Again on meat. Again on guilt.

Or ignorance. (Ce. Michael Pollan) -

Many of the species have evolved expressly to gratify our desires, in the intricate dance of domestication that has allowed us and them to prosper together as we never could have prospered apart. But our relationships with the wild species we eat -- from the mushroom, we pick in the forests to the yeasts that leaven our bread -- are no less compelling, and far more mysterious. Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart. It defines us.

What is perhaps most troubling and most sad about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from chicken (Gallus Gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.