We are what we EAT The decisions we make every day can affect the lives of people all over the world, not to mention the conditions of farm animals.

By JEREMY IGGERS
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
WHAT DOES YOUR SHOPPING CART SAY about your values? A typical grocery list might include eggs, milk, pork chops, asparagus, coffee, salmon steaks and bananas. Sounds simple. But each involves a personal choice that reflects our values.
Are the bananas organic or grown with chemicals? Do they carry a Fair Trade sticker, indicating that the farm workers who grew and harvested them earned a living wage?
How much fossil-fuel energy went into growing that asparagus, and transporting it thousands of miles? Or was it grown nearby?
Is the salmon wild-caught from a well-managed fishery, or was it raised on an underwater feedlot that pollutes the surrounding oceans?
Are those eggs free-range, organic or produced by hens packed tightly into small cages?
Is the milk from cows treated with recombinant bovine growth hormone, which increases their productivity, but may harm their health?
Do those pork chops come from a pig raised indoors in a factory farming operation, or raised on deep straw bedding with access to the outdoors on a family farm?
Whew. Who ever said grocery shopping was simple?
A few years ago, those might have seemed like fringe issues for the granola and tofu crowd. But today, granola and tofu are supermarket staples, and issues of human rights, environmental sustainability and animal welfare are mainstream.
Wal-Mart is considering selling Fair Trade coffee, McDonald's requires its egg producers to meet minimal animal welfare standards and Chipotle, which buys only sustainably produced pork raised on family farms, advertises on its Web site that "Quite Frankly, Factory Farms Suck."
We all have values, and we all like to eat. But we don't always put the two together. The hard part is knowing how to put those values into practice when we shop.
The choices aren't always easy. Often, foods that meet higher ethical standards are more expensive and less convenient to buy and prepare. How do you weigh the added cost and inconvenience against competing priorities?
And we don't all have the same values. But when it comes to the basic questions of food ethics, most of us do have a few points of agreement:
It's wrong to cause unnecessary suffering to animals.
Protecting the environment is a good thing.
People who produce our food ought to have decent lives and decent wages.
It also turns out that in practice, these ethical issues are often inseparable: raising meat in a sustainable way turns out to be not only better for the environment, but better for the animals, and to offer a better life for farmers.
RED-LIGHT ETHICS AND GREEN-LIGHT ETHICS
Much of the talk about ethical eating focuses on what you shouldn't eat or shouldn't buy. Many consumers avoid buying veal because of the methods by which this meat is produced. Some shoppers avoid factory eggs for the same reason. And some boycott retailers that don't pay their employees a decent wage.
That's the red-light approach to ethics.
But it may be more productive to take a green-light approach: to look for positive choices that make the world a better place. For example, by buying locally grown foods, you support local businesses and contribute to the vitality of your community. The impact is greater when you choose sustainably produced foods, when you shop at farmers' markets, or sign up for a weekly delivery of seasonal produce from a community supported agriculture farm. Sustainable farming methods actually help restore the vitality of soils damaged by conventional agriculture.
THE TIMES ARE A-CHANGING
The issues aren't new. What has changed, dramatically, in the past decade is the range of choices available to consumers. Organic foods have become the fastest-growing sector of the American food industry as they have spread from co-ops and health food stores into mainstream supermarkets. According to a recent study, nearly three-quarters of U.S. consumers now buy organic foods, at least occasionally. Kowalski's celebrates Earth Day by handing out fliers listing six reasons to buy organic: among them, the health of farm workers and the preservation of family farms. Whole Foods now sells eggs only from cage-free chickens. Cub Foods boasts that it sells more locally grown produce than anybody else in town.
There also has been a dramatic increase in the number of farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture projects nationwide, allowing small producers to sell directly to consumers.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO WHOLE HOG
Choosing to become a more ethical eater doesn't mean you have to become a vegetarian, or shop only at farmers' markets or buy only fair-trade, free-range, shade-grown coffee sold by nonprofit groups that donate all their money to literacy programs in developing countries. Rather, it means being clear on what your values are, and in deciding how far to go to practice them.
If you enjoy fish and care about the environment, you can choose wild-caught salmon from well-managed fisheries, or farm-raised salmon from well-managed aquaculture farms. If you like meat too much to give it up, you can opt for meat produced in a sustainable way with a minimum of animal suffering.
Michael Pollan, author of "Omnivore's Dilemma," argues that, "If people can do the right thing once a day with one of their food votes, that's plenty; that will be enough to build an alternative food system."
OUTLINING THE ISSUES
Animal welfare gets the most attention. Activists have focused public attention on animal suffering, and achieved some important successes in the past decade. But sustainability and human rights also are emerging as major ethical concerns:
Sustainability has been defined as meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. But the damage that current agricultural and fishing practices are inflicting on the environment isn't just a threat to future generations. The environmental impact of these practices is being felt today, in groundwater contamination, air pollution and declining fish populations.
As for human rights, in the past, when people made ethical eating choices because of human rights concerns, the focus was on red-light ethics: Consumers boycotted lettuce and table grapes in support of farm workers' rights, or boycotted South African wines to support the fight against apartheid. But today the connection between food choices and human rights is more often framed in green-light terms. The growing popularity of fair-trade labeling for coffee, tea, bananas and chocolate reflects increased consumer awareness of inequities in global trade.
While the red-light approach to ethical eating is often driven by guilt, the green-light approach offers the promise of more joy in our eating. Knowing the story behind the foods we consume, and making choices that reflect our values, enrich the experience of eating.