For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

Once you introduce the issue to young people and suggest to them that they have the ability to vote with their forks, either by positively going for certain kinds of foods or rejecting other kinds of foods, they realize that this is a responsibility and an opportunity to shape the world a little bit by their own choices.

Don't ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.

That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.

Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.

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.

One USDA scientist went so far as to claim that there has never been a documented case of food-borne illness from eating fermented vegetables.