[Epistemic status: The authors of this book make many factual claims that I'm not equipped to conclusively verify. Much of the publicly available information on the food industry comes from agribusinesses themselves or from activists who bitterly oppose them. In this review I've tried to summarize the authors' claims as they've presented them, with the occasional corroborating link, but as a layman I can't offer a much more complex perspective on these topics beyond what I learned from this book. The value judgments expressed in this review are my attempt to capture the authors' point of view, except where otherwise noted. I've absorbed many convincing arguments against factory farming from Effective Altruists over the years though, and as of this writing I've drastically cut back my meat consumption because of it.]

The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter was published in 2006 and written by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. You’ve probably already heard of Singer, due to his enormous influence on the ideas and practices of Effective Altruism. (If not, his 1971 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" is a good intro to his moral viewpoint.)

Jim Mason, meanwhile, is an author and attorney whose prior work focuses primarily on animal advocacy. The Ethics of What We Eat is actually the second collaboration between the pair; the co-authors connected in the ‘70s, after Singer published Animal Liberation, and in 1980 published Animal Factories, an exposé on the abuses of industrial farming.

In The Ethics of What We Eat, however, their aims and research are somewhat more sprawling in scope. While animal treatment and factory farming remain a major focus of the book, M&S also address the job conditions of food production workers, as well as the merits and demerits of specific subjects like organic farming, GMOs, Fair Trade certification, and "eat local" movements.

Mason and Singer present their research as a case study of three American families and their day-to-day food choices, each representing a certain set of popular American diets. All of the families are real people who cooperated with the authors’ research for several months; each main section of the book starts with a short segment introducing us to the family members and their life before diving into a farm-to-table examination of where their food comes from. (The authors mention that ~20 families...

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