The quickest way to relieve pressure on world food prices would be to cut U.S. subsidies for ethanol and drop import tariffs on Brazilian ethanol. But there are longer-term steps we need to take as well if we are to ensure food for everyone. The other reason grain prices have spiked is that oil prices have spiked, and industrial agriculture has become heavily reliant on fossil fuel–for fertilizer, for pesticide, for processing and transportation. Today it takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy. We need to reduce the dependence of modern agriculture on oil, an eminently feasible goal–after all, agriculture is the original solar “technology,” and sustainable farmers have shown us how we might put our food system back on a foundation of sunlight. For example, when you take cattle off their typical feedlot diet of grain and allow them to eat grass, those hamburgers put less pressure on the prices of both oil and grain.

That brings me to the third, and perhaps least tractable, factor behind the run-up in world grain prices: the growing appetite for meat in places like China and India. Most of the world’s grain goes to feed animals, not people, and meat is a very inefficient use for that grain–it takes 10 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. There would be plenty of grain for everyone if we actually ate it as food and didn’t use it to make meat. Reducing world meat consumption–or feeding our food animals differently–would leave more grain for the world’s hungry.

It comes down to this: the world’s agricultural lands make up a precious and finite resource; we should be using it to grow food for people, not for cars or cattle.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is often mentioned as a leading institution in the world of food law enforcement. Yale University professor Kelly Brownell, whose concept of culinary law-and-order includes proposals to tax junk food, is a prominent member of the force. Several authors have been added to its ranks as well — Eric Schlosser and Marion Nestle hold high positions down at the stationhouse and, apparently, I have recently joined the force as a new recruit. I’m honored to be counted in their company, but before I accept the badge I want to take a moment to think through the implications of the title.

As near as I can determine, the whole notion of the “food police” got its start in the fevered brain of Rick Berman, a lawyer and former restaurant industry executive who founded the Center for Consumer Freedom. This nonprofit organization was originally funded by the tobacco and restaurant industries to fight smoking bans in bars and restaurants. Fresh from that resounding defeat, the “center” (it’s unclear whether there’s anything more to it than Mr. Berman, his Web site and his sizeable budget) expanded its mission, which is summed up on its site: “The growing cabal of ‘food cops,’ health care enforcers, militant activists, meddling bureaucrats and violent radicals who think they know ‘what’s best for you’ are pushing against our basic freedoms. We’re here to push back.”

The Center for Consumer Freedom is actually not a consumer group, but an astro-turf (that’s faux grassroots) advocacy group funded by Big Food to discredit those in the media and government who would do anything — including litigate, regulate and, apparently, express disagreeable opinions — to interfere with the industry’s freedom to make as much money as possible selling us junk food. Many of the same groups that Big Tobacco launched to attack its critics (including the Center for Consumer Freedom and the Heartland Institute) have seamlessly moved into attacking the critics of Big Food. This is hardly a coincidence: large segments of the food industry share corporate parents with Big Tobacco. Not surprisingly, the highest priority of these groups is to counter every suggestion that food, like tobacco, is a public health issue that demands public education and action.

In an interview with the trade publication Chain Leader a couple of years ago, Mr. Berman explained that one of the best ways to “push back” against criticism of the industry was to “shoot the messenger.” That can take many forms, including the personal attack: the site has made pictorial fun of the fact that Professor Brownell, who writes on obesity and advocates junk food taxes, is not quite as buff as a leading “food cop” is supposed to be.

But though the phrase seems to have begun its life in this right-wing corporate incubator, it’s been picked up all over the place, and is now used unselfconsciously even in the pages of The New York Times. Last Tuesday, the Science Times section ran a piece about the unintended consequences of the campaign to reform school food under the headline, “Well-Intentioned Food Police May Create Havoc With Children’s Diets.” Well, at least these food cops are “well-intentioned.” But the phrase should be examined closely before being so lightly tossed around.
To describe critics of agribusiness as cops or police is to imply that their messages are somehow repressive, while the activities and competing messages of the food companies represent the opposite: freedom, a word they dearly love. When a journalist writes critically of the cooking or marketing practices at McDonald’s, he is somehow interfering with people’s freedom to enjoy their chicken nuggets — the journalist stands for control. Yet for some reason the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by McDonald’s to market its food represents not control but freedom. Keep in mind that this marketing involves the routine manipulation of children — bribing them with toys, enticing them to eat more with cleverly designed packaging and portion sizes, and deploying the arts of food science to exploit their inborn cravings for fat, salt and sugar. So who exactly is the more “controlling” party here?

American food companies spend an estimated $36 billion to market food to us — that is to say, to get us to eat more of their products than we otherwise would. Their techniques include putting health claims on junk food (my current favorite: Whole Grain Lucky Charms); supersizing portions; slipping high-fructose corn syrup into every imaginable and heretofore unsweetened product; and offering seemingly healthy alternatives to high-fat foods that turn out to be just as fattening (check out McDonald’s new grilled chicken Caesar salad with Newman’s Own dressing: more calories than a Quarter Pounder).

Now compare this $36 billion worth of powerful, hidden and manipulative messages with the voices on the other side endeavoring, openly, to point all this out — in articles, books, academic studies, op-ed columns and a handful of independent films. How much is spent getting that message out? Marion Nestle addresses the discrepancy in resources in her book “Food Politics.” She compares the $1 million spent by the National Cancer Institute on its Five a Day for Better Health campaign (to get Americans to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables) to the $32 million spent in 2004 to advertise a single minor food product — Cheez-Its.

Some of the same food companies that preach the virtues of freedom of choice are considerably less enamored of freedom of thought and opinion. They decry litigation against the food industry, yet when Oprah Winfrey, a “food cop,” did a show suggesting there might be mad cow disease in the U.S. beef supply, the beef industry sued to silence her, using one of the “veggie-libel laws” that agribusiness has secured in more than a dozen agricultural states. Under these laws it is a crime to speak ill of a food product. For a journalist today, it is far riskier to criticize a rib-eye steak than a human being.

(Oprah won her suit, at an estimated cost of $1 million, though you have to wonder if she’ll ever do another show on the beef industry. Her concerns about the American beef supply turned out to be well-founded; since her program aired 10 years ago, three cases of mad cow disease have turned up in the U.S.)

But while the food industry is quite prepared to attack its critics using veggie libel laws, it seeks to insulate itself from litigation by pushing Congress and state legislatures to pass “cheeseburger laws” that grant the industry immunity from obesity lawsuits. Eric Schlosser, the author of “Fast Food Nation,” knows how the industry “pushes back” against its critics. In April The Wall Street Journal reported that McDonald’s had launched a campaign to attack “Chew on This,” a new book by Schlosser and Charles Wilson. The company distributed a memo to franchisees, alluding to plans to “discredit the message and the messenger.” According to The Journal, several groups affiliated with the conservative Washington lobbying firm DCI Group, which counts McDonald’s and Coca-Cola among its clients, launched attacks on Mr. Schlosser.

One charge is that he supports the decriminalization of marijuana. (He outlined his position in an April 2004 essay in The New York Times, “Make Peace With Pot.”) This might not seem terribly germane, until you remember that “Chew on This” is directed at middle school children. Mr. Schlosser reports that several schools that invited him to speak about the book have received letters urging them to cancel his talks on the grounds he is not fit to speak to children. Hecklers, industry representatives and pamphleteers have also been showing up at his public appearances.

Healthy debate, you might say. But debate is healthy only when it is conducted openly, and that is surely not the case here. As Mr. Schlosser pointed out in a recent e-mail message, “One of the fundamental differences between us food police and these food pushers is that we put our names on what we write, whereas these food companies hide behind front groups, and the front groups refuse to disclose their corporate funding. They love the word ‘freedom’ but try to destroy anyone with a different point of view.”

For more information on the campaign against Mr. Schlosser and his new book, go to chewonthisnews.com. Source Watch documents the links between various public relations and lobbying firms and their corporate funders.

Earlier this month these interests finally got it together to form a group — the North American Foie Gras Producers Association — to defend against the rising prohibitionist wave: to date, legislation to ban foie gras has been introduced in six states. How delicious it must feel for a legislator to strike a blow on behalf of defenseless ducks and geese at the expense of an unpronounceable and Frenchified delicacy that maybe .00000001 percent of their constituents would even dream of ordering, assuming they could afford it. Such an exquisitely painless political opportunity doesn’t come along every day.

For animal rights groups, the battle to ban foie gras must seem like a tasty target of opportunity — the lowest-hanging fruit in their campaign to improve the lives of animals in industrial agriculture. “It’s only a matter of time before practices like cramming nine hens into an 18-by-20-inch wire mesh cage for their entire lives is made illegal,” Bruce Friedrich, an official of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), told a reporter after the victory in Chicago.

We can only hope he’s right. The lives of billions of animals on American feedlots and factory farms are horrible to contemplate, an affront to our image of ourselves as humane. But banning foie gras will not do much to advance the larger cause. By suggesting we’ve outlawed the most heinous practice in animal agriculture, the campaign against foie gras allows everyone to feel good about doing something for the animals. Yet it leaves the much larger problem untouched.

Chances are you haven’t had any foie gras today, but you may well have eaten eggs. It is routine practice to cram laying hens into cages so small that the birds are sometimes driven to cannibalize their cagemates. The solution to this “vice” — as the industry and the Department of Agriculture call such counterproductive behaviors in livestock (talk about blaming the victims!) — is to snip the beaks off the hens with hot knives, without anesthetic. Similarly, the U.S.D.A.’s recommended solution for the “vice” of tail-biting among hogs driven mad by close confinement is to snip off their tails — with a pliers, without anesthetic. To peer over the increasingly high walls of our industrial animal agriculture is not only to lose your appetite but to feel revulsion and shame.

Mutilating pigs and chickens while they are alive is as routine in modern American agriculture as bacon and eggs for breakfast. These operations are performed every day on thousands of factory farms that are owned by, or under contract to, Fortune 500 corporations that supply hundreds of thousands of restaurants and supermarkets. There is, as yet, scant appetite among elected officials to challenge these practices; so far, change has come, to the extent it has, because of direct action by animal rights groups like PETA. Whatever you may think of their tactics, they have won important concessions from the fast food industry, extracting a few more square inches of living space for those poor hens and for the sows, many of whom still live in pens so small they cannot turn around.

Politicians sense a gathering outrage over the treatment of animals in American agriculture. So what to do? Or, more precisely, what to seem to do? Because to do anything of consequence would mean to confront the considerable power of agribusiness. Some of the best-organized and most widely dispersed political interests in America — factory farmers, feedlot owners, meat processors and the restaurant industry — will not yield without a fight their freedom to abuse animals as they see fit. Such abuse is extremely profitable, and it is the reason why meat in this country is so cheap. In fact, the abuse is protected by law: Most federal animal cruelty laws specifically exempt agriculture — where most of the animals are. Thus you may not kick your dog in public, but you’re free to mutilate pigs and chickens behind the fences of C.A.F.O.’s (concentrated animal feeding operations).

