Eating - Peter Singer & Jim Mason

Subtitled "what we eat and why it matters", this book focuses on three US families - one whose food choices are based largely on cost & convenience, one family of "conscientious omnivores", and one of vegans - and investigates the impact of their food choices on animal welfare, the people involved in its production, and the environment. Having read Singer's earlier "Animal Liberation", I did not expect to be shocked by any of this, but was almost reduced to tears by one passage describing the casual cruelty of slaughterhouse workers observed jumping up and down on live chickens or ripping them apart for entertainment. The authors attribute this sort of behaviour to the desensitizing effects of fast-paced, monotonous, bloody work, in environments where supervisors routinely refuse to stop the processing line when mechanical failures lead to conscious animals being killed in slow and painful ways. Many large companies - bizarrely, led by McDonalds - have introduced audits to improve this situation, but critics claim that there is evidence from some slaughterhouses that the lines are simply run slower when an auditor is on site. Although the information about regulations and production practices in the US was interesting - for example the disturbing fact that most states' anti-cruelty laws contain exemptions for "common farming practices" - and the general principles were obviously universal, I would be interested in a UK-specific version of this book that went into more depth about UK suppliers.

As well as focusing on animal welfare, the book also includes a lot of material about environmental impacts, such as the vast quantities of feces and urine produced by large pig farms. In one incident in 1995, 25 million gallons of liquid waste were released into a river in North Carolina when a "lagoon" burst due to heavy rain, and even under normal conditions these farms can have such an impact on human health that the American Public Health Association passed a resolution in 2003 calling for a moratorium on the construction of new factory farms ("CAFOs"). The book also describes the inefficiency of meat production in terms of land use and water consumption - concluding, for example, that it takes 13 pounds of grain to produce a single pound of boneless beef.

The chapter on "the ethics of eating meat" includes my own reason for becoming vegetarian rather than attempting to apply welfare standards when purchasing meat - that "since we are all often tempted to take the easy way out, drawing a clear line against eating animal products may be the best way to ensure that one eats ethically - and sticks to it". (Although whenever I read anything like this I realise that my own position is inconsistent, and veganism would be a more rational place to draw that line, given the number of male chicks & calves that are killed by the egg & dairy industries...) It applies a similar argument to producers, pointing out that "as long as animals are commodities, raised for sale on a large scale in a competitive market situation, there will be conflicts between their interests and the economic interests of the producer" - and corners will be cut. I was particularly struck by the inclusion of a quote from Roger Scruton - the philosopher whose opposition to the concept of "animal rights" led him to name a pig "Singer" and then personally turn it into sausages: his assessment of modern large-scale factory farming is that "a true morality of animal welfare ought to begin from the premise that this way of treating animals is wrong".

Time to be in Earnest - P. D. James

This "fragment of autobiography" caught my attention for several reasons, and lived up to expectations on all counts. P.D. James herself has interested me since I saw her give an excellent talk on detective fiction as social history last year, and since then I have read several of her novels and found them much more complex (and a lot darker!) than the "genre fiction" I had previously dismissed them as. This was not a conventional autobiography, as it explicitly excludes detailed discussion of painful subjects such as her husband's long-term mental illness, choosing instead to take the form of a diary which mingles records of current doings with reminiscences from a lifetime and more general reflections. One of its main strengths is the insights it gives into the experiences of her generation - for example her memories of working in the NHS in its early years, at a time when MPs were assuming that the annual costs of the service would decrease as long-standing conditions were treated and the health of the nation gradually increased as a result!

One rather self-indulgent reason for my interest in this book was that there are several points of overlap between her life and mine in terms of locations, and I find it oddly satisfying to read about familiar places through unfamiliar eyes, particularly casual mentions to obscure train stations and pubs that I haven't thought about for years. I found that this had the strange effect of making it feel rather shocking whenever she expressed strong opinions that I do not share, as she occasionally did - for example her vehement outrage at the "injustice" of the intrusion into the lives of those persuaded to take part in family therapy sessions.

However, my main reason for picking this up was to see what she had to say about the writing process and about crime fiction. For her, the fascination of detective fiction lies in

"the exploration of character under the revealing trauma of a murder enquiry. Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. Murder destroys privacy, both of the living and of the dead. If forces us to confront what we are and what we are capable of being."

I was also struck by her observation, in a discussion of the contrasts between modern detective novels and their 1930s counterparts, that although they have become so much more realistic in many ways, they still contain an element of fantasy in that so many modern fictional detectives are curiously childless and able to devote their lives to their work...

On the writing process itself, she offers four pieces of advice: read widely; practise writing ("the craft is learned by practising it, not by talking about it"); increase your vocabulary; and finally, welcome experience:

"This means going through life with all senses open: observing, feeling, relating to other people. Nothing that happens to a writer need ever be lost."