Product Information
Product Information
Product information should be more thorough because it will help us become more ethical consumers and take better care of our health. We do have the right to know whether a product has been made by unethical means before purchasing it, or if the product is harmful to our health. Our market has expanded to the point where we are presented to an enormous number of products and have built the tendency to buy things without knowing where they come from or how they were made. Nonetheless, even if one tried to find relevant information about the production methods or use of raw material for a specific product such as a branded steak or the iphone, his or her efforts would probably be in vain.
In his essay “An Animal’s Place”, Micheal Pollan discusses some ways in which animals are treated and transformed into food products. Pollan’s discussion demonstrates that many animals have been treated in unethical ways throughout history, and is still being done today.
“From everything, i’ve read, egg and hog operations are the worst. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they do get their beaks snipped off with a hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of their confinement, at least don’t spend their eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the
American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of this
animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral “vices” that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding. Pain?
Suffering? Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on more neutral descriptions, such as
Product information should be more thorough because it will help us become more ethical consumers and take better care of our health. We do have the right to know whether a product has been made by unethical means before purchasing it, or if the product is harmful to our health. Our market has expanded to the point where we are presented to an enormous number of products and have built the tendency to buy things without knowing where they come from or how they were made. Nonetheless, even if one tried to find relevant information about the production methods or use of raw material for a specific product such as a branded steak or the iphone, his or her efforts would probably be in vain.
In his essay “An Animal’s Place”, Micheal Pollan discusses some ways in which animals are treated and transformed into food products. Pollan’s discussion demonstrates that many animals have been treated in unethical ways throughout history, and is still being done today.
“From everything, i’ve read, egg and hog operations are the worst. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they do get their beaks snipped off with a hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of their confinement, at least don’t spend their eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the
American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of this
animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral “vices” that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding. Pain?
Suffering? Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on more neutral descriptions, such as