<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nOnce we were sun kings, every little one of us, rulers of our hometown restaurants, demanding whatever extravagances our incomes allowed. We indulged ravenously and gleefully, beneficiaries of a trend known as world cuisine, which meant fresh food flown to the kitchens of top dining establishments at unimaginable expense. Sourcing from faraway places was thought to be the ultimate in elite eating, and nobody I knew had the slightest idea that the pursuit of wanton culinary pleasure wasn&amp;#39;t an advancement in the progress of the human race.\n\nThat was in the &amp;#39;90s, when fine dining had become our principal amusement. We ate mindlessly and ecstatically, cherishing foie gras from tormented barnyard fowls, our only debate being whether goose or duck produced the superior product. We craved caviar from the Caspian Sea, not caring that the beluga sturgeons knocked on their heads and gutted (often while alive) were as old as Russia&amp;#39;s Faberg\u00E9 eggs. Life was good, at least for humans.\n\nI never changed. I never criticized. I never learned anything, except that the Iranian caviar I ate on the Concorde was superior to the Russian caviar I ate while earthbound.\n\nI had one admirable moment, in a New York restaurant, when I became a virtuous eater, briefly and unconvincingly. I was served a plate of small, crisp, fried fish that the waiter called &amp;quot;bait,&amp;quot; but it wasn&amp;#39;t the unappetizing name that temporarily transformed me. It was the idea that a shockingly large quantity of once living creatures (that I suspect were smelts) would be the first course of a meal in which I would go on to eat many more once living creatures. For reasons I no longer remember, I immediately thought of the culture of Tibet, which mandates slaughtering a single animal, a yak, for the good of a community, using all body parts, wasting nothing. That&amp;#39;s respect, thrift, goodness, and the most significant term in dining today\u2014ethical eating.\n\nThese days almost everyone has the highest ethical standards, to say nothing of a newly published book on the subject. Food writers ponder little except good versus bad, right versus wrong, royalties versus advances. Somehow I was left behind, licking goose fat off my lips, more of a doubter than a believer. I became disillusioned with farmers&amp;#39; markets, which have become boutique shopping malls with elitist prices. I&amp;#39;ve eaten jewel-like products from the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco that awed me, but who among us is able to afford $8-per-dozen free-range eggs laid by grub-eating hens? And how many well-heeled swells are willing to stand in the rain at 7 a.m. waiting for a truck from an organic farm to pull up with the day&amp;#39;s meager supply?\n\nWhen a Whole Foods opened in Manhattan&amp;#39;s Time Warner Center in 2004, I walked the aisles, expecting to be awed. After all, Whole Foods has become the mecca of grocery-store goodness for most right-thinking Americans. Instead I counted ninety-nine different sausage products on sale, not my idea of a healthier way of life. Not long ago, I asked a friend of mine, Michael Pecht, to shop with me at his neighborhood branch in Edgewater, New Jersey. As we walked into the store, he told me his definition of ethical eating was to consume only vegetables and to leave the smallest possible carbon footprint, which represents the greenhouse gases emitted in the performance of a task. Then he innocently picked out organic vegetables shipped in from Mexico, Guatemala, California, and Washington. The closest he came to home was shiitake mushrooms from Massachusetts. I wasn&amp;#39;t surprised. To me, Whole Foods has commoditized ethics and dazed shoppers with natural snacks, solar panels, composting, and cash back for reusable bags.\n\nOf course, we can obtain plenty of organic products, those grown in California and shipped long-distance in bulk. It&amp;#39;s all you can eat, if you care to eat it. I&amp;#39;m convinced that the majority of organic products sold in chain supermarkets are a waste\u2014their only unequivocal virtue is that workers who pick them are saved from breathing inorganic weed killers. My list of worthless organic products ranges from Mexican grape tomatoes (tasteless) to Heinz ketchup (more like salsa than the regular Heinz we cherish). Supermarket organic is not the quick fix, the easy ethical solution, that so many shoppers desire, not when you don&amp;#39;t know how the product was grown or how long it&amp;#39;s been in transit.\n\nUncertain whether or not my skepticism made sense, I set off earlier this year on a monthlong journey of ethical enlightenment, a pilgrimage to visit farms, restaurants, and even two of my relatives, who are pretty much the living moral compasses of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their righteousness does not run in the family. I&amp;#39;m just a guy who eats. I eat more than almost anybody I know, and I eat better than almost anybody I know. I have always eaten exclusively for taste, which seemed like a good plan until now. The idea of my trip was to meet people who labor to raise, grow, prepare, and eat food that meets whatever definition of ethical eating they have embraced. I wasn&amp;#39;t seeking audiences with our Aristotles, writer-philosophers such as Michael Pollan. I wanted our artisans. My plan was to listen to them, ask to be led through the riot of morality that has overwhelmed this seemingly honorable cause, find a way to sort through a dizzying and growing array of ethical beliefs: local, seasonable, sustainable, organic, biodynamic, green, environmentally friendly, nontoxic, grass-fed, and labor-friendly, to note most. In addition, I decided that for the thirty days of my trip, I would try to eat not by whatever feeble guidelines of ethical eating I might have picked up in the past few years\u2014primarily avoidance of mushy farm-raised fish\u2014but by paying attention to those I met. No matter where I went, I asked this fundamental question: What does ethical eating mean to you?