What’s left on the menu?

It all started with a dinner party to mark Chinese New Year. ‘Duck,’ pronounced my wife. ‘Free range,’ I insisted. And so, armed with our shopping list and our ethics, we hit the supermarket. There, we almost met our nemesis.

It was squatting in a bare wire basket on the floor of a deserted supermarket aisle. One lonely duck. Standing over it, my wife and I faced off. It was the rush hour but bystanders had vanished — maybe they could smell marital discord in the air.

This duck posed a problem. It met neither of my criteria of free range or organic. And what’s more, for all the guff on the packet about a farmer somewhere or other, it didn’t say whether or not he cared a jot for the bird’s welfare, or even that this particular duck had come from his farm.

I threw down the gauntlet. We’d have to give up on the duck. My wife thought differently. Wasn’t I the one who’d dragged us here because of this supermarket’s reputation for animal welfare? As for the environment, surely the fact that we didn’t eat meat very often counted for more than how this one bird was farmed? And anyway, Mr Ethical, just when had it become OK to break promises?

As our sotto voce became terser, I thanked my lucky stars we didn’t come here often. It wasn’t just the meat aisle that was dangerous. Dilemmas lurked round every corner: among the vegetables, at the fish counter, and even with the booze.

With vegetables, for example, there is the issue of those innocuous-looking aeroplane stickers. Is it good or bad to fly in mange tout from Kenya? Flying stuff is much worse for the climate than carting it by truck, but more than 100,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa rely on airfreight for a living. The controversy over flying food has died down since climate campaigners found bigger fish to fry, notably meat and dairy, which together contribute 25 times as much to total UK emissions as airfreighted food. But it has given way to tougher questions. How good are all those jobs for development? Few of them are Fairtrade, after all, and they depend on dwindling oil reserves. And can we really sustain the habit of eating any kind of fruit or vegetable whatever the season?

The trouble with fish, meanwhile, is that they’re fast running out. The health experts who urge us to eat more fish because it’s good for us are only just cottoning on to this. According to the Marine Conservation Society, all the chip-shop regulars — Atlantic cod and haddock especially — and other favourites like mackerel and most tuna, are either at risk of overfishing or are already red-listed.

Where will it all end? The problem is that very soon, ethics fatigue begins to set in. Ever since
I told friends that anchovies are over-fished, they’ve started clamping their hands over their ears and humming when the conversation turns to food — they worry that soon there’ll be nothing left on the menu.

And perhaps the most vexing challenge facing the would-be ethical foodie comes in liquid form. The issue isn’t whether to buy organic or Fairtrade wine. That argument is old hat. The big conundrum is whether we should be drinking anything other than water.

Everyone who spurns bottled water in a restaurant and orders it from the tap, loud and proud, should consider this as they order their other drinks: it takes much more water and energy to make a pint of beer or a glass of wine, or even fruit juice, than a bottle of mineral water.

Booze alone accounts for 1.5 per cent of the UK contribution to climate change, and it’s hardly great for the health of the nation either. As someone who tries to eat sustainably but enjoys a good tipple, I find that a hard fact to swallow.

And that’s my point. You can’t help but feel like a hypocrite sometimes if you try to eat ethically without being a mean-spirited martyr. Many of the dilemmas we face when we’re shopping simply can’t be resolved in the supermarket aisle. We need concerted action by businesses and governments to change consumers’ options in the market place.

Often the answer will be to leave us fewer — but better — products to choose from. That’s something we need to demand as active citizens, rather than relying on the diluted power we can wield as angst-ridden consumers, trying to buy the world out of trouble one by one.

All this I pondered as my wife and I confronted each other over that blasted fowl. How did it end? In a happy marriage with star anise and ginger. And what about the bird’s welfare? Well, as my better half observed, how much more harm could we do to a dead duck?

Tom grapples with such dilemmas daily as director of the Food Ethics Council.