Rather than take on that big fight, the politicians have hit on a wonderful simulacrum: going after America’s two little, politically unconnected foie gras producers.

I’m not about to defend foie gras from the legions of righteous animal defenders. But do we have any reason to believe that feeding ducks and geese corn through tubes put down their throats is any more brutal than snipping off tails and beaks? I have not visited either of America’s foie gras farms, but I note that they have invited journalists to visit and see the operations for themselves. (Just try to wangle your way into an industrial chicken or hog facility.) Some of the journalists who have accepted that invitation report that the birds rush over to the farmers at feeding time. Our own visceral revulsion at the prospect of having tubes stuck down our throats may have to do with the fact we have a gag reflex; ducks and geese do not. I seriously doubt you’d ever see pigs rushing over to the man wielding the pliers.

To ban foie gras is symbolic politics at its worst, a way to create the appearance of doing something about a problem that politicians — and, let’s face it, most of us eaters — would rather not confront. So we close down a couple of foie gras farms. (Though the California law gives the farmers till 2012 to desist, which is odd: if force-feeding ducks is really so heinous, then how in good conscience can we abide the practice for six more years?) We brace ourselves for a major change in our eating habits: no more foie gras after 2012. What a sacrifice! And, after patting ourselves on the back for all we’ve done for the animals, we can now, with clear conscience, turn back to our breakfast, ordering bacon and eggs, sunny side up.

Walking with a loaded rifle in an unfamiliar forest bristling with the signs of your prey is thrilling. It embarrasses me to write that, but it is true. I am not by nature much of a noticer, yet here, now, my attention to everything around me, and deafness to everything else, is complete. Nothing in my experience has prepared me for the quality of this attention. I notice how the day’s first breezes comb the needles in the pines, producing a sotto voce whistle and an undulation in the pattern of light and shadow tattooing the tree trunks and the ground. I notice the specific density of the air. But this is not a passive or aesthetic attention; it is a hungry attention, reaching out into its surroundings like fingers, or nerves. My eyes venture deep into thickets my body could never penetrate, picking their way among the tangled branches, sliding over rocks and around stumps to bring back the slenderest hint of movement. In the places too deeply shadowed to admit my eyes, my ears roam at will, returning with the report of a branch cracking at the bottom of a ravine, or the snuffling of a. . .wait: what was that? Just a bird. Everything is amplified. Even my skin is alert, so that when the shadow launched by the sudden ascent of a turkey vulture passes overhead I swear I can feel the temperature momentarily fall. I am the alert man.

Hunting inflects a place powerfully. The ordinary prose of the ground becomes as layered and springy as verse — and as dense with meanings. Notice the freshly rototilled soil at the base of that oak tree? Look how the earth has not yet been crisped by the midday sun; this means wild boar — my quarry — have been rooting here since yesterday afternoon, either overnight or earlier this morning. See that smoothly scooped-out puddle of water? That’s a wallow, but notice how the water is perfectly clear: pigs haven’t disturbed it yet today. We could wait here for them.

Hunter and quarry maintain different but overlapping maps of the hunting ground, places of refuge and prospect, places of prior encounter. The hunter’s aim is to have his map collide with his quarry’s map, which, should it happen, will do so at a moment of no one’s choosing. For although there’s much the hunter can know, about game and about its habitat, in the end he knows nothing about what is going to happen here today, whether the longed-for and dreaded encounter will actually take place and, if it does, how it will end.

Since there’s nothing he can do to make the encounter happen, the hunter’s energy goes into readying himself for it, and trying, by the sheer force of his attention, to summon the animal into his presence. Searching for his prey, the hunter instinctively becomes more like the animal, straining to make himself less visible, less audible, more exquisitely alert. Predator and prey alike move according to their own maps of this ground, their own forms of attention and their own systems of instinct, systems that evolved expressly to hasten or avert precisely this encounter.. . .

wait a minute. Did I really write that last paragraph? Without irony? That’s embarrassing. Am I actually writing about the hunter’s “instinct,” suggesting that the hunt represents some sort of primordial encounter between two kinds of animals, one of which is me? This seems a bit much. I recognize this kind of prose: hunter porn. And whenever I’ve read it in the past, in Hemingway and Ortega y Gasset and all those hard-bitten, big-bearded American wilderness writers who still pine for the Pleistocene, it never failed to roll my eyes. I never could stomach the straight-faced reveling in primitivism, the barely concealed bloodlust, the whole macho conceit that the most authentic encounter with nature is the one that comes through the sight of a gun and ends with a large mammal dead on the ground — a killing that we are given to believe constitutes a gesture of respect. So it is for Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, who writes in his “Meditations on Hunting” that “the greatest and most moral homage we can pay to certain animals on certain occasions is to kill them.. . .” Please.

And yet here I find myself slipping into the hunter’s ecstatic purple, channeling Ortega y Gasset. It may be that we have no better language in which to describe the experience of hunting, so that all of us who would try sooner or later slide into this overheated prose ignorant of irony. Or it could be that hunting is one of those experiences that appear utterly different from the inside than the outside. That this might indeed be the case was forcibly impressed on me after a second outing with my hunting companion and mentor, Angelo Garro, when, after a long and gratifying day in the woods, we stopped at a convenience store for a bottle of water. The two of us were exhausted and filthy, the fronts of our jeans stained dark with blood. We couldn’t have smelled terribly fragrant. And under the bright fluorescence of the 7-Eleven, in the mirror behind the cigarette rack behind the cashier, I caught a glimpse of this grungy pair of self-satisfied animal killers and noted the wide berth the other customers in line were only too happy to grant them. Us. It is a wonder that the cashier didn’t pre-emptively throw up his hands and offer us the contents of the cash register.

Irony — the outside perspective — easily withers everything about hunting, shrinks it to the proportions of boy’s play or atavism. And yet at the same time I found that there is something about the experience of hunting that puts irony itself to rout. In general, experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing. But there it is: I enjoyed shooting a pig a whole lot more than I ever thought I should have.

II. A CANNABINOID MOMENT

I had never hunted before, never had the need or the desire or the right kind of dad. One of the world’s great indoorsmen, my father looked upon hunting as a human activity that stopped making sense with the invention of the steakhouse. What first got me out there, in the oak chaparral of northern Sonoma County that morning last spring, hoping to shoot a wild pig, was a conceit. I’d gotten it into my head that I wanted to prepare a meal I had hunted, gathered and grown myself. Why? To see if I could do it. I was also curious to experience the food chain — which has grown so long and complex as to no longer even feel anything like a food chain — at its shortest and most elemental. And I had long felt that, as a meat eater, I should, at least once, take responsibility for the killing that eating meat entails. I wanted, for once in my life, to pay the full karmic price of a meal.

Yet when the day arrived, part of me did not want to go. The night before, I had anxiety dreams about hunting. In one I was on a bobbing boat trying to aim a rifle at a destroyer that was firing its cannons at me; in the other, the woods were crawling with Angelo’s Sicilian relatives, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember how my gun worked, whether the safety was on when the little button popped up on the left side of the trigger or the right. I had tried out my rifle only once before taking it to the woods, at a firing range in the Oakland hills, and by the end of the morning my paper target had sustained considerably less damage than my left shoulder, which ached for a full week. I wasn’t ready to buy a gun of my own, so Angelo had borrowed a fairly basic pump-action rifle, a .270 Winchester with an old-fashioned sight that I had trouble getting used to. After my session at the range, the first-order worry that I wouldn’t have whatever it takes to fire a rifle aimed at an animal was overtaken by a second-order worry that, assuming I did manage to pull the trigger, nothing of consequence would happen to the animal.

Why boar? The animals were introduced to California by the Spanish in the early 1700′s and today are regarded as pests in many parts of the state; it seemed to me easier to justify killing an exotic pest than a native species. Though the pigs have been living wild a long time, they are not technically wild or even full-blooded boar; feral pigs would be more accurate. They are also, by reputation, vicious; one of the nicknames the California pig has earned is “dog ripper.”

When I asked Angelo why he hunted wild pig, he didn’t hesitate (or say word one about the environment); rather, he just kissed the tips of his fingers and said: “Because it is the most delicious meat. And there is nothing that tastes so good as boar prosciutto. You’ll see. You shoot a big one, and we’ll make some.”

On this, my first outing, we were joined by Richard, the property’s owner, and Angelo’s friend Jean-Pierre, a Frenchman who works as a chef in Berkeley. Jean-Pierre grew up hunting boar with his relatives in Normandy. He had on one of those green felt Alpine fedoras with the feather (a hat he managed to wear without so much as a trace of self-consciousness) and a pair of tall black riding boots. We didn’t look much the part of an American hunting party (Angelo had on a pair of flouncy Euro-style black pants), though Richard did have on the full international orange regalia, and I was wearing my brightest orange sweater. We divided into pairs, me with Angelo, and went our separate ways, with a plan to meet back at the cars for lunch around noon.

“You are going to kill your first pig today,” Angelo hollered over the roar of the A.T.V. we were riding on. Given the nature of hunting, not to mention me, I understood this as less a prediction than a prayer. After a while we parked the A.T.V. and set out on foot. Angelo gave me a route and a destination — a wallow in a grassy opening at the bottom of a ravine — and told me to find a tree with a good view of it and wait there, perfectly still, for 20 minutes until I heard him whistle. He would make his way toward the same spot from another direction, in the hope of driving some pigs into my field of vision.

When I could hear Angelo’s footsteps no longer, my ears and eyes started tuning in — everything. It was as if I’d dialed up the gain on all my senses, or quieted myself to such an extent that the world itself grew louder and brighter. I quickly learned to filter out the static of birdsong, of which there was plenty at that early hour, and to listen for the frequency of specific sounds — the crack of branches or the snuffling of animals. I found I could see farther into the woods than I ever had before, picking out the tiniest changes in my visual field at an almost inconceivable distance, just so long as those changes involved movement or blackness. The sharpness of focus and depth of field was uncanny, though, being nearsighted, I knew it well from the experience of putting on glasses with a strong new prescription for the first time. “Hunter’s eye,” Angelo said later when I described the phenomenon; he knew all about it.

I found a shaded spot overlooking the wallow and crouched down in the leaves, steadying my back against the smooth trunk of a madrone. I rested my gun across my thighs and got quiet. The whoosh of air through my nostrils suddenly sounded calamitous, so I began inhaling and exhaling through my mouth, silencing my breath. So much sensory information was coming into my head that it seemed to push out the normal buzz of consciousness. The state felt very much like meditation, though it took no mental effort or exercise to achieve that kind of head-emptying presence. The simple act of looking and listening, tuning my senses to the forest frequencies of Pig, occupied every quadrant of mental space and anchored me to the present. I must have lost track of time, because the 20 minutes flashed by. Ordinarily my body would have rebelled at being asked to hold a crouch this long, but I felt no need to change position or even to shift my weight.