\n\nI traveled to farms raising animals in North Carolina, Michigan, and Massachusetts, where I was awed not only by the humane treatment of cows, pigs, goats, and sheep but also by the commitment of the people caring for them. I was even impressed with myself, at least for the three days I spent at Tantr\u00E9 Farm in Chelsea, Michigan. Long ago, while in the army, I lived in a tent for five months, but that was a delight compared with my two February nights in central Michigan. The weather was so cold that I slept under five blankets and wore a hooded sweatshirt, pajamas, and socks. Farms provide a commendable way of life for their owners, but insufficient credit is given to those who work on them for wages. I suspect such individuals turn out healthier and more compassionate than city dwellers, and they are inclined to own little clothing except the sort that keeps them warm and dry.\n\nI made my way down to Florida to see the winter farming operation of Satur Farms, which in other seasons grows herbs and vegetables on New York&amp;#39;s North Fork. I went up to Maine to visit Eliot Coleman, fabled farmer, and his wife, Barbara Damrosch, gardening authority, to talk to them about the mind-set of the people who are again returning to the land. (Americans do so approximately every thirty years, a cycle as predictable as that of droughts or locusts.) Coleman, recalling those who found salvation in farming in the &amp;#39;60s and &amp;#39;70s, said, &amp;quot;Back then they were against business, whatever their parents did, and The Man. They were hanging out. These days kids know they have to make a living.&amp;quot; In Berkeley, the heart of enlightened antiestablishment culture in America, I met Mollie Katzen, who more than thirty years ago compiled her famed vegetarian bible, The Moosewood Cookbook. She reminded me that vegetarianism back then had little to do with vegetables and was mostly about avoiding meat. Those two made me realize that the current ethical-food infatuation is more complex, more positive, more wholesome, and more thoughtful than most popular obsessions that grip this country.\n\nI started my journey with a few preconceived notions. Excused from ethical considerations, I decided, were birthday cakes; Communion wafers; your grandmother&amp;#39;s cooking; lemons (since they are indispensable and grow in only a few warm spots); all ancient spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and saffron (since the spice trade basically created modern civilization); and wine, regardless of where it was from. Wine is as much about the land as it is about sustenance and deserves a cultural bye. I asked my niece Nicole Adelman, and her husband Mike Appel, those relatives in Ann Arbor, to keep a diary of the tribulations of eating ethically, which they have been doing for years. Neither one eats meat (although occasionally he weakens for pork), but that seems secondary to their true dedication, which is to eat mindfully. I affectionately refer to them as part of the lunatic fringe of eating, but they decidedly are not. They don&amp;#39;t condemn those who fail to eat as they do. They are simply dedicated, and thus tolerable. Appel classifies himself and my niece as &amp;quot;less wacky foodwise than most people in Ann Arbor but certainly more wacky than most people who live elsewhere.&amp;quot; (I suspect this comes of living in a university town.) Her diary reinforced what I would soon learn: Eating ethically means constantly asking questions of yourself. It means hearing voices in your head that turn out to be your own. If you are overheard mumbling responses to yourself, only you will understand that you&amp;#39;re not a little nuts.\n\n&amp;quot;We went to the People&amp;#39;s Food Cooperative in Ann Arbor, where we do our grocery shopping. We&amp;#39;re members and can vote on relevant issues. Mike and I have daily discussions. Today it was over garlic. I noticed right next to each other some nice-looking organic garlic from California for $4.99 a pound and also some not-as-nice-looking garlic that was not organic but was very local, from a nearby Michigan farm, for $8.99 a pound. I handed Mike the local stuff, and he put it back. I asked why, because I&amp;#39;m always trying to learn, since I don&amp;#39;t seem to get it right. He said the local guy didn&amp;#39;t bother to grow it organically and it&amp;#39;s a big scam. He believes he can charge more because of the so-called local-food buzz.&amp;quot;\u2014Nicole\n\nEthics in eating, throughout history, have primarily been the purview of a fringe class, including vegans, vegetarians, the religious, and just about anyone else who feels that abstention and restraint constitute an ideal. Remember macrobiotics? Its disciples endured a colorless life of brown food and brown clothing. Today our true believers fervently pursue such principles as ecologically sound, socially just, humane, halal, kosher, nitrite-free, gluten-free, free-range, certified organic, or raw, whatever their cause demands. Yet not even vegans, our ultimate culinary ideologues, can match the commitment of those who dedicate themselves to the land. Farmers are, literally, America&amp;#39;s unwashed nobility.