A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.

The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can only eat about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products - CDs, say, or shoes - there's a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year - 1 percent being the annual growth rate of American population. The problem is that [the industry] won't tolerate such an anemic rate of growth.

Everything we eat begins with a plant turning solar energy into carbohydrates. Everything. Whether we're eating meat or eating vegetables, it all begins there. So I'm always interested in taking things back to the beginning.

It's more important that you eat vegetables, even if they are conventional -- I'm talking about for your health -- then it is until you wait until you can afford organic, or you can find organic.

Meat is a tremendous environmental challenge. It contributes enormous amounts of greenhouse gas, especially beef eating.

We need to create incentives for our ranchers and farmers to manage their lands to maximize carbon sequestration.

There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.