Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley, or organic cut flowers from Peru, doesn't mean we should do it, not if we're really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism.

If you have to put on a haz-mat suit to visit a farm, you may not want to eat what comes from it.

We don't need a law against McDonald's or a law against slaughterhouse abuse - we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.

You, as a food buyer, have the distinct privilege of proactively participating in shaping the world your children will inherit.

The wealth of any ecosystem is its perennials. The primal herbivore-predator-disturbance-rest dance is literally the breath and pulse of the earth. Grasses recycle oxygen far more efficiently than trees. The turnover is faster. Grass reaches out and turns solar energy into carbon. Tillage hyper-aerates the soil, burning out carbon. But because a plant creates bilateral symmetry at the soil horizon, it sloughs off root mass when the top gets chopped off.

Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley, or organic cut flowers from Peru, doesn't mean we should do it, not if we're really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism.

On a grander scale, when a society segregates itself, the consequences affect the economy, the emotions, and the ecology. That's one reason why it's easy for pro-lifers to eat factory-raised animals that disrespect everything sacred about creation. And that is why it's easy for rabid environmentalists to hate chainsaws even though they snuggle into a mattress supported by a black walnut bedstead.