\n\nEberhard Mller and his wife, Paulette Satur, own and operate Satur Farms, located one hundred miles east of New York City, where he used to be chef of the once revered restaurant Lut\u00E8ce. They recently began winter farming in Florida, and Mller and I are driving from the outskirts of West Palm Beach to his 140-acre plot of leased land. As we come closer, we see black smoke rising and smudging a clear Florida day. He explains to me that the billowing smoke comes from sugarcane being burned before mechanical harvesting, one step in a dubious but established farming practice. Those who are convinced cane sugar is a healthier and thus more ethical product than corn syrup should gaze upon a soot-blackened Florida sky punctuated by crop-dusting planes dropping pesticides while gusts of wind blow away too-dry topsoil.\n\nWe are in the Everglades, or what was the northern Everglades until the Army Corps of Engineers drained 700,000 acres of it, more than a quarter of the Great American Swamp. The primary benefactors, as far as I can tell, were sugar producers. The Everglades Agricultural Area, as it is now known, is dead flat and bisected by canals that drain excess water. I don&amp;#39;t see a lot to admire, because in this part of America, not much appears to be determined by anything except the core beliefs of retirees, rich folks, and rednecks, all living in incongruous accord. I don&amp;#39;t see much in the way of ethical eating, either, although lunch at an obscure spot called Don Caf\u00E9 near the airport in West Palm Beach got me thinking about the virtues of food cooked by immigrants. I instinctively felt they had a better appreciation of fresh food than American-born cooks, usually generations removed from farms and other primary sources of food. Don Caf\u00E9 offers a weekly lunch plan for $30, a hot meal for farmworkers that&amp;#39;s superior to what&amp;#39;s available at alternative restaurants, almost all of them chains.\n\nSatur Farms&amp;#39; vegetables, whether grown on Long Island or in Florida, are not beloved by ethical purists who accept nothing but the loftiest ideals. Satur Farms is not biodynamic. It is not 100 percent organic, which means that technically it must be classified as conventional farming. Mller uses organic sprays until something stronger is required to save his crop and compares it to a doctor prescribing orange juice and honey until antibiotics become the only remedy. I&amp;#39;m not even certain the Florida outpost of Satur Farms can be considered sustainable, since Mller and Satur lease the land and their operation could go out of existence at any time. The irresistible virtue of the products\u2014particularly those grown in New York and sold to restaurants and specialty stores in that state\u2014is that they are both local and seasonal. That means they are fresher, tastier, and almost certainly more wholesome than food shipped long-distance. To me, little is of more significance. Unless America is struck by one of those catastrophic famines that plagued Europe in centuries past, I cannot envision any drawback to reliance on local crops. In fact, ethical eating would not be such an unfeasible goal if we had preserved the farms that used to surround our cities, but we&amp;#39;ve paved over those fields. Small farms have become the vanished rain forests of America.\n\nI do not fantasize about owning property, except maybe a French vineyard. Nevertheless, what Satur Farms does is breathtaking, especially compared with the huge properties that surround it and grow vast quantities of iceberg or romaine lettuce for shipping to out-of-state distributors. I don&amp;#39;t romanticize vegetables. I don&amp;#39;t believe in their nobility, nor have I been convinced by those who claim plants have feelings and scream silently when tossed into a hot pan. (I wouldn&amp;#39;t mind if that were true, since it would require vegans to starve themselves to death.) Still, I find it essential that we stop treating them as insignificant commodities.\n\nIn the Satur Farms fields, I see beets and cauliflower of all colors, spinach, radishes, wild arugula, seemingly limitless crops destined for shops and restaurants willing to pay a premium for vegetables approaching perfection. Mller&amp;#39;s heads of escarole wear tiny plastic hats so the centers remain white, and each is so huge it is capable of providing a salad course for six or eight. His arugula, just pulled from the ground, is perfect to me, sweet, spicy, and bitter, but perhaps that&amp;#39;s because I recently bought arugula at my local supermarket and noted that the huge commercial growers had finally bred the taste out of their crop.\n\nIn the Whole Foods market located in nearby Wellington, a community of horsey folks with little but time, money, and saddles, I counted twenty-one kinds of organic vegetables, almost all shipped from California. No Satur Farms produce is on the shelves. Says Mller, &amp;quot;In two generations, we have lost the ability to grow food and distribute it where it came from.&amp;quot; His wife, who handles the business end of farming, occasionally deals with wholesalers and says of them, &amp;quot;They don&amp;#39;t care if our product is better. They know it is. But if a cheaper product is acceptable, they&amp;#39;ll take it. Eberhard and I are mad constantly. We&amp;#39;re seething.