Later it occurred to me that this mental state, which I quite liked, in many ways resembled the one induced by marijuana: the way your senses feel heightened and the mind seems to forget everything outside the scope of its present focus, including physical discomfort and the passing of time. One of the more interesting areas of research in the neurosciences today is the study of the brain’s “cannabinoid network,” a set of receptors in the nervous system that are activated by a group of unusual compounds called cannabinoids. THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, is one, and the brain produces its own: a neurotransmitter called anandamide. Whether made by the plant or the brain, cannabinoids have the effect of intensifying sensory experience, disabling short-term memory and stimulating appetite. Scientists still aren’t certain what the evolutionary utility of such a system might be. Some researchers hypothesize that the cannabinoids, like the opiates, play a role in the brain’s pain relief and reward system; others that they help regulate appetite or emotion.

The experience of hunting suggests another explanation. Could it be that the cannabinoid network is precisely the sort of adaptation that natural selection would favor in the evolution of a creature who survives by hunting? A brain chemical that sharpens the senses, narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of time) and makes you hungry would seem to be the perfect pharmacological tool for Man the Hunter. All at once it provides the motive, the reward and the optimal mind-set for hunting. I would not be the least bit surprised to discover that what I was feeling in the woods that morning, crouching against a tree, avidly surveying that forest grove, was a tide of anandamide washing over my brain.

But whether I was actually having a cannabinoid moment or not, in the minutes before Angelo’s whistle pierced my vigil I did feel as if I had somehow entered nature through a new door. For once I was not a spectator but a full participant in the life of the forest. Later, when I reread Ortega y Gasset’s description of the experience, I decided maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all, not even when he asserted that hunting offers us our last best chance to leave behind history and return to the state of nature, if only for a time — for what he called a “vacation from the human condition.”

Ortega believed that in hunting we returned to nature because hunting is the “generic” way of being human and because the animal we are stalking summons the animal still in us. This is atavism pure and simple — the recovery of an earlier mode of being human — and that for Ortega is the supreme, and the exclusive, value of hunting. For perhaps his most outrageous claim is that the hunt is the only such return available to us — we can’t ever, as he points out, go back to being Christian in the manner of St. Augustine, say, because once history begins, it is irreversible. So how is it we can still go back to being Paleolithic? Because our identity as hunters is literally prehistoric — is in fact inscribed by evolution in the architecture of our bodies and brains. Much that surrounds hunting is completely artificial, Ortega freely admitted, yet the experience itself, the encounter of predator and prey, is no fiction. (Just ask the animals.) Even though the hunt takes place during a brief “vacation” from modern life, what occurs in the space of this electrifying parenthesis will ever and always be, in a word Ortega never shrinks from using, “authentic.”

III. READY. OR NOT.

As I said, all this seemed much less crazy to me after I’d been in the woods that first morning with my gun, long before I even had occasion to fire it. I’m chagrined to report that the occasion never presented itself during that first hunting trip — or rather, when it did present itself I was in no position to do anything about it. I know, I’ve been talking here like Mister Big Game Hunter, comparing notes on the experience with the likes of Señor Ortega y Gasset, but I returned from the woods that day not only empty-handed, which in hunting is entirely forgivable, but also what is not, having failed as a hunter because I was not ready.

I blame this, at least partly, on lunch.

By the end of the morning, one animal had been shot, a small boar, taken by Jean-Pierre. On our way back up to the ridge in the A.T.V., Angelo and I picked it up. Not a whole lot bigger than a beagle, it had a florid blotch erupting from the side of its bristly black head. Angelo hung it by its ankles from the limb of a tree near the cars; he planned to dress it after lunch.

Being Europeans, as well as accomplished cooks, Angelo and Jean-Pierre take lunch very seriously, even when out in the woods some distance from civilization. “So I brought with me a few little things to nibble on,” Jean-Pierre mumbled. “Me, too,” chimed Angelo. And out of their packs came course after course of the most astonishing picnic, which they proceeded to lay out on the hood of Angelo’s S.U.V.: a terrine of lobster and halibut en geleé, salami and prosciutto and mortadella, Angelo’s homemade pâté of boar and home-cured olives, cornichons, chicken salad, a generous selection of cheeses and breads, fresh strawberries and pastries, silverware and napkins and, naturally, a bottle each of red and white wine.

It was a delicious lunch, but arguably it took off some of my hunter’s edge. One of the easier questions on my state hunter-education course exam went something like this: “Hunting after drinking alcohol is an acceptable practice, true or false.” Not that I was intoxicated, but I was feeling notably loquacious and relaxed when Richard and I set off to look for another pig after lunch, while Angelo dressed Jean-Pierre’s pig and Jean-Pierre enjoyed a postprandial nap in the grass. Our rifles slung over our shoulders, we strolled down a shady trail toward a spot where Richard had once had some luck, all the while getting acquainted and chatting about one thing or another.

We were thoroughly absorbed in conversation when I happened to glance up ahead and saw directly in front of us, not 30 yards away, several large black shapes swimming in the shadows. There they were, four big pigs milling beneath an oak tree, their attention fixed on the acorns littering the path that connected us. Incredibly, they gave no sign they’d spotted us or heard our yammering.

I grabbed Richard by the shoulder, put my finger to my lips and pointed ahead. He stopped. “It’s your shot,” he whispered. “Go ahead. Take it.” It is the custom when hunting with companions that the first shot belongs to the person who spotted the animal, perhaps in recognition of the fact that skill in hunting is as much about finding the game as killing it. In fact in many hunter-gatherer societies, rights to the meat go not just to the hunter who killed the animal but to the hunter who spotted it as well. These pigs were mine.

One little problem. I had neglected to pump my rifle before we set out on the trail. There was no bullet in the chamber, and to pump my gun now would almost surely alert the pigs to our presence. I could take the chance, but to do so probably meant the pigs would be on the run by the time I was ready to shoot. I explained all this in a whisper to Richard, whose own gun, a fancy new Finnish bolt-action job, could be cocked with little more than a click of the little bolt. I gave him my shot.

Richard got down on one knee and slowly raised his rifle to his shoulder. I braced for the explosion, preparing to pump my gun the moment it came; perhaps I could still get off a shot at one of the others. Richard took his time, aiming carefully, waiting for one of the animals to turn and offer its flank. The pigs had their heads down, eating acorns, utterly oblivious to our presence. Then the woods exploded. I saw a pig stagger and fall back against the embankment, then struggle drunkenly to its feet. I pumped my rifle but it was already too late: the other pigs were gone. Richard fired again at the wounded pig, and it crumpled.

The pig, a sow weighing perhaps a hundred pounds, was too heavy to carry, so we took turns dragging it by its rear leg up the path back toward the cars. Angelo trotted over to see the animal, excited and impressed and eager to hear our story. It’s curious how the hunting story takes shape in the moments after the shot, as you work through the chaotic simultaneity of that lightning, elusive moment, trying to tease out of the adrenaline fog something linear and comprehensible. Even though we’d witnessed the event together, Richard and I had taken turns carefully telling each other the story on the long march back, rehearsing our lack of readiness, reviewing the reasons Richard had taken the shot instead of me, trying to nail down the precise distance and number of pigs involved, carefully unpacking the moment and turning our shaky recollections into a consensus of fact — a hunting story. As I watched Angelo drink in our hunting story, I could see the disappointment bloom on his face. It had been my shot, my pig, but I hadn’t taken it.

“You weren’t ready,” Angelo said, levelly. “In hunting you always need to be ready. So, O.K., you learned something today. Next time you will be ready, and you will take your shot.” He was trying hard not to sound like the disappointed father; even so, I couldn’t help feeling like the disappointing son.

So what had really happened? I hadn’t been ready to shoot. But why? The practical reasons were clear; surely it had made more sense to give my shot to Richard than to risk losing the animal. It was because of my unselfish decision that we now had this pig. Yet maybe there was some deeper sense in which I hadn’t been ready; maybe my failure to have a bullet in the chamber reflected some unconscious reluctance about doing what I was asking myself to do. The fact is I’d blown it, and I wasn’t sure how deep I should go in search of an explanation. And yet I had been, and still was, determined to shoot a pig — I had a meal to cook, for one thing, but I was also genuinely hungry for the experience, to learn whatever it had to teach me. So I spent the rest of the afternoon hunting intently alone, walking the ridge, raking the shadows for signs of pig, looking and listening as hard as I could to will another pig out of the woods. When Angelo announced it was time to go home, I felt deflated.

Jean-Pierre generously offered to give me some cuts of his pig. Since I needed the meat for my meal, I was grateful for his offer, yet I understood that to accept it underscored my inferior status in our little society of hunters. To the successful hunter goes the privilege of giving away the spoils, and I’d read a lot in the anthropological literature suggesting just how important that privilege was. The sheer nutritional density of meat has always made it a precious form of social currency among hunter-gatherers. Since the successful hunter often ends up with more meat than he or his family can eat before it spoils, it makes good sense for him to, in effect, bank the surplus in the bodies of other people, trading meat for obligations and future favors. Chimps will do the same thing. Not to say that Jean-Pierre was lording it over me or demanding anything in return; he wasn’t. But that didn’t change the fact that here I stood, on the vaguely pathetic receiving end of the alpha hunter’s meat gift. I thanked Jean-Pierre for the gift.

in the days after, I wasn’t sure whether I needed to go hunting again. I had my meat. And I had been hunting: I felt as if I had a good idea what it was all about, or nearly all about — the hunter’s way of being in nature, and the way of the pigs. I’d spotted the prey and witnessed the kill. I had a pretty good story too. And yet everyone to whom I told it managed to remind me how unsatisfactory the ending was. You mean you never even fired your gun? I’d violated the Chekhovian dramatic rule: having introduced a loaded gun in Act One, the curtain can’t come down until it is fired. I might miss, but the gun had to be fired. That at least seemed to be the narrative imperative.

And then of course there was Señor Ortega y Gasset, who was not about to accept me into the fellowship of hunters until I’d actually killed an animal. Mere spectatorship, or “platonic” analogues of hunting such as photography or bird-watching, don’t cut it for him. Although Ortega says one does not hunt in order to kill, he also says that one must kill in order to have hunted. Why? For authenticity’s sake. If my venture was about taking ultimate responsibility for the animals I eat, their deaths included, well, I hadn’t done that yet, had I?

I e-mailed Angelo and asked him to let me know the next time he planned to go hunting. He wrote back saying he would give me 48 hours notice, to get ready.

IV. MY PIG

Word came about a month later, on a May Friday, that we were to meet at a gas station in Petaluma the following Monday morning, 6 a.m. sharp. This time it would be just the two of us.

We spent the first part of the morning doing the circuit of Angelo’s customary spots, patrolling first the ridge in the A.T.V. and then moving down into the lower forest on foot. The entire day, I kept a round in my chamber. We staked out a wallow deep in the woods and then a trampled clearing of ferns on the near side of the hill that abuts the road, but saw no signs of boar.

