In “The Ethics of Eating Animals,” Pollan considers the moral act that he is about to engage in as part of his exploration of the personal food chain. While eating a rib-eye steak, Pollan reads Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, which calls for people to stop eating meat. Pollan opens the chapter prepared to consider that Singer has a strong argument and that

eating meat has become morally problematic, at least for people who take the trouble to think about it.

People often set humans aside from the rest of the animal kingdom because of their intelligence. However, Singer would point out that chimpanzees are often more intelligent than a variety of humans, including infants and the mentally handicapped. Singer would have his audience consider the suffering of the animal rather than the intelligence, and it is difficult to deny that animals suffer before they are eaten.

Consequently, Pollan decides to become a vegetarian. He approaches the subject with some humor when he says,

I will now burden you with my obligatory compromises and ethical distinctions.

Burdening others is one aspect of vegetarianism that Pollan finds particularly irritating, and he finds that he feels like a bad guest because he requires special food while visiting friends. He also finds that vegetarianism requires a great deal of careful planning before eating. Perhaps Pollan’s biggest objection to vegetarian eating is not ethical so much as cultural when he shares that

healthy and virtuous as I may feel these days, I also feel alienated from traditions I value.

All of this leads Pollan to further explore what eating meat really means.

Pollan finds that philosophers like Daniel Dennett have begun to draw attention to the nature of animal suffering by suggesting that it may occur on a different order of magnitude than it does for people. For example, a rhesus monkey can have one of its testicles bitten off while competing for a mate only to go on mating the following day. It seems that a great deal of the discussion of animal rights may be based upon anthropomorphic arguments that are based on distance from animals. However, Pollan agrees that there is something very wrong with the way concentrated animal feeding operations work. These slaughterhouses view animals as “production units” and little else. Pollan points out that the capitalist system reinterprets suffering as “stress” and explains that the industry has begun to respond to this by “simply engineering the ‘stress gene’ out of pigs and chickens.” Is there a system that works differently?

Once again, Pollan returns to Polyface Farm as an alternative. There, chickens and other animals are allowed to live out what Aristotle calls their “characteristic form of life.” Furthermore, he feels that if we are going to concern ourselves with the suffering of animals, we should also concern ourselves with their happiness. At Polyface Farms, animals are happy—in Pollan's opinion, happier than they would be in the wild. Pollan goes on to point out the moral interpretation of the relationship between humanity and nonhuman animals is a difficult fit, and might more accurately be understood in terms of coevolutionary development. In other words, the corn population has exploded because of its relationship with humanity. Dogs number in the millions while wolf populations have shrunk. For animal rightists, predation is a problem that, Pollan feels, reveals an urban bias based on disconnection from animals.

Pollan suggests that vegetarians feel they are harming fewer animals by eating vegetables. He points out that vegetarians may not realize that their grain is produced on a farm with harvesters that kill a multitude of creatures. On the other hand, many animals benefit from their relationship with humans, particularly through “good farms” like Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm. For Pollan, the most disconcerting aspect of meat eating remains the concentrated feedlot with its opaque walls. If this were ended, it might result in our eating animals “with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.”