This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

The best farming systems are ones where animals and plants are put into a synergistic relationship.

I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.

Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.