A little after 9 in the morning, we were walking together down a logging road cut into a steep hillside when we were stopped in our tracks by a grunt so loud and deep and guttural that it seemed to be coming from the bowels of the earth. A very big pig was very close by. But where? What direction to look? The sound had no address; this was the grunt of the ground itself, omnipresent, more audible to my torso than to my ears. We crouched down low, making ourselves as inconspicuous as possible, and I listened as hard as I’ve ever listened for anything before, listened the way you listen when you hear a strange sound in the night.

I needn’t have strained so, because the next sound we heard was nearly as loud as the first: the sharp, clean crack of a branch, coming from above us to our right, where the thickly oaked hillside climbed to a crest. A stream ran down the hillside and crossed the path in front of us about 30 yards ahead. With my eyes I followed the silvery line of the stream up through the woods to the crest, and that’s when I saw it: a rounded black form, a negative of sunrise, coming over the top of the hill. Then another black sun, and another, a total of five or six, I couldn’t be sure, popping over the crest in a line like a string of huge black pearls.

I touched Angelo on the shoulder and pointed toward the pigs. What should I do? This time my gun was pumped of course, and now, for the first time, I took off the safety. Should I shoot? No, you wait, Angelo said. See — they’re coming down the hill now. I followed the pigs with the barrel of my gun, trying to get one of them in my sight. My finger rested lightly on the trigger, and it took all the self-restraint I could summon not to squeeze, but I didn’t have a clear shot — too many trees stood between us. Take your time, Angelo whispered, they will come to us. And so they did, following the stream bed down to the road directly in front of us, moving toward us in an excruciatingly slow parade. I have no idea how long it took the pigs to pick their way down the steep hill, whether it was minutes or just seconds. At last the first animal, a big black one, stepped out into the clearing of the dirt road, followed by another that was just as big but much lighter in color. The second pig presented its flank. Now! Angelo whispered. This is your shot!

I could sense Angelo a step or two behind me, preparing to take his shot the second I took mine. We were both down on one knee. I braced the rifle against my shoulder and lined up my sight. I felt calmer and clearer than I expected to; at least when I looked down the barrel of the rifle it didn’t appear to be wagging uncontrollably. I took aim at the shoulder of the grayish pig, aligning the sight’s two parts — its U and I — with the top of the animal’s front leg. I held my breath, resisted a sudden urge to clamp my eyes shut and gently squeezed.

The crystal stillness of the scene and the moment in time now exploded into a thousand shards of sense. The pigs erupted in panic, moving every which way at once like black bumper cars, and then the blam! of Angelo’s shot directly behind made me jump. One pig was down; another seemed to stagger. I pumped my gun to fire again but the adrenaline was surging now and I was shaking so violently my finger accidentally pressed the trigger before I could lower my gun; the shot went wild, skying far over the heads of the rioting pigs. Something like the fog of war now descended on the scene, and I’m uncertain exactly what happened next, but I believe Angelo fired a second time. I collected myself just enough to pump and fire one more poorly aimed round before the pigs dispersed, most of them tumbling down the steep embankment to our left.

We ran forward to the downed animal, a very large grayish sow beached on her side across the dirt road; a glossy marble of blood bubbled directly beneath her ear. The pig thrashed briefly, trying to lift her head, then gave it up. Death was quickly overtaking her, and I was grateful she wouldn’t need a second shot.

Angelo clapped me on the back and congratulated me extravagantly. “Your first pig! Look at the size of it. And with a perfect shot, right in the head. You did it!” Did I do it? Was that really my shot? I thought my first shot had dropped the pig, but already that moment was blurred irretrievably, and when I saw what a clean shot it was, I suddenly had my doubts. Yet Angelo was adamant — he had fired at a different pig, a black one. “No, this is your pig, Michael, you killed it, there’s no doubt in my mind.” Our hunting story was taking form, the fluid confusion of the moment rapidly hardening into something sturdier and sharper than it really was. “What a great shot,” Angelo continued. “You got yourself a big one. That’s some very nice prosciutti!”

Meat I was not yet quite ready to see. What I saw was a dead wild animal, its head lying on the dirt in a widening circle of blood. I kneeled down and pressed the palm of my hand against the pig’s belly above the nipples and felt beneath the dusty, bristly skin her warmth, but no heartbeat. My emotions were as surging and confused as the knot of panicked pigs had been on this spot just a moment before. The first to surface was this powerful upwelling of pride — that I had actually done this thing I’d set out to do, had successfully shot a pig. I felt a flood of relief too, that the deed was done, thank God, and didn’t need to be done again. And then there was this wholly unexpected wash of gratitude. But for what exactly, or to whom? For my good fortune, I guess, and to Angelo, of course, but also to this animal, for stepping unbidden over the crest of that hill, out of the wild and into my sight, to become what Angelo kept calling her: your pig. More than the product of any labor of mine (save receptiveness), the animal was a gift — from whom or what I couldn’t say, but gratitude seemed in order, and gratitude is what I felt.

The one emotion I expected to feel but did not, inexplicably, was remorse, or even ambivalence. All that would come later, but now, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, I felt absolutely terrific — unambiguously happy. Angelo wanted to take my picture, so he posed me behind my pig, one hand cradling the rifle across my chest, the other resting on the animal. I couldn’t decide whether to smile or to compose a more somber expression. I opted for the latter, but I couldn’t quite manage to untie the knot of my smile. Nor did I register, yet anyway, the slightest disgust at the creeping stain of the animal’s blood on the ground, the stain that I remembered Ortega calling a “degradation.” I was still too excited, too interested in this most improbable drama in which I had somehow found myself, playing the hero’s part.

V. MAKING MEAT

The sense of elation didn’t last. Less than an hour later, back up on the ridge, I found myself in a much less heroic position, embracing the pig’s hanging carcass from behind to steady it so Angelo could reach in and pull out its viscera. I was playing the nurse now, passing him tools and holding the patient still. Using a block and tackle and a stainless-steel hanger with two hooks, we’d managed to raise and hang the pig by its rear ankles from the limb of an oak tree. A scale attached to the rig gave the weight of the animal: 190 pounds. The pig weighed exactly as much as I did.

Angelo worked with a small cigar clamped between his teeth; the smoke discouraged the flies and yellow jackets, which had taken an avid interest in the dead animal. There were also a pair of turkey vultures circling high overhead, patiently waiting for us to finish. Whatever parts of this pig we didn’t take, the local fauna were preparing to set upon and consume, weaving this bonanza of fat and protein back into the fabric of the land. Using a short knife, Angelo made a shallow incision the length of the animal’s belly, moving very slowly so as not to pierce any internal organs.

Angelo talked while he worked, mostly, if you can believe it, about food: prosciutto, pâté, ventricina, sausages. The pig was splayed open now, all its internal organs glistening in their place like one of those cutaway anatomy dolls from biology: the bluish links of intestine coiled beneath the stout muscle of heart, beribboned with its map of veins; the spongy pink pair of lungs like outspread wings behind; and below, the sleek chocolate slab of liver. The pig’s internal organs, in their proportions and arrangement and colors, were indistinguishable from human organs.

I held the cavity open while Angelo reached in to pull out the mass of organs, saving only the liver, which had a jagged tear across it. The bullet had apparently crossed the rib cage diagonally from upper left to lower right, tearing through a lobe of the liver. But Angelo thought the liver was salvageable (“for a nice pâté”), so we dropped it into a Ziploc bag. Then he reached in and pulled gently and the rest of the organs tumbled out onto the ground in a heap, up from which rose a stench so awful it made me gag. This was not just the stink of pig wastes but those comparatively benign smells compounded by an odor so wretched and ancient that death alone could release it. I felt a wave of nausea begin to build in my gut. The clinical disinterest with which I had approached the whole process of cleaning my pig collapsed all at once: this was disgusting.

Since it was my plan to serve and eat this animal, the revulsion at its sight and smell that now consumed me was discouraging, to say the least. That plan was no longer just a conceit, either, since the moment I killed this pig I felt it descend on me with the weight of a moral obligation. And yet at the moment the prospect of sitting down to a meal of this animal was unthinkable. Pâté? Prosciutto? Ventricina? Just then I could have made myself vomit simply by picturing myself putting a fork to a bite of this pig. How was I ever going to get past this? And what was this attack of revulsion all about, anyway?

Disgust, I understood, is one of the tools humans have evolved to navigate the omnivore’s dilemma — the elemental question of what we should and should not eat. The emotion alerts us to things we should not ingest, like rotten meat or feces. And surely that protective reflex figured in what I was feeling as I beheld these viscera, which no doubt did contain microbes that could sicken me. Our sense of disgust, as Steven Pinker has written, is “intuitive microbiology.”

But there had to be more to it than that, and later, when I did some reading on disgust, I acquired a better idea what else might underlie my revulsion. Paul Rozin, a cultural psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that many of the things that disgust people do come from animals — bodily fluids and secretions, decaying flesh, corpses. Beyond the sanitary reasons for avoiding certain parts and products of animals, these things disgust us, Rozin suggests, because they confront us with the reality of our own animal nature. So much of the human project is concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts that we seem strenuously to avoid things that remind us that we are beasts, too — animals that urinate, defecate, copulate, bleed, die, stink and decompose. Rozin tells a story about Cotton Mather, who confided to his journal the powerful revulsion he felt at finding himself urinating alongside a dog. Mather turned his self-disgust into a resolution of self-transcendence: “Yet I will be a more noble creature; at the very time when my natural necessities debase me into the condition of the beast, my spirit shall (I say at that very time!) rise and soar.. . .”

Exactly why we would strive so hard to distance ourselves from our animality is a large question, but surely the human fear of death figures in the answer. What we see animals do an awful lot of is die, very often at our hands. Animals resist dying, but, having no conception of death, they don’t give it nearly as much thought as we do. And one of the main thoughts about it we think is, will my own death be like this animal’s or not? The belief, or hope, that human death is somehow different from animal death is precious to us — but unprovable. Whether it is or is not is one of the questions I suspect we’re trying to answer whenever we look into the eyes of an animal.

From the moment I laid eyes on my animal straight through to the moment Angelo sawed off her head, her eyes remained tightly shut beneath her disconcerting eyelashes, yet everything else about the episode asked me to confront these kinds of questions. What disgusted me about “cleaning” the animal was just how messy — in every sense of the word — the process really was, how it forced me to look at and smell and touch and even to taste the death, at my hands, of a creature my size that, on the inside at least, had all the same parts and probably looked very much like me. The line between human and animal I could discern here, gazing into that carcass, was nowhere near sharp. Cannibalism is one of the things that most deeply disgusts us, and while this isn’t by any reasonable definition that, you could forgive the mind for being fooled into reacting as if it were — in disgust.

In this, I decided, was one of the signal virtues of hunting: it puts large questions about who we and the animals are, and the nature of our respective deaths, squarely before the hunter, and while I’m sure there are many hunters who manage to avoid their gaze, that must take some doing.

so we are left standing there in the woods with our uneasiness and our disgust, and disgust’s boon companion, shame. I did not register any such emotion in the moments after shooting my pig, but eventually it dawned, or fell on me, like a great and unexpected weight. It happened late that evening, when, back at home, I opened my e-mail and saw that Angelo had sent me some digital pictures, under the subject heading “Look the great hunter!” I was eager to open them, excited to show my family my pig, since it hadn’t come home with me but was hanging in Angelo’s walk-in cooler.