&amp;quot;\n\nThe soil at Satur Farms is nearly black, in stark contrast to the dreary and endlessly gray adjacent acreage. Much of that farmland is littered with broken school buses and discarded tires\u2014thoughtless farmers employ used tires in a multitude of ways, not seeming to notice how hideously they deface the earth. The products grown on the nearby lands end up in processing facilities that are to vegetables what meatpacking plants are to cows. If there is such a thing as man&amp;#39;s inhumanity to plants, this is where it occurs, not on the stove. Mller&amp;#39;s rainbow-hued herbs and vegetables seem unrealistically beautiful, an artist&amp;#39;s rendition of idealistic farming, shocking in contrast to the surrounding landscape. Imagine walking into a neglected urban neighborhood and seeing a single Victorian house that has magically survived unharmed. The soil is loamy, deep, and full of nutrients. My feet sink far into it as we walk the rows. He points to an alligator, six or seven feet long, sunning itself on the banks of one of the canals that run through the property, and says, laughing, that one of the men he brought with him from Long Island saw it and was so frightened he wanted to go home. Mller appreciates the diligence of the beast. He says it does voluntary guard duty and nobody comes onto the property at night.\n\nHis workers, all from Central America, live in a garden apartment with a swimming pool that Satur Farms rents for them. If there is an injury, which miraculously didn&amp;#39;t happen when one of them drove a tractor into a canal the day I arrived, Mller or his wife care for them. He says that freshness is the peak of ethical eating, but he adds two additional definitions of ethics: taking care of employees and not paying them the very minimum allowed by law. He is blunt about the unlikelihood of Americans going to work on farms for the wages that most farmers are able to pay. &amp;quot;If we would charge the proper price for food, farming would be a job Americans would do. It&amp;#39;s hard, but it&amp;#39;s out in the air, and none of my guys make minimum wage.&amp;quot; He says the only time he was accused of abusing them was when he tried to teach them to play tennis, figuring they could use a recreational diversion. According to Mller, they cried out, &amp;quot;No mas! No mas!&amp;quot;\n\n\n\nMeat is a part of practically all my meals. Nobody believes that&amp;#39;s a levelheaded idea. My ex-wife once suggested to our doctor that I needed a nutritionist, and he replied, &amp;quot;He doesn&amp;#39;t need a nutritionist. He needs a psychiatrist.&amp;quot; Eating ethically, as I&amp;#39;ve sheepishly pointed out, wasn&amp;#39;t an aspiration of mine prior to this trip, and even during it I realized that I would most likely succumb if offered a prime, dry-aged, grain-fed, succulent strip steak, the unholy grail of unethical eating in America. (The French have their equivalent, the ortolan, a tiny, endangered songbird eaten by depraved aristocrats and government officials on their deathbeds as they insincerely beg forgiveness from God.)\n\nI did not require tutoring in the shame of &amp;quot;commodity meat,&amp;quot; animals raised inhumanely on an industrial scale so that consumers might dine rapaciously and crassly while simultaneously saving a few dollars at home, even more in restaurants. I have nothing but contempt for those who eat this way; unfortunately, I have trouble separating myself from those who do. At least I do not feel self-satisfied and manly when ripping into a blood-rare porterhouse with a carved-stag-bone-handled knife. I give myself credit: I know I am morally wrong whenever I yield to the temptation of commodity meat\u2014incidentally, commodity is the latest word in our vocabulary to be bestowed with an entirely new definition.\n\nIt now stands for that which is commercial, abundant, and unexceptional, like Brad and Angelina&amp;#39;s commodity kids.\n\nWe Americans prefer not knowing that the food we eat had a life. That way we don&amp;#39;t have to face the awful truth\u2014that the food we eat had to die. We push away fish that arrives whole, with its glazed eyes, distressed not by the fate of the animal but by our own discomfiture, a dinner date ruined. Most of us would prefer that our livestock were treated indifferently, even inhumanely. If we consider animals inconsequential, a meaningless food source, we won&amp;#39;t be ill at ease when they emerge from the kitchen nicely cooked. Should we be made to think of them as something that has been hand-raised, named, and sometimes even loved, we become uncomfortable. We are a squeamish people. After this trip, I cooked ethically raised lamb at home and expounded on the fine existence the animal had led. A guest pushed her plate away and said queasily, &amp;quot;You sound like a funeral director.&amp;quot;\n\nIn my travels I repeatedly came across animals living in exquisite natural balance, operating in harmony under a code of fundamental animal behavior I never knew existed. In Hardwick, Massachusetts, at a farm called Stillman&amp;#39;s at The Turkey Farm, the ground floor of the barn is patrolled by two goats who prevent the family dog, which is wary of them, from harassing the sheep, which are penned up with a Norwegian Fjord, a small draft horse that protects them from coyotes out in the fields. It&amp;#39;s a Disneyish amalgam of animals living in tranquillity (if not perfect friendship). At MAE Farm in Louisburg, North Carolina, I watched goats, almost impossible to pen up, steeplechasing over a fence, coming home from a neighbor&amp;#39;s field and moving more like a flock of birds than a herd of animals. At Rare Earth Farms in Zebulon, North Carolina, I stood at the edge of a meadow of bucolic beauty, with wood posts, strands of wire, and Black Angus cows. The cows came to the fence to greet me, and an owner, Karl Hudson, told me that even in the heat of summer they&amp;#39;ll leave the cool of the trees to visit small children who have come to the farm. The alternative is factory farms that treat animals with indifference at best and cruelty at worst, making excessive use of drugs, crates, and cages. If you&amp;#39;re wondering, chickens are the most abused of our commodity animals, followed by cows and pigs.