What my brain does when it hears the word “steak” Beatrice Marovich has a fascinating essay at Religion Dispatches called “Eat, Pray, Kill: The Basic Brutality of Eating,” in which she writes about the ethical quandaries of food in the context of secular morality and religious traditions. It’s fascinating to me both […]
Read MoreThe blood footprint
More animal-friendly than a vegetarian? There are all sorts of ways in which people can alter their diets for ethical reasons, but the presumed reason that people become vegetarians out of ethical concern is that they don’t want to cause any animals to die in order to supply their meal. […]
Read MoreThe “E” word applied to food. No, it doesn’t stand for “educated.” Or “empathetic.”
Eric Schlosser lays down the law in the Washington Post: At the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual meeting this year, Bob Stallman, the group’s president, lashed out at “self-appointed food elitists” who are “hell-bent on misleading consumers.” His target was the growing movement that calls for sustainable farming practices and […]
Read MoreTuesday links
New Hampshire Tea Partiers’ opinions of gay marriage range from apathetic to vaguely supportive. I wonder how many of those people are members of the Free State Project. Check out the guy at 42 seconds in. Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota are trying to ban covert photography of factory farm operations. […]
Read MoreWhy should we care where Sarah Palin got her bunny (and how many shots it took)?
The designated Badass Quote of the Day for today over on Dispatches is from Jason Easley at Politics USA: Sarah Palin has become the political equivalent of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. America regrets the one night stand they had with Palin, but now she has broken into our house […]
Read MoreHardcore eggs
Leslie Halleck is a horticulturist and general manager at North Haven Gardens in Dallas who blogs at growLively. Today she comments on the difference between grocery store eggs and the eggs from her backyard chickens: I’m often asked if there is any difference between my fresh backyard eggs and eggs […]
Read MoreWow
That’s all I can say at the moment– just, wow. From Casaubon’s Book, an excerpt from a post entitled “On Sentiment…And Against Sentimentality“: Sentiment officially has no place in agriculture, but I’ve met precious few smaller farmers who don’t have a spot of it. Indeed, I’ve come to suspect that […]
Read MoreSome thoughts on “opting out.”
To return to a Michael Pollen note for a bit (sorry), I came across a section of Omnivore’s Dilemma today that devoted some discussion to “opting out.” The context was home-schooling parents who also decide to buy their food from local farmers rather than from the grocery store, and Pollan […]
Read MoreFactoid from The Omnivore’s Dilemma that I learned today
Pigs raised in factory farms have their tails docked (i.e., cut off) because they are weaned from their mothers at about 12 days. They would normally wean at about three weeks, but the feed they are given causes them to grow at a much faster rate than their mother’s milk […]
Read More“Survival and reproduction are in fact most definitely amoral.”
This was a remark made in the breeder comment thread. An odd one, I thought. It sounds sensical at first– surviving is something we all need to do individually, and reproducing is something we at least need to do as a species, so how can someone apply “right and wrong” […]
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