The image that appeared on my computer screen hit me like an unexpected blow to the body. A hunter in an orange sweater was kneeling on the ground behind a pig the side of whose head has erupted in blood that is spreading like a river delta toward the bottom of the frame. The hunter’s rifle is angled just so across his chest; clearly he is observing some hoary convention of the hunter’s trophy portrait. One proprietary hand rests on the dead animal’s broad flank. The man is looking into the camera with an expression of unbounded pride, wearing an ear-to-ear grin that might have been winning, if perhaps incomprehensible, had the bloodied carcass sprawled beneath him been cropped out of the frame. But the bloodied carcass was right there, front and center, and it rendered that grin — there’s no other word for it — obscene. I felt as if I had stumbled on some stranger’s pornography. I hurried my mouse to the corner of the image and clicked, closing it as quickly as I could. No one should ever see this.

What could I possibly have been thinking? What was the man in that picture feeling? I can’t for the life of me explain what could have inspired such a mad grin, it seemed so distant and alien from me now. If I didn’t know better, I would have said that the man in the picture was drunk. And perhaps he was, seized in the throes of some sort of Dionysian intoxication, the bloodlust that Ortega says will sometimes overtake the successful hunter. And what was I so damned proud of, anyway? I’d killed a pig with a gun, big deal.

Like the image of the two filthy hunters I’d caught in the convenience-store mirror earlier that afternoon, Angelo’s digital photo had shown me the hunt, and the hunter, from the outside, subjecting it to a merciless gaze that hunting can’t withstand, at least not in the 21st century. Yet I’m not prepared to say that that gaze offers the more truthful view of the matter. Angelo’s picture resembles in certain respects the trophy photos sent home by soldiers, who shock their brides and mothers with images of themselves grinning astride the corpses of the enemy dead. They are entitled to their pride; killing is precisely what we’ve asked them to do, so why do we have so much trouble looking at the pictures?

I’ve looked at Angelo’s pictures again, trying to figure out why they should have shamed me so. I realize it isn’t the killing it records that I felt ashamed of, not exactly, but the manifest joy I seemed to be feeling about what I’d done. 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 also to take a certain pleasure in killing. It’s not as if 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.

Perhaps there is a more generous light in which to view the hunter’s joy. Perhaps it is the joy of a creature succeeding at something he has discovered his nature has superbly equipped him to do, an action that is less a perversion of that nature, his “creaturely character,” than a fulfillment of it. But what of the animal in the picture? Well, the animal, too, has had the chance to fulfill its wild nature, has lived, and arguably even died, in a manner consistent with its creaturely character. Hers is, by the standards of animal death, a good one. But could I really say that yet? What if it turned out I couldn’t eat this meat? Her death then will have been pointless, a waste. I realized then that the drama of the hunt doesn’t end until the animal arrives at the table.

So which view of me-the-hunter is the right one, the shame of the photograph or the joy of the man in it, the outside gaze or the inside one? The moralist is eager to decide this question once and for all, to join Cotton Mather in his noble quest for transcendence. The hunter — or at least the grown-up hunter, the uneasy hunter — recognizes the truth disclosed in both views, which is why his joy is tempered by shame, his appetite shadowed by disgust.

The fact that you cannot come out of hunting feeling unambiguously good about it is perhaps what should commend the practice to us. You certainly don’t come out of it eager to protest your innocence. If I’ve learned anything about hunting and eating meat, it’s that it’s even messier than the moralist thinks. Having killed a pig and looked at myself in that picture and now looking forward (if that’s the word) to eating that pig, I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing the force of human will can somehow overcome it. “The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.”

“What is.” I suppose that this as much as anything else, as much as a pig or a meal, is what I was really hunting for, and what I returned from my hunt with a slightly clearer sense of. “What is” is not an answer to anything, exactly; it doesn’t tell you what to do or even what to think. Yet respect for what is does point us in a direction. That direction just happens to be the direction from which we came — that place and time, I mean, where humans looked at the animals they killed, regarded them with reverence and never ate them except with gratitude.

VI. THE PERFECT MEAL

Two weeks later, I prepared my first-person feast: a meal I had hunted, gathered and grown myself. The menu featured braised leg of boar; morels I’d gathered in the Sierras; greens and fava beans from my garden; bread baked from, O.K., store-bought flour, but leavened with wild yeasts I’d gathered from the air outside my house; and a galette made from Bing cherries I’d foraged from a neighborhood tree. My guests included Angelo and Richard and a handful of other new friends who’d taught me about hunting and gathering food. The meal was, among other things, my way of saying thanks. And not just to them.

Any dinner party is a little nervous-making, and I was more nervous about this one than most. Would this rather haphazard assortment of people gel? Would the meal be edible? I’d never cooked any of these dishes; how would they taste? And, guests aside, would the hunter be able to enjoy eating the animal he’d shot? Trimming and larding the leg of boar that morning, I wasn’t so sure.

Cooking is a wondrous process, truly, and that Saturday, spent entirely in the kitchen, I appreciated its magic in a way I never quite had before. It was a day of transformations, as one after another of the raw stuffs of nature — chunks of animal; piles of wild fungi; the leaves, pods and fruits of plants; and piles of pulverized grain — took on whole new forms. Bread dough magically rose and crisped; desiccated mushrooms came back to fleshy life; the leaves of herbs from the garden inflected whatever they touched; animal flesh browned and caramelized, turning into meat. All the various techniques humans have devised for transforming the raw into the cooked — nature into culture — do a lot more for us than make food tastier and easier to digest; they interpose a welcome distance too. It might be enough for other species that their food be good to eat, but for us, as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously put it, food has to be “good to think” as well; the alchemies of the kitchen help get us there, by giving new, more human forms and flavors to the plants and fungi and animals we bring out of nature. The long, civilizing braise is a particularly effective one, rendering the meat bloodless and fork tender. It was when I pulled the leg of boar from the oven to check if it was done, and a deep, woodsy-winey aroma filled the kitchen, that I felt my appetite begin to recover.

There comes a moment in the course of a dinner party when, with any luck, you realize everything’s going to be O.K. The food and the company having sailed past the shoals of awkwardness and disaster, the host can allow himself at last to slip into the warm currents of the evening and actually begin to enjoy himself. For me that moment came just around the time that the platter of wild pig made its second circuit of the table and found many eager takers. The meat was delicious, with a nutty sweetness that tasted nothing like store-bought pork; the sauce I’d reduced from the braising liquid was almost joltingly rich and earthy, powerfully reminiscent of the forest. I was enjoying myself now, and that’s when I realized that this was, at least for me, the perfect meal, though it took me a while to figure out exactly what that meant.

Was the perfect meal the one you made all by yourself? Not necessarily; it had taken many hands to bring this one to the table. The fact that nearly all those hands were at the table was the more rare and important thing, that and the fact that every story about the food on the table could be told in the first person. I prized too the almost perfect transparency of this meal, the brevity and simplicity of the chain that linked it to the natural world. Scarcely an ingredient in it had ever worn a label or bar code or price tag, and yet I knew almost everything there was to know about its provenance and price. I knew and could picture the very oaks that had nourished the pig that was nourishing us. I knew the true cost of this food, the precise sacrifice of time and energy and life it had entailed.

So perhaps that’s what the perfect meal is: one that’s been fully paid for, that leaves no debts outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why, real as it was, there was nothing very realistic about this meal. Yet as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true cost of our food, and that, no matter what we eat, we eat by the grace not of industry but of nature.

We learned, for example, that the beef we have been eating (until the U.S.D.A.’s sudden change of heart about the practice) might consist in whole or part of meat from a “downer cow,” an animal so sick and hobbled that it must be dragged to the slaughterhouse with chains or pushed by a front-end loader. Then, before finding its way into a frankfurter, the carcass of that animal is often subjected to an “Advanced Meat Recovery System” that is so efficient at stripping flesh from spinal cord that the chances are good (35 percent, in one study) that the resultant frankfurter contains “central nervous system tissue”—precisely the tissue most likely to contain the infectious prions thought to communicate B.S.E.

So: We have been eating downers and really picking their bones clean. And what did these animals eat in turn? Many of us were surprised to learn that despite the F.D.A.’s 1997 ban on feeding cattle cattle meat and bone meal, feedlots continue to rear these herbivores as cannibals. When young, they routinely receive “milk replacer” made from bovine blood; later, their daily ration is apt to contain rendered cattle fat as well as feed made from ground-up pigs and chickens—pigs and chickens that may themselves have grown up on a diet of ground-up cows. But the grossest feedlot dish we read about in our newspapers over breakfast has to be “chicken litter,” the nasty stuff shoveled out of chicken houses—bedding, feathers and overlooked chicken feed. Since this chicken feed may contain the same bovine meat and bone meal that F.D.A. rules prohibit in cattle feed, those rules are, in effect, all but guaranteed to break themselves. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention one of the ingredients in chicken litter: chicken feces, which the U.S. cattle industry regards as a source of protein.

Whatever else it is—nutritious, economical, the polar opposite of wasteful—you can’t help feeling that the convoluted new food chain that industrial agriculture has devised for the animals we eat (and thus for us) is, to be unscientific for a moment, disgusting.

I know, I’m offering an aesthetic judgment of a system designed not for beauty but for efficiency. Protein is protein, goes the logic of this system, whether you find it in an animal muscle, a soybean or a chicken dropping: this reductionism is the world-beating formula that drives industrial agriculture, and it works, up to a point. By feeding the absolute cheapest forms of energy and protein to animals it treats as machines, the industrial food chain has succeeded in making the protein we eat unimaginably cheap. Just look at what you can get for a buck or two at Wal-Mart or McDonald’s.

But there is a problem. By the reductive logic that rules our food system, cannibalism should be as legitimate a way of eating as any other: it’s all just protein, right? Yet the great unlearned lesson of B.S.E. and other similar brain-wasting diseases is that, at the level of species or ecosystems, it isn’t quite true that protein is protein. Eating the protein of your own species, for example, carries special risks. The Fore of New Guinea were nearly wiped out by kuru, which bears a striking resemblance to B.S.E.; they spread it among themselves by ritually eating the brains of their dead kin.

Biologists think that evolution probably selected against cannibalism as a way to avoid such infections (among other things). Many animals’ instinctive aversion to their own feces and to the carcasses of their species may represent similar strategies to avoid infectious microbes and parasites. Through natural selection, animals have developed what amount to a set of hygiene rules that function much like taboos. One of the most off-putting things about factory farms is how cavalierly they flout these evolutionary rules, forcing animals to overcome deeply ingrained aversions. For their instincts we substitute antibiotics.