\n\nI drove to Chestnut Farms, also in Hardwick, where I was met by Caroline Wise, 19, the daughter of the owners and a student at Smith College. She was walking about the family farmhouse like a new mother, cradling a baby pig she had named Clarabelle and feeding it milk from a bottle. She told me that the piglet was the first for its mother, who had abandoned it and walked away &amp;quot;like a 12-year-old girl who never realized she was pregnant.&amp;quot; Wise offered one of the most thoughtful definitions of ethical eating I heard, in essence saying that anybody who eats food has a responsibility to understand the life of that food. &amp;quot;People don&amp;#39;t want to know,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;We don&amp;#39;t want to know that our food had an emotional life.&amp;quot; Her intensity, even more than her words, made me realize something essential: All of us like to be conversant in fashionable topics such as ethics. It&amp;#39;s less demanding than being knowledgeable about them. The ethics of eating is about more than menu items. It doesn&amp;#39;t stop at what&amp;#39;s on our plate. It&amp;#39;s about life and death.\n\nI mentioned to her that the day would come when Clarabelle would be sent to slaughter, and she said, unfazed, &amp;quot;There&amp;#39;s a disconnect between food as a grocery-store product packaged by machine and food that is grown by a person. I know somebody who didn&amp;#39;t know eggs came from a chicken.&amp;quot;\n\nFoolishly, I asked her where that person lived. She stared at me without admiration and replied, &amp;quot;New York.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;We&amp;#39;re eating leftover Chinese food. There was moo shu shrimp, but Mike wouldn&amp;#39;t eat the shrimp. He said it wasn&amp;#39;t an ethical choice. This confused me, because he&amp;#39;s been claiming that I should always opt for shellfish over other fish because they&amp;#39;re more ethical. So it seemed to me that eating little shrimp was okay, but he said he meant mussels and scallops and lobster and other hard shellfish. The shrimp, he says, are probably tropical and farmed in big swamps where there used to be mangroves. The owners of the land cut them down, put a levee around the outside edge, created huge shrimp ponds that decimate coastal wetlands, thus making tropical countries more susceptible to sea-level rise and saltwater infiltration and more vulnerable to climate change and big storms.&amp;quot;\u2014Nicole\n\nIn a tiny, windowless basement office a few blocks from Times Square, a whiteboard filled with multicolored scrawls looks to be the work of a criminal mastermind planning a bank heist. I am in a conference room used by the chefs of Le Bernardin\u2014the very restaurant that twenty years ago brought me that first ethically dubious food, the school of tiny fried fish. I had requested an ethical dinner from the chef, Eric Ripert, and he responded by bringing in members of his staff and asking them to decide what was ethical and what was not. The scribblings are the result.\n\nRipert practices Buddhism, and he says that if he were to operate his restaurant under those religious teachings, the decision of what to feed customers would be simple: vegetables, nothing else. He cannot very well do that, since his is a seafood restaurant, but he and his chefs discussed the products they would prepare, the price they should charge, and how to make certain my meal was a special experience, the primary obligation of any restaurant of Le Bernardin&amp;#39;s reputation. After that he wanted to make certain the fish was sustainable, which he broke down into two essential categories: Was the species of fish he served endangered, and did the practices used to harvest the fish endanger the ocean?\n\nIn choosing what to serve, not just the fish and seafood, the staff focused on the local, seasonal, artisanal, and humane. I hadn&amp;#39;t prompted Ripert to say this, but he added, &amp;quot;We debated what is better, killing one big or many small animals. To me, the big piece is better, the way a tuna serves fifty people.&amp;quot; He even discussed whether it would be unethical of him not to serve local wines\u2014he is no fan of those produced in New York. Ultimately, my meal incorporated a Pinot Noir from Long Island, a wine that his sommelier, Aldo Sohm, admired. Ripert came to what I think is an inevitable conclusion about eating ethically: There is no illuminated path to understanding, no inner light or vision that will reveal all. &amp;quot;The answer,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;is to find a balance.&amp;quot;\n\nThat seems to be the default position of most everyone, including those who are most passionately ethical. Blue Hill at Stone Barns, located in Westchester County, New York, is the restaurant of an agricultural center whose barns were built in the 1930s so the children of the Rockefellers could benefit from fresh milk. (We tend to idealize the wholesome values of an earlier America, but it seems that nutritious food wasn&amp;#39;t always so obtainable back then.) Today, updated at enormous expense, the old Rockefeller property is a farm, an animal-breeding facility, and a destination restaurant with Dan Barber as chef.\n\nHe will not deviate from his conviction that vegetables must be grown organically. Yet when I ate there, he had just flown in sockeye salmon from Alaska (seemingly a violation of carbon-footprint idealism) because he has faith that the fisheries up there are &amp;quot;the best-managed in the world.