As a committed environmentalist who happens to have also killed many animals for human consumption, I have found that many vegetarians and vegans have a poor understanding of nature. They seem to envision the natural world as a Disneyesque place where animals play in the fields and cuddle with each other. It is not.

In fact, all animals are food-- for other animals, including apex predators. There is no moral injustice committed when a salmon eats a smaller fish, nor when a sea lion eats that same salmon, nor when a raptor feasts on the same sea lion upon its death. With the killing of each of these animals, a beautiful thing has happened: another animals has lived so that it can propagate and accomplish its role in the ecosystem. Suffering is neither here nor there; predators make no particular effort to mercifully kill their prey.

Ethical codes dreamt up by humans are artificial constructs foisted upon a natural world that has no use for them. Unlike other letter writers here, I have no quarrel with Peter Singer's concern for suffering or his philosophical journeys in general. They should not, however, be construed as guidance in how to live one's life. However compelling, they have little pragmatic use.

Humans should be concerned about their diets for many pragmatic reasons, not the least of which is significant negative impacts on the natural environment. But ethical codes based on the anthropomorphization of animals are not particularly useful in the real world.

"If you had a choice, right in front of you, between a piece of meat from an animal that was made to suffer while it was alive and killed in a cruel, painful manner, or a piece of meat from an animal that was treated with some measure of respect when it was alive, and killed in a swift, painless (as possible) manner, which piece would you select to eat?" --anonymous

Actually, I'd share so my freind didn't go hungry. Thanks for two plates of meat!

A lot of intellectual hot air in this interview.

Fallacy 1. using local produce and grains are not necessarily better for the world. Rice from Bangladesh is better.

For whom is it better? The starving Bangladeshis who do not get 2000 calories a day? It is probably better for the air around Sacramento in October when the hulls are burned in the fields and the air is acrid and eye burning for days on end. But that is because we are a waste culture and we do not make rice paper from the hulls as other societies have for eons. We burn them and make air pollution and greenhouse gases instead. It does not pay to make paper from the small amount of rice hulls. It would cost too much to set up the system.

Flying persimmons and white peaches out of Chile into California right now makes no sense, yet they are available in my small market. These things grow here in their proper seasons. The whole thing is predicated on cheap oil which is more expensive both ecologically and militarily that we can begin to add up.

Fallacy 2. Chickens are stupider than our pets so it is OK to eat them. Chickens make great pets, learn tricks and recognize and greet their owners protect their young from drowning and exhibit all kinds of sentient behavior when they are not nailed to the floor of a 8.5 by 11 cage. You should try catching one of the feral ones (jungle fowl they are called) running wild in Hawaii and you see how smart they are.

Fallacy 3. Any two people are worth more than one of my family members. This is an intellectual lie. I want to see him save two drowning children while his one daughter/mother/grandchild dies.

Objectivity is an intellectual house of cards. In front of a burning house, or a pile of food when we are starving, we all become very subjectively aggressive. My country right or wrong is not an anomaly but the truth about how we feel in the us versus them equation. Animals are "them" so we eat them. Cannibalism done during WWII, or after plan crashes on snowy peaks demonstrates that our dead can become edible "them" when it is a matter of our survival.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion about food and agriculture, but it is unethical to mislead the public on matters of fact. As a farmer and veterinarian, I can assure you that this piece contains misleading information. To understand corn production, one must realize the difference between yields per acre of sweet corn for human consumption and field corn (ears, leaves and stalks) for animal feed. I also question the figure given for consumption of poultry litter, as I am located in a poultry growing area and find that very few cattle are fed any litter even here. Most of the few farmers who fed it at one time have stopped, and it may soon be banned altogether. In the country as a whole, poulty litter feeding is negligible.

In addition, if cattle production required the amounts of oil stated in the article, then no one could produce cattle. The value of the finished 1350 pound steer is about $1150, so obviously the production chain could never sustain even close to a fuel bill of $500 per steer. I don't have enough space to outline the production chain in detail in order to prove this to you, but on my own farm I add 300 pounds to steers by exclusively grazing grass from April to October. I might use one or two gallons of fuel per head per year, and no inorganic fertilizer or pesticides or herbicides. This holds true for farms all across the country on which calves are born and grazed for almost all their lives before being sent to feedlots for a few months.

I only wish that people who pontificate on agricultural practices would spend many days on many farms all around the country. As a personal aside, I will never buy eggs from caged hens. I agree that it borders on the barbaric, and I agree that some of our methods in animal agriculture are in need of real revision. Farmers would be glad to change if production economics allowed.