Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.

Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat.

Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules. A food chain is a system for passing those calories on to species that lack the pant's unique ability to synthesize them from sunlight.

If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.

A natural historian is somebody who looks at something in terms of its relationship to the rest of the natural world. You look at things ecologically. When you see a cow on a feedlot, you don't just see a cow; you see a cow that is eating certain food. You follow that food and that food takes you back to a corn field.

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.