&amp;quot; Nor is he bothered by eating meat, as one might expect a chef so devoted to vegetables to be. He said, &amp;quot;You cannot have a diverse, successful ecological system without animals. Particularly here. We are not in vegetable territory. Where we are, the environment is telling you to eat meat. We should pursue a diet based on what the land is telling us to grow.&amp;quot;\n\nEssentially, Barber is recommending limits on our habit of eating whatever we want whenever we want it, making him an advocate of seasonal and local to the extreme. It sounds terribly restrictive, but of course it is reasonable: We would eat what we are used to eating, which is basically the definition of comfort food. Like all the chefs I met, most with reputations for paying attention to ethical eating, Barber was convincing. My only surprise was their tendency to justify\u2014or rationalize, depending on your point of view\u2014the use of farm-raised fish. This is controversial. For each person who believes that the practice pollutes the oceans, or that it might result in genetically modified fish being released into the population, or that it&amp;#39;s wrong to feed ground-up wild fish to farm-raised fish, there&amp;#39;s another who believes it&amp;#39;s a way of preserving our vanishing wild-fish population. I could not fault the taste of the farm-raised fish I ate, nor did I feel I was being deprived of the best in luxurious products. This extended to sushi, although I&amp;#39;m certain that aficionados of toro, the fatty belly of the recklessly overfished bluefin tuna, might feel destitute if obligated to carry on without it. (Certainly the Japanese feel this way.) My favorite sushi happens to be raw scallop, and at the restaurant Tataki, in San Francisco, I was served &amp;quot;suspension-farmed&amp;quot; scallops from Japan. When I asked how this worked, the waiter said, &amp;quot;Picture a chandelier, a scallop chandelier.&amp;quot;\n\nUnless you require toro, now a primary luxury food, I see little reason to prefer sushi that comes from a species in danger of extinction to that from an abundant species. American spiny lobster is a fine substitute for Caribbean spiny lobster. You won&amp;#39;t miss a thing. The terrible truth, one that sushi gluttons hate to face, is that one raw fish tastes pretty much the same as the next\u2014it&amp;#39;s like trying to differentiate one member of the Radio City Rockettes from another. Anyway, when eating sushi, we&amp;#39;re supposed to say it&amp;#39;s about the rice.\n\nI met Rabbi Avrohom Keller, who supervises kosher food at the restaurant Le Marais in Manhattan. Kosher slaughter practices, until recently thought to be humane, are now being questioned because religious tenets do not call for animals to be stunned beforehand. The rabbi said, &amp;quot;The laws of slaughtering animals are God-given, and nobody has a right to change them,&amp;quot; but he added that stunning animals is not discussed in the Torah, the Jewish legal texts. Therefore whether or not to allow it has become the purview of influential rabbis. &amp;quot;It is likely that some will find it permissible, and others will find it not permissible,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;The majority would say no, but you can find a rabbi who says what you want to believe, and you can follow his way of living.&amp;quot; I&amp;#39;ve taken a stand on the ethics of kosher killing, and this is it: All things considered, the Jews treat animals a whole lot better than the world has treated the Jews. My vote is to leave the Jews alone.\n\nBrad McDonald, a chef at Crabtree&amp;#39;s Kittle House in Westchester, is as meticulous about products as anyone I know, and his sweet-and-sour Berkshire pork-belly confit from the farm of John Ubaldo in Cambridge, New York, was of unmatched sweetness. He sent out farm-raised halibut from Scotland and lamb loin from Laid Back Lamb in New York&amp;#39;s Hudson Valley. When I asked McDonald about ethics, he replied, &amp;quot;The owner of Laid Back Lamb, Dane Martindale, actually names his animals. I&amp;#39;ve wrestled with that.&amp;quot; Jamie Bissonnette of Coppa in Boston prepared meat from pigs that he had fed and touched, which raised this ethical point: &amp;quot;I felt the pressure. I had to do them justice.&amp;quot;\n\nMichelle Bernstein, chef-owner of Michy&amp;#39;s in Miami, served fried pigs&amp;#39; ears of astounding delicacy because, she said, &amp;quot;Ethical is using parts of the animal that other people discard.&amp;quot; Although we seem to be increasing the consumption of less-cherished animal parts, thanks mostly to chefs who practice nose-to-tail cooking, we remain an overstuffed nation that worships such illustrious cuts of meat as the strip loin. We&amp;#39;re willing to throw almost anything away.\n\nNobody loves pigs more than Ed Mitchell, chef and co-owner of The Pit, in Raleigh, North Carolina, the only ethical barbecue establishment I&amp;#39;ve come across in a lifetime of hungering for barbecue. His uncomplicated philosophy is that restaurants should get back to what&amp;#39;s right, which is growing and serving food the way it used to be done. &amp;quot;The difference between an animal raised naturally and one raised industrially is in both humaneness and flavor\u2014the sweetness, the succulence, the moisture,&amp;quot; he said. He&amp;#39;s right, of course. The meat from his hogs, raised on small farms and cooked whole over hickory, oak, and charcoal, possesses incomparable purity and richness. I suspect the small farmers who supply his pork deserve the honor of being called American artisans. The word artisan, much like the word ethical, has become a culinary catchphrase, too often used indiscriminately and excessively, usually for self-promotion. These producers raise meat of exquisite value in tiny quantities. What is artisanal if not that?