As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.

Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world's problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.

Consumers are going to have get used to eating less meat - to paying more for better quality meat and eating significantly less of it.

Life was a small negative space cut out of the eternal solidity, and for the first time, it felt precious - not like all of the words that had come to mean nothing, but like the last breath of a drowning victim.

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.