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Soylent Green

This was too rich not to mention, though it doesn't have all that much to do with science and technology. Evidently, the House cafeteria has just gone green. They now offer a wider selection of vegetarian options, cage free eggs, and hormone free milk. This has some lobby groups (namely, the egg and milk lobbies) in a twist.

Read the NY Times article.

The lobbyists seem to think that the restaurant operators are "hooked by propaganda of animal rights groups." So this raises a question: What's the grub? Either it's the case that industry eggs and cage free eggs, or industry milk and hormone free milk are absolutely, categorically equivalent, on both moral and non-moral grounds; or it's not. If there is absolutely, categorically no moral distinction between the two, then there's always the possibility that the two options are distinct on, say, preference grounds. In either case, the important observation is that there is some difference relevant to the decision-making of the restaurant operators: whether it be that the offerings come from American or Chinese chickens, wild or farmed fish, or (yes) fat or skinny farmers.

The last issue, you might reply, smacks of irrelevance. Who cares if the farmer is fat or skinny? Maybe there are even justice issues here: if, say, a restaurant operator chooses chickens from the fat farmer, on grounds that the farmer is fat, maybe this is due to a deeply embedded anti-skinny bias; or perhaps an affirmative action-laced agriculture bill. But these considerations are no more irrelevant to the restaurant operator's decision than any other considerations. They're all factors; and they need to be argued for. Positively. Not negatively.

Lobbyists who argue against the practice of greening one's food options once the decision has already been made are stuck with the hard line: that there is no difference whatsoever. That's plainly false, just as it is false that there is no difference whatsoever between food brands or between food that comes from Guatamala or Iowa. Now that the decision has been made, the burden of proof is on the lobbyists to demonstrate that there is absolutely, categorically no relevant difference between the several options. By my reckoning, that'll be mighty hard, since differences like the living conditions of chickens plainly matter, even if not morally, at least to some people. Maybe that's why someone would revert to inane strategies like suggesting that cafeteria operators are "hooked by propaganda."

Foodfights like this can only be made of people.