\n\nThe Pit, located in a refurbished meatpacking plant, also serves the most unlikely ethical product to be found in a barbecue restaurant anywhere: tofu, made locally in Morrisville, North Carolina. The Pit is one of the most principled meatcentric restaurants in America, although I suppose it can be criticized for offering complimentary valet parking to customers. This does not encourage the use of mass transit.\n\nErik Desjarlais, chef-owner of Evangeline in Portland, Maine, added another ethical category. He told me that when purchasing lobster and shrimp locally, he has this thought: I buy that and the person I buy it from buys shoes for his kids. Tony Maws of Craigie on Main in Cambridge, Massachusetts, served the collarbone of a sea trout, usually discarded in American restaurants, like the ear of a pig. It was marinated, roasted, and scented with chilies. He said, &amp;quot;When considering &amp;#39;ethical,&amp;#39; a restaurant also has to take into account the back end\u2014the energy used by lightbulbs and dishwashing, paper tablecloths versus cloth, waste, even take-home containers. Doesn&amp;#39;t ethical involve giving the staff health care? The customer has to be aware, too. You drove here. Why didn&amp;#39;t you use public transportation?&amp;quot; Okay, call me a hypocrite, but you try taking Boston&amp;#39;s Red Line on a Sunday night.\n\n&amp;quot;We usually buy the local milk that&amp;#39;s not organic, but also it&amp;#39;s not from a milk pool, and it&amp;#39;s hormone-free. It&amp;#39;s in a glass bottle, which we bring back for a deposit each time. The bottles get reused. It&amp;#39;s $3.35 for a half gallon. The alternative is less local but organic milk that comes in a plastic jug and is $5.99 a gallon. After some discussion, we opted for the more expensive local milk because even though the plastic jug gets recycled, it&amp;#39;s more energy-intensive than reusing glass bottles. Mike tells me that those empty plastic jugs get shipped in huge bos to the dairy, so they take up a lot of resources in the shipping process. And they created the plastic from petroleum. Making glass requires tons more energy than making plastic bottles, but the glass is reused and reused and reused. But even that has a downside, because they have to be sterilized with very hot water before reusing. He also said that every time we break one of those glass bottles, it&amp;#39;s a tragedy for the planet, because apparently there&amp;#39;s no market for recycled glass right now. It&amp;#39;s cheaper to go scoop sand out of the quarry and make new glass bottles than to buy recyclable broken glass. Mike tells me it gets ground up and used as road base. I want to know this: Where does he store all this information?&amp;quot; \u2014Nicole\n\n\n\nI came to some conclusions. Dining can no longer be entirely about gratification; it also has to be about vegetables. The best I ate were Charlotte potatoes of unmatched purity grown in Maine by Eliot Coleman and Mokum carrots of otherworldly sweetness grown by Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns. I developed high regard for the underrated winter vegetables kohlrabi (raw, it has sweetness and turnip-like crunch) and kale (roasted with olive oil, it&amp;#39;s addictively crisp). You can have meat, but only if it&amp;#39;s humanely raised on farms by people who willingly endure more discomfort than the animals in their care. Today, even Mollie Katzen eats meat. &amp;quot;For decades I ate brown rice, broccoli, and tofu,&amp;quot; she told me. &amp;quot;And I felt tired, depressed, and irritable. As I&amp;#39;ve aged, I&amp;#39;ve felt a need for animal protein.&amp;quot;\n\nPreparing a quick and ethical meal for myself proved nearly impossible. It was the same for my friends. When Michael Pecht returned from our shopping trip to Whole Foods and attempted to cook an ethical meal for his family, he ended up complaining, as everyone who isn&amp;#39;t a well-trained cook inevitably will, about the time it took. &amp;quot;When you cook ethically, every ingredient is in its most elemental form,&amp;quot; he said. A friend in California who had bought half a grass-fed cow and struggled to prepare it properly told me she finally learned from her housekeeper to &amp;quot;cook like a peasant,&amp;quot; relying mostly on braising to tenderize the meat. I was hopeless. Not only was I unhappy with the quality of the presumably ethical products available, I also lacked the knowledge to cook them efficiently. I didn&amp;#39;t have the skills. I didn&amp;#39;t have the strategies. When preparing food ethically, you must plan. It&amp;#39;s more like a mission than a meal. Nothing is obvious or instinctive.\n\nWe are no longer a nation of cooks. We are reheaters and microwavers\u2014when we don&amp;#39;t substitute takeout. Cooking from scratch would require a seismic shift in the American way of thinking about food. It requires shopping, chopping, heating, and most of all, deliberation. We would have to change the thrust of our lives and no longer spend our free time seeking personal development and managing our Twitter accounts. Kitchen labor is something your grandmother accepted, and she probably didn&amp;#39;t complain about it, either.\n\nI had wonderful home-cooked meals, even if none of them were my own. Mitchell Davis of the James Beard Foundation prepared an ethical dinner for me, but he lost credibility when I realized that the knives at his place settings had rhinoceros-horn handles. Barbara Damrosch cooked a pasture-raised chicken from Old Ackley Farm in Blue Hill, Maine, that was a dream realized. It was one of the few times in my chicken-loving life that a free-range chicken tasted as meaty and profound as promised.