Diana Rozendaal--she's the one on the left--is much too nice to challenge me directly, but because I know both the goodness of her heart and her well-articulated views on animal rights, she challenges me nonetheless (in a good way). Specifically, she challenges the choices I make about food three times a day--sometimes more, if the truth be told. (Perhaps I should make it clear that I don't eat bears.)
Some choices we make about food--steamed or stir-fried, for example--are matters of preference, but, whether we recognize it or not, many of our choices related to food are moral choices. Some even involve human rights rather than animal rights so that even vegetarians (and vegans) are not off the hook. Eric Schlosser makes the point very persuasively in Fast Food Nation. In an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, he demonstrates that our commitments regarding human rights are tied up in some of the choices we make concerning what--and where--we eat. Fortunately (for some fast food junkies), Taco Bell has finally done the right thing for farm workers in Florida.