Life as a human omnivore is more complicated and risky. When you can eat almost anything, how do you avoid the dangers nature presents, the plant toxins and parasites and lethal microbes? We have culture to guide us (traditions, science, Jane Brody), but surely even we can still hear older voices, aversions (to rot) and attractions (to sweetness) that still speak when we encounter a plate of food. In matters as fundamental to our animal lives as choosing what to eat, perhaps our aesthetic sense of things is not just aesthetic but is informed by something deeper, something we would do well to heed.

For tens of thousands of years, we have been eating the flesh of ruminants that live on grass. The rightness of that picture—a bovine grazing on grassland—goes way back, maybe all the way to the savanna. And while that picture has recently been eclipsed by nauseating images of modern meat production, the grass-fed ruminant and the vegetarian herbivore are not extinct yet.

For several years now, an alternative, postindustrial food chain has been taking shape, its growth fueled by one “food scare” after another: Alar, G.M.O.’s, rBGH, E. coli 0157:H7; now B.S.E. Whatever science told us about the risks of these novel industrial entrees and sides, something else told us we might want to order something more appetizing: organic, hormone-free, grass-finished. It might cost more, but it’s possible again to eat meat from a short, legible food chain consisting of little more than sunlight, grass and ruminants. Back to the future: a 21st-century savanna. If, as seems probable, this landscape should now expand at the expense of the feedlot, then something good—even beautiful—will have come of this poor mad cow.

Singer and the swelling ranks of his followers ask us to imagine a future in which people will look back on my meal, and this steakhouse, as relics of an equally backward age. Eating animals, wearing animals, experimenting on animals, killing animals for sport: all these practices, so resolutely normal to us, will be seen as the barbarities they are, and we will come to view “speciesism”–a neologism I had encountered before only in jokes–as a form of discrimination as indefensible as racism or anti-Semitism.

Even in 1975, when “Animal Liberation” was first published, Singer, an Australian philosopher now teaching at Princeton, was confident that he had the wind of history at his back. The recent civil rights past was prologue, as one liberation movement followed on the heels of another. Slowly but surely, the white man’s circle of moral consideration was expanded to admit first blacks, then women, then homosexuals. In each case, a group once thought to be so different from the prevailing “we” as to be undeserving of civil rights was, after a struggle, admitted to the club. Now it was animals’ turn.

That animal liberation is the logical next step in the forward march of moral progress is no longer the fringe idea it was back in 1975. A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.

So far the movement has scored some of its biggest victories in Europe. Earlier this year, Germany became the first nation to grant animals a constitutional right: the words “and animals” were added to a provision obliging the state to respect and protect the dignity of human beings. The farming of animals for fur was recently banned in England. In several European nations, sows may no longer be confined to crates nor laying hens to “battery cages”–stacked wired cages so small the birds cannot stretch their wings. The Swiss are amending their laws to change the status of animals from “things” to “beings.”

Though animals are still very much “things” in the eyes of American law, change is in the air. Thirty-seven states have recently passed laws making some forms of animal cruelty a crime, 21 of them by ballot initiative. Following protests by activists, McDonald’s and Burger King forced significant improvements in the way the U.S. meat industry slaughters animals. Agribusiness and the cosmetics and apparel industries are all struggling to defuse mounting public concerns over animal welfare.

Once thought of as a left-wing concern, the movement now cuts across ideological lines. Perhaps the most eloquent recent plea on behalf of animals, a new book called “Dominion,” was written by a former speechwriter for President Bush. And once outlandish ideas are finding their way into mainstream opinion. A recent Zogby poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe that primates are entitled to the same rights as human children.

What is going on here? A certain amount of cultural confusion, for one thing. For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. One by one, science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens. Yet most of the animals we kill lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling. There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig–an animal easily as intelligent as a dog–that becomes the Christmas ham.

We tolerate this disconnect because the life of the pig has moved out of view. When’s the last time you saw a pig? (Babe doesn’t count.) Except for our pets, real animals–animals living and dying–no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check, either on the sentiment or the brutality. This is pretty much where we live now, with respect to animals, and it is a space in which the Peter Singers and Frank Perdues of the world can evidently thrive equally well.

Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, “Why Look at Animals?” in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals–and specifically the loss of eye contact–has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays, it seems, we either look away or become vegetarians. For my own part, neither option seemed especially appetizing. Which might explain how I found myself reading “Animal Liberation” in a steakhouse.

This is not something I’d recommend if you’re determined to continue eating meat. Combining rigorous philosophical argument with journalistic description, “Animal Liberation” is one of those rare books that demand that you either defend the way you live or change it. Because Singer is so skilled in argument, for many readers it is easier to change. His book has converted countless thousands to vegetarianism, and it didn’t take long for me to see why: within a few pages, he had succeeded in throwing me on the defensive.

Singer’s argument is disarmingly simple and, if you accept its premises, difficult to refute. Take the premise of equality, which most people readily accept. Yet what do we really mean by it? People are not, as a matter of fact, equal at all–some are smarter than others, better looking, more gifted. “Equality is a moral idea,” Singer points out, “not an assertion of fact.” The moral idea is that everyone’s interests ought to receive equal consideration, regardless of “what abilities they may possess.” Fair enough; many philosophers have gone this far. But fewer have taken the next logical step. “If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose?”

This is the nub of Singer’s argument, and right around here I began scribbling objections in the margin. But humans differ from animals in morally significant ways. Yes they do, Singer acknowledges, which is why we shouldn’t treat pigs and children alike. Equal consideration of interests is not the same as equal treatment, he points out: children have an interest in being educated; pigs, in rooting around in the dirt. But where their interests are the same, the principle of equality demands they receive the same consideration. And the one all-important interest that we share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain.

Here Singer quotes a famous passage from Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century utilitarian philosopher, that is the wellspring of the animal rights movement. Bentham was writing in 1789, soon after the French colonies freed black slaves, granting them fundamental rights. “The day may come,” he speculates, “when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights.” Bentham then asks what characteristic entitles any being to moral consideration. “Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse?” Obviously not, since “a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant.” He concludes: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Bentham here is playing a powerful card philosophers call the “argument from marginal cases,” or A.M.C. for short. It goes like this: there are humans–infants, the severely retarded, the demented–whose mental function cannot match that of a chimpanzee. Even though these people cannot reciprocate our moral attentions, we nevertheless include them in the circle of our moral consideration. So on what basis do we exclude the chimpanzee?

Because he’s a chimp, I furiously scribbled in the margin, and they’re human! For Singer that’s not good enough. To exclude the chimp from moral consideration simply because he’s not human is no different from excluding the slave simply because he’s not white. In the same way we’d call that exclusion racist, the animal rightist contends that it is speciesist to discriminate against the chimpanzee solely because he’s not human.

But the differences between blacks and whites are trivial compared with the differences between my son and a chimp. Singer counters by asking us to imagine a hypothetical society that discriminates against people on the basis of something nontrivial–say, intelligence. If that scheme offends our sense of equality, then why is the fact that animals lack certain human characteristics any more just as a basis for discrimination? Either we do not owe any justice to the severely retarded, he concludes, or we do owe it to animals with higher capabilities.

This is where I put down my fork. If I believe in equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics, then either I have to take the interests of the steer I’m eating into account or concede that I am a speciesist. For the time being, I decided to plead guilty as charged. I finished my steak.

But Singer had planted a troubling notion, and in the days afterward, it grew and grew, watered by the other animal rights thinkers I began reading: the philosophers Tom Regan and James Rachels; the legal theorist Steven M. Wise; the writers Joy Williams and Matthew Scully. I didn’t think I minded being a speciesist, but could it be, as several of these writers suggest, that we will someday come to regard speciesism as an evil comparable to racism? Will history someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their ordinary lives in the shadow of Treblinka? Precisely that question was recently posed by J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist, in a lecture delivered at Princeton; he answered it in the affirmative. If animal rightists are right, “a crime of stupefying proportions” (in Coetzee’s words) is going on all around us every day, just beneath our notice.

It’s an idea almost impossible to entertain seriously, much less to accept, and in the weeks following my restaurant face-off between Singer and the steak, I found myself marshaling whatever mental power I could muster to try to refute it. Yet Singer and his allies managed to trump almost all my objections.

My first line of defense was obvious. Animals kill one another all the time. Why treat animals more ethically than they treat one another? (Ben Franklin tried this one long before me: during a fishing trip, he wondered, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we may not eat you.” He admits, however, that the rationale didn’t occur to him until the fish were in the frying pan, smelling “admirably well.” The advantage of being a “reasonable creature,” Franklin remarks, is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do.) To the “they do it, too” defense, the animal rightist has a devastating reply: do you really want to base your morality on the natural order? Murder and rape are natural, too. Besides, humans don’t need to kill other creatures in order to survive; animals do. (Though if my cat, Otis, is any guide, animals sometimes kill for sheer pleasure.)

This suggests another defense. Wouldn’t life in the wild be worse for these farm animals? “Defenders of slavery imposed on black Africans often made a similar point,” Singer retorts. “The life of freedom is to be preferred.”

But domesticated animals can’t survive in the wild; in fact, without us they wouldn’t exist at all. Or as one 19th-century political philosopher put it, “The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all.” But it turns out that this would be fine by the animal rightists: for if pigs don’t exist, they can’t be wronged.

Animals on factory farms have never known any other life. Singer replies that “animals feel a need to exercise, stretch their limbs or wings, groom themselves and turn around, whether or not they have ever lived in conditions that permit this.” The measure of their suffering is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts.

O.K., the suffering of animals is a legitimate problem, but the world is full of problems, and surely human problems must come first! Sounds good, and yet all the animal people are asking me to do is to stop eating meat and wearing animal furs and hides. There’s no reason I can’t devote myself to solving humankind’s problems while being a vegetarian who wears synthetics.

But doesn’t the fact that we could choose to forgo meat for moral reasons point to a crucial moral difference between animals and humans? As Kant pointed out, the human being is the only moral animal, the only one even capable of entertaining a concept of “rights.” What’s wrong with reserving moral consideration for those able to reciprocate it? Right here is where you run smack into the A.M.C.: the moral status of the retarded, the insane, the infant and the Alzheimer’s patient. Such “marginal cases,” in the detestable argot of modern moral philosophy, cannot participate in moral decision making any more than a monkey can, yet we nevertheless grant them rights.

That’s right, I respond, for the simple reason that they’re one of us. And all of us have been, and will probably once again be, marginal cases ourselves. What’s more, these people have fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, which makes our interest in their welfare deeper than our interest in the welfare of even the most brilliant ape.

Alas, none of these arguments evade the charge of speciesism; the racist, too, claims that it’s natural to give special consideration to one’s own kind. A utilitarian like Singer would agree, however, that the feelings of relatives do count for something. Yet the principle of equal consideration of interests demands that, given the choice between performing a painful medical experiment on a severely retarded orphan and on a normal ape, we must sacrifice the child. Why? Because the ape has a greater capacity for pain.