\n\nOne day I brought home two packages of country ribs from a Stop Shop. I cooked them identically, in the same roasting pan. The cheaper, run-of-the-meat-counter ribs came out juicy. The pinker and prettier ribs labeled Nature&amp;#39;s Promise, a delu store brand guaranteeing &amp;quot;all natural\u2026no antibiotics administered\u2026no growth stimulants or added hormones\u2026fed a vegetarian diet,&amp;quot; were dry, tough, and tasteless. In time I understood how nonsensical, wasteful, and unethical virtually all packaging promises have become. Advertising claims are doing for our metabolism what investment banking did for our economy. American food companies employ so many deliberate distortions that nothing they say can be trusted. They aren&amp;#39;t in business to assist us. They&amp;#39;re in business to entice us, and they seem willing to do anything short of breaking whatever ineffectual laws we have.\n\nI suggest you write your congressman to demand a ban on TV food advertising. Remember that all commercial products that are fortified, portion-controlled, enhanced, powerized, and supposedly better for you are not. We eat every foodstuff in this country that promises health and very little that delivers it. (Only your doctor or your mother should tell you what to eat, and these days I&amp;#39;m not so sure about Mom.)\n\nWhile you&amp;#39;re at it, here&amp;#39;s something else to tell Congress: Every American should be required to kill a chicken or grow a vegetable. It&amp;#39;s good training, an alternative to the compulsory military service we don&amp;#39;t have.\n\nWe have become a nation where the rich eat one way and the poor another, unlike, say, in Italy, where the perfect tomato is admired by all. We no longer regard food as a gift, the way so many foreign cultures and religious families do. Instead of giving thanks and expressing gratitude on holidays, we gorge ourselves with meat. I blame Norman Rockwell, who painted the ideal Thanksgiving dinner, a dimpled family sitting around an overstuffed table as Grandma brings out a sacrificial thirty-pound turkey in order to satisfy her family&amp;#39;s overdeveloped carnivoral lust. If it makes you feel better, we&amp;#39;re not the only society that has the wrong idea about food. The Japanese produce the most perfect, delicious fruit in the world, then go out and slaughter the maximum number of whales.\n\nThere are still people out there who believe we can put our nation into reverse and learn to eat correctly. One is Eliot Coleman. When I told him it couldn&amp;#39;t be done, he replied, &amp;quot;You mean like people in the 1940s saying it was impossible for a human being to run a four-minute mile?&amp;quot;\n\nI argued this with Alice Waters, whose restaurant, Chez Panisse, is famous for the deliberation that goes into every product served. She is eternally optimistic, which of course I am not.\n\nI told her that the turnaround so desperately needed was unattainable, and she said, &amp;quot;There&amp;#39;s only one way. Go into the schools and teach our children very, very young. Begin in kindergarten, before they develop their addiction to salt, sugar, and fast food.&amp;quot;\n\nI reminded her that school cafeterias were disasters where the rustling of food being unwrapped had replaced the clang of pots and clatter of plates. She said that children in schools should be given free meals, prepared from local products, cooked on stoves.\n\nI mentioned that we have lost not just our love of cooking but also our will to cook. I told her about young women in Manhattan with three items in their refrigerators: wine, vodka, and nail-polish remover. We have more people with eating disorders than eating ethics in New York. I told her about me, defeated in my quest to eat ethically.\n\n&amp;quot;You need a crash course in making a vinaigrette and slicing an onion,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;Everybody should have a few things under their belt. Saut\u00E9 greens with garlic. Scramble an egg. Make a chicken stock. Once you know those things, you can make a meal in ten or fifteen minutes.&amp;quot;\n\nShe made it sound uncomplicated. And perhaps it is. In truth, ethics is a simple concept. It prevents us from doing whatever the hell we want to do, puts the brakes on unseemly expressions of free will. The simple fact that the word has entered the mainstream and is not automatically being dismissed as elitist, holier-than-thou pretentiousness is a positive development. Even the emergence of culinary ethicists as our new gurus\u2014replacing, I hope, diet counselors\u2014is hopeful, as long as they avoid the appalling answer that America always embraces: quick-fix books. Nevertheless, I&amp;#39;m not convinced we&amp;#39;ll become a nation where man, beast, and vegetable live in exquisite natural harmony. That is not the American way.\n\nFood has become a great national dilemma, a dizzying near calamity. The people I met managed to briefly dissipate my gloom, but none offered a realistic solution. We are still in the most elemental stage, trying to articulate the crisis in a way that will stimulate change.\n\nMarion Nestle, a teacher of food and nutrition, spoke of &amp;quot;the tension between convenience and ethics,&amp;quot; which nicely sums up where we stand, in an academic sense. One of my niece&amp;#39;s friends proposed what I believe is the most easily understood guideline for eating ethically when she said that it came down to &amp;quot;not eating like an asshole.&amp;quot; How sad that in America today, even that seems an unattainable ideal.\n\nalan richman is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/alan-richman-ethical-eating?currentPage=2>