Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.

Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it

But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter.

The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.

When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.

It's been a mystery to me and a disappointment why conversation about health care reform hasn't turned more attention to the subject of food.