Here in a nutshell is the problem with the A.M.C.: it can be used to help the animals, but just as often it winds up hurting the marginal cases. Giving up our speciesism will bring us to a moral cliff from which we may not be prepared to jump, even when logic is pushing us.

And yet this isn’t the moral choice I am being asked to make. (Too bad; it would be so much easier!) In everyday life, the choice is not between babies and chimps but between the pork and the tofu. Even if we reject the “hard utilitarianism” of a Peter Singer, there remains the question of whether we owe animals that can feel pain any moral consideration, and this seems impossible to deny. And if we do owe them moral consideration, how can we justify eating them?

This is why killing animals for meat (and clothing) poses the most difficult animal rights challenge. In the case of animal testing, all but the most radical animal rightists are willing to balance the human benefit against the cost to the animals. That’s because the unique qualities of human consciousness carry weight in the utilitarian calculus: human pain counts for more than that of a mouse, since our pain is amplified by emotions like dread; similarly, our deaths are worse than an animal’s because we understand what death is in a way they don’t. So the argument over animal testing is really in the details: is this particular procedure or test really necessary to save human lives? (Very often it’s not, in which case we probably shouldn’t do it.) But if humans no longer need to eat meat or wear skins, then what exactly are we putting on the human side of the scale to outweigh the interests of the animal?

I suspect that this is finally why the animal people managed to throw me on the defensive. It’s one thing to choose between the chimp and the retarded child or to accept the sacrifice of all those pigs surgeons practiced on to develop heart-bypass surgery. But what happens when the choice is between “a lifetime of suffering for a nonhuman animal and the gastronomic preference of a human being?” You look away–or you stop eating animals. And if you don’t want to do either? Then you have to try to determine if the animals you’re eating have really endured “a lifetime of suffering.”

Whether our interest in eating animals outweighs their interest in not being eaten (assuming for the moment that is their interest) turns on the vexed question of animal suffering. Vexed, because it is impossible to know what really goes on in the mind of a cow or a pig or even an ape. Strictly speaking, this is true of other humans, too, but since humans are all basically wired the same way, we have excellent reason to assume that other people’s experience of pain feels much like our own. Can we say that about animals? Yes and no.

I have yet to find anyone who still subscribes to Descartes’s belief that animals cannot feel pain because they lack a soul. The general consensus among scientists and philosophers is that when it comes to pain, the higher animals are wired much like we are for the same evolutionary reasons, so we should take the writhings of the kicked dog at face value. Indeed, the very premise of a great deal of animal testing–the reason it has value–is that animals’ experience of physical and even some psychological pain closely resembles our own. Otherwise, why would cosmetics testers drip chemicals into the eyes of rabbits to see if they sting? Why would researchers study head trauma by traumatizing chimpanzee heads? Why would psychologists attempt to induce depression and “learned helplessness” in dogs by exposing them to ceaseless random patterns of electrical shock?

That said, it can be argued that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality. The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a few animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness, worry, regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation and dread.

Consider castration. No one would deny the procedure is painful to animals, yet animals appear to get over it in a way humans do not. (Some rhesus monkeys competing for mates will bite off a rival’s testicle; the very next day the victim may be observed mating, seemingly little the worse for wear.) Surely the suffering of a man able to comprehend the full implications of castration, to anticipate the event and contemplate its aftermath, represents an agony of another order.

By the same token, however, language and all that comes with it can also make certain kinds of pain more bearable. A trip to the dentist would be a torment for an ape that couldn’t be made to understand the purpose and duration of the procedure.

As humans contemplating the pain and suffering of animals, we do need to guard against projecting on to them what the same experience would feel like to us. Watching a steer force-marched up the ramp to the kill-floor door, as I have done, I need to remind myself that this is not Sean Penn in “Dead Man Walking,” that in a bovine brain the concept of nonexistence is blissfully absent. “If we fail to find suffering in the animal lives we can see,” Dennett writes in “Kinds of Minds,” “we can rest assured there is no invisible suffering somewhere in their brains. If we find suffering, we will recognize it without difficulty.”

Which brings us–reluctantly, necessarily–to the American factory farm, the place where all such distinctions turn to dust. It’s not easy to draw lines between pain and suffering in a modern egg or confinement hog operation. These are places where the subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, where everything we’ve learned about animals at least since Darwin has been simply . . . set aside. To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on the part of everyone else.

From everything I’ve read, egg and hog operations are the worst. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they do get their beaks snipped off with a hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of their confinement, at least don’t spend their eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral “vices” that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding. Pain? Suffering? Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on more neutral descriptors, like “vices” and “stress.” Whatever you want to call what’s going on in those cages, the 10 percent or so of hens that can’t bear it and simply die is built into the cost of production. And when the output of the others begins to ebb, the hens will be “force-molted”–starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of egg laying before their life’s work is done.

Simply reciting these facts, most of which are drawn from poultry-trade magazines, makes me sound like one of those animal people, doesn’t it? I don’t mean to, but this is what can happen when . . . you look. It certainly wasn’t my intention to ruin anyone’s breakfast. But now that I probably have spoiled the eggs, I do want to say one thing about the bacon, mention a single practice (by no means the worst) in modern hog production that points to the compound madness of an impeccable industrial logic.

Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers 10 days after birth (compared with 13 weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their hormone- and antibiotic-fortified feed. This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring. “Learned helplessness” is the psychological term, and it’s not uncommon in confinement operations, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of sunshine or earth or straw, crowded together beneath a metal roof upon metal slats suspended over a manure pit. So it’s not surprising that an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a pig would get depressed, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Sick pigs, being underperforming “production units,” are clubbed to death on the spot. The U.S.D.A.’s recommended solution to the problem is called “tail docking.” Using a pair of pliers (and no anesthetic), most but not all of the tail is snipped off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail-biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it.

Much of this description is drawn from “Dominion,” Matthew Scully’s recent book in which he offers a harrowing description of a North Carolina hog operation. Scully, a Christian conservative, has no patience for lefty rights talk, arguing instead that while God did give man “dominion” over animals (“Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you”), he also admonished us to show them mercy. “We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality but . . . because they stand unequal and powerless before us.”

Scully calls the contemporary factory farm “our own worst nightmare” and, to his credit, doesn’t shrink from naming the root cause of this evil: unfettered capitalism. (Perhaps this explains why he resigned from the Bush administration just before his book’s publication.) A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency and the moral imperatives of religion or community, which have historically served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is one of “the cultural contradictions of capitalism”–the tendency of the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward animals is one such casualty.

More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here in these places life itself is redefined–as protein production–and with it suffering. That venerable word becomes “stress,” an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like tail-docking or beak-clipping or, in the industry’s latest plan, by simply engineering the “stress gene” out of pigs and chickens. “Our own worst nightmare” such a place may well be; it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath these grim steel roofs, into the brief, pitiless life of a “production unit” in the days before the suffering gene was found.

Vegetarianism doesn’t seem an unreasonable response to such an evil. Who would want to be made complicit in the agony of these animals by eating them? You want to throw something against the walls of those infernal sheds, whether it’s the Bible, a new constitutional right or a whole platoon of animal rightists bent on breaking in and liberating the inmates. In the shadow of these factory farms, Coetzee’s notion of a “stupefying crime” doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.

But before you swear off meat entirely, let me describe a very different sort of animal farm. It is typical of nothing, and yet its very existence puts the whole moral question of animal agriculture in a different light. Polyface Farm occupies 550 acres of rolling grassland and forest in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, Joel Salatin and his family raise six different food animals–cattle, pigs, chickens, rabbits, turkeys and sheep–in an intricate dance of symbiosis designed to allow each species, in Salatin’s words, “to fully express its physiological distinctiveness.”

What this means in practice is that Salatin’s chickens live like chickens; his cows, like cows; pigs, pigs. As in nature, where birds tend to follow herbivores, once Salatin’s cows have finished grazing a pasture, he moves them out and tows in his “eggmobile,” a portable chicken coop that houses several hundred laying hens–roughly the natural size of a flock. The hens fan out over the pasture, eating the short grass and picking insect larvae out of the cowpats–all the while spreading the cow manure and eliminating the farm’s parasite problem. A diet of grubs and grass makes for exceptionally tasty eggs and contented chickens, and their nitrogenous manure feeds the pasture. A few weeks later, the chickens move out, and the sheep come in, dining on the lush new growth, as well as on the weed species (nettles, nightshade) that the cattle and chickens won’t touch.

Meanwhile, the pigs are in the barn turning the compost. All winter long, while the cattle were indoors, Salatin layered their manure with straw, wood chips–and corn. By March, this steaming compost layer cake stands three feet high, and the pigs, whose powerful snouts can sniff out and retrieve the fermented corn at the bottom, get to spend a few happy weeks rooting through the pile, aerating it as they work. All you can see of these pigs, intently nosing out the tasty alcoholic morsels, are their upturned pink hams and corkscrew tails churning the air. The finished compost will go to feed the grass; the grass, the cattle; the cattle, the chickens; and eventually all of these animals will feed us.

I thought a lot about vegetarianism and animal rights during the day I spent on Joel Salatin’s extraordinary farm. So much of what I’d read, so much of what I’d accepted, looked very different from here. To many animal rightists, even Polyface Farm is a death camp. But to look at these animals is to see this for the sentimental conceit it is. In the same way that we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too, and here I was seeing it in abundance.

For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character–its essential pigness or wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle speaks of each creature’s “characteristic form of life.” For domesticated species, the good life, if we can call it that, cannot be achieved apart from humans–apart from our farms and, therefore, our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where animal rightists betray a profound ignorance about the workings of nature. To think of domestication as a form of enslavement or even exploitation is to misconstrue the whole relationship, to project a human idea of power onto what is, in fact, an instance of mutualism between species. Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans imposed on animals some 10,000 years ago.

Rather, domestication happened when a small handful of especially opportunistic species discovered through Darwinian trial and error that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own. Humans provided the animals with food and protection, in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk and eggs and–yes–their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the relationship: animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves (evolution tends to edit out unneeded traits), and the humans gave up their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled life of agriculturists. (Humans changed biologically, too, evolving such new traits as a tolerance for lactose as adults.)

From the animals’ point of view, the bargain with humanity has been a great success, at least until our own time. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats and chickens have thrived, while their wild ancestors have languished. (There are 10,000 wolves in North America, 50,000,000 dogs.) Nor does their loss of autonomy seem to trouble these creatures. It is wrong, the rightists say, to treat animals as “means” rather than “ends,” yet the happiness of a working animal like the dog consists precisely in serving as a “means.” Liberation is the last thing such a creature wants. To say of one of Joel Salatin’s caged chickens that “the life of freedom is to be preferred” betrays an ignorance about chicken preferences–which on this farm are heavily focused on not getting their heads bitten off by weasels.

But haven’t these chickens simply traded one predator for another–weasels for humans? True enough, and for the chickens this is probably not a bad deal. For brief as it is, the life expectancy of a farm animal would be considerably briefer in the world beyond the pasture fence or chicken coop. A sheep farmer told me that a bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. “As a rule,” he explained, “animals don’t get ‘good deaths’ surrounded by their loved ones.”

The very existence of predation–animals eating animals–is the cause of much anguished hand-wringing in animal rights circles. “It must be admitted,” Singer writes, “that the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it.” Some animal rightists train their dogs and cats to become vegetarians. (Note: cats will require nutritional supplements to stay healthy.) Matthew Scully calls predation “the intrinsic evil in nature’s design . . . among the hardest of all things to fathom.” Really? A deep Puritan streak pervades animal rights activists, an abiding discomfort not only with our animality, but with the animals’ animality too.

However it may appear to us, predation is not a matter of morality or politics; it, also, is a matter of symbiosis. Hard as the wolf may be on the deer he eats, the herd depends on him for its well-being; without predators to cull the herd, deer overrun their habitat and starve. In many places, human hunters have taken over the predator’s ecological role. Chickens also depend for their continued well-being on their human predators–not individual chickens, but chickens as a species. The surest way to achieve the extinction of the chicken would be to grant chickens a “right to life.”

Yet here’s the rub: the animal rightist is not concerned with species, only individuals. Tom Regan, author of “The Case for Animal Rights,” bluntly asserts that because “species are not individuals . . . the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of species to anything, including survival.” Singer concurs, insisting that only sentient individuals have interests. But surely a species can have interests–in its survival, say–just as a nation or community or a corporation can. The animal rights movement’s exclusive concern with individual animals makes perfect sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but does it make any sense in nature?

Consider this hypothetical scenario:
In 1611 Juan da Goma (aka Juan the Disoriented) made accidental landfall on Wrightson Island, a six-square-mile rock in the Indian Ocean. The island’s sole distinction is as the only known home of the Arcania tree and the bird that nests in it, the Wrightson giant sea sparrow. Da Goma and his crew stayed a week, much of that time spent in a failed bid to recapture the ship’s escaped goat — who happened to be pregnant. Nearly four centuries later, Wrightson Island is home to 380 goats that have consumed virtually every scrap of vegetation in their reach. The youngest Arcania tree on the island is more than 300 years old, and only 52 sea sparrows remain. In the animal rights view, any one of those goats have at least as much right to life as the last Wrightson sparrow on earth, and the trees, because they are not sentient, warrant no moral consideration whatsoever. (In the mid-80′s a British environmental group set out to shoot the goats, but was forced to cancel the expedition after the Mammal Liberation Front bombed its offices.)

The story of Wrightson Island (recounted by the biologist David Ehrenfeld in “Beginning Again”) suggests at the very least that a human morality based on individual rights makes for an awkward fit when applied to the natural world. This should come as no surprise: morality is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us negotiate social relations. It’s very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn’t provide an adequate guide for human social conduct, isn’t it anthropocentric to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for nature? We may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights suit us humans today.

To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm is to appreciate just how parochial and urban an ideology animals rights really is. It could thrive only in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose a threat to us and human mastery of nature seems absolute. “In our normal life,” Singer writes, “there is no serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.” Such a statement assumes a decidedly urbanized “normal life,” one that certainly no farmer would recognize.

The farmer would point out that even vegans have a “serious clash of interests” with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor crushes woodchucks in their burrows, and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky. Steve Davis, an animal scientist at Oregon State University, has estimated that if America were to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, the total number of animals killed every year would actually increase, as animal pasture gave way to row crops. Davis contends that if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, then people should eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least intensively cultivated land: grass-fed beef for everybody. It would appear that killing animals is unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat.

When I talked to Joel Salatin about the vegetarian utopia, he pointed out that it would also condemn him and his neighbors to importing their food from distant places, since the Shenandoah Valley receives too little rainfall to grow many row crops. Much the same would hold true where I live, in New England. We get plenty of rain, but the hilliness of the land has dictated an agriculture based on animals since the time of the Pilgrims. The world is full of places where the best, if not the only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing animals on it–especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into protein and whose presence can actually improve the health of the land.

The vegetarian utopia would make us even more dependent than we already are on an industrialized national food chain. That food chain would in turn be even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel farther and manure would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful that you can build a more sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature–rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls–then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.

There is, too, the fact that we humans have been eating animals as long as we have lived on this earth. Humans may not need to eat meat in order to survive, yet doing so is part of our evolutionary heritage, reflected in the design of our teeth and the structure of our digestion. Eating meat helped make us what we are, in a social and biological sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the fire where the meat was cooked, human culture first flourished. Granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal world of predation, but it will entail the sacrifice of part of our identity–our own animality.

Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and then demands that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way. Whether or not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere “gastronomic preference.” We might as well call sex–also now technically unnecessary–a mere “recreational preference.” Whatever else it is, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.

Are any of these good enough reasons to eat animals? I’m mindful of Ben Franklin’s definition of the reasonable creature as one who can come up with reasons for whatever he wants to do. So I decided I would track down Peter Singer and ask him what he thought. In an e-mail message, I described Polyface and asked him about the implications for his position of the Good Farm–one where animals got to live according to their nature and to all appearances did not suffer.

“I agree with you that it is better for these animals to have lived and died than not to have lived at all,” Singer wrote back. Since the utilitarian is concerned exclusively with the sum of happiness and suffering and the slaughter of an animal that doesn’t comprehend that death need not involve suffering, the Good Farm adds to the total of animal happiness, provided you replace the slaughtered animal with a new one. However, he added, this line of thinking doesn’t obviate the wrongness of killing an animal that “has a sense of its own existence over time and can have preferences for its own future.” In other words, it’s O.K. to eat the chicken, but he’s not so sure about the pig. Yet, he wrote, “I would not be sufficiently confident of my arguments to condemn someone who purchased meat from one of these farms.”

Singer went on to express serious doubts that such farms could be practical on a large scale, since the pressures of the marketplace will lead their owners to cut costs and corners at the expense of the animals. He suggested, too, that killing animals is not conducive to treating them with respect. Also, since humanely raised food will be more expensive, only the well-to-do can afford morally defensible animal protein. These are important considerations, but they don’t alter my essential point: what’s wrong with animal agriculture–with eating animals–is the practice, not the principle.

What this suggests to me is that people who care should be working not for animal rights but animal welfare–to ensure that farm animals don’t suffer and that their deaths are swift and painless. In fact, the decent-life-merciful-death line is how Jeremy Bentham justified his own meat eating. Yes, the philosophical father of animal rights was himself a carnivore. In a passage rather less frequently quoted by animal rightists, Bentham defended eating animals on the grounds that “we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. . . . The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and, by that means, a less painful one than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature.”

My guess is that Bentham never looked too closely at what happens in a slaughterhouse, but the argument suggests that, in theory at least, a utilitarian can justify the killing of humanely treated animals–for meat or, presumably, for clothing. (Though leather and fur pose distinct moral problems. Leather is a byproduct of raising domestic animals for food, which can be done humanely. However, furs are usually made from wild animals that die brutal deaths–usually in leg-hold traps–and since most fur species aren’t domesticated, raising them on farms isn’t necessarily more humane.) But whether the issue is food or fur or hunting, what should concern us is the suffering, not the killing. All of which I was feeling pretty good about–until I remembered that utilitarians can also justify killing retarded orphans. Killing just isn’t the problem for them that it is for other people, including me.

During my visit to Polyface Farm, I asked Salatin where his animals were slaughtered. He does the chickens and rabbits right on the farm, and would do the cattle, pigs and sheep there too if only the U.S.D.A. would let him. Salatin showed me the open-air abattoir he built behind the farmhouse–a sort of outdoor kitchen on a concrete slab, with stainless-steel sinks, scalding tanks, a feather-plucking machine and metal cones to hold the birds upside down while they’re being bled. Processing chickens is not a pleasant job, but Salatin insists on doing it himself because he’s convinced he can do it more humanely and cleanly than any processing plant. He slaughters every other Saturday through the summer. Anyone’s welcome to watch.

I asked Salatin how he could bring himself to kill a chicken.

“People have a soul; animals don’t,” he said. “It’s a bedrock belief of mine.” Salatin is a devout Christian. “Unlike us, animals are not created in God’s image, so when they die, they just die.”

The notion that only in modern times have people grown uneasy about killing animals is a flattering conceit. Taking a life is momentous, and people have been working to justify the slaughter of animals for thousands of years. Religion and especially ritual has played a crucial part in helping us reckon the moral costs. Native Americans and other hunter-gathers would give thanks to their prey for giving up its life so the eater might live (sort of like saying grace). Many cultures have offered sacrificial animals to the gods, perhaps as a way to convince themselves that it was the gods’ desires that demanded the slaughter, not their own. In ancient Greece, the priests responsible for the slaughter (priests!–now we entrust the job to minimum-wage workers) would sprinkle holy water on the sacrificial animal’s brow. The beast would promptly shake its head, and this was taken as a sign of assent. Slaughter doesn’t necessarily preclude respect. For all these people, it was the ceremony that allowed them to look, then to eat.

Apart from a few surviving religious practices, we no longer have any rituals governing the slaughter or eating of animals, which perhaps helps to explain why we find ourselves where we do, feeling that our only choice is to either look away or give up meat. Frank Perdue is happy to serve the first customer; Peter Singer, the second.

Until my visit to Polyface Farm, I had assumed these were the only two options. But on Salatin’s farm, the eye contact between people and animals whose loss John Berger mourned is still a fact of life–and of death, for neither the lives nor the deaths of these animals have been secreted behind steel walls. “Food with a face,” Salatin likes to call what he’s selling, a slogan that probably scares off some customers. People see very different things when they look into the eyes of a pig or a chicken or a steer–a being without a soul, a “subject of a life” entitled to rights, a link in a food chain, a vessel for pain and pleasure, a tasty lunch. But figuring out what we do think, and what we can eat, might begin with the looking.

We certainly won’t philosophize our way to an answer. Salatin told me the story of a man who showed up at the farm one Saturday morning. When Salatin noticed a PETA bumper sticker on the man’s car, he figured he was in for it. But the man had a different agenda. He explained that after 16 years as a vegetarian, he had decided that the only way he could ever eat meat again was if he killed the animal himself. He had come to look.

“Ten minutes later we were in the processing shed with a chicken,” Salatin recalled. “He slit the bird’s throat and watched it die. He saw that the animal did not look at him accusingly, didn’t do a Disney double take. The animal had been treated with respect when it was alive, and he saw that it could also have a respectful death–that it wasn’t being treated as a pile of protoplasm.”

Salatin’s open-air abattoir is a morally powerful idea. Someone slaughtering a chicken in a place where he can be watched is apt to do it scrupulously, with consideration for the animal as well as for the eater. This is going to sound quixotic, but maybe all we need to do to redeem industrial animal agriculture in this country is to pass a law requiring that the steel and concrete walls of the CAFO’s and slaughterhouses be replaced with . . . glass. If there’s any new “right” we need to establish, maybe it’s this one: the right