirectly through supporting humanitarian charities than I can directly through working as a doctor;
2. It is wrong not to; and
3. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.

Take The Life You Can Save pledge along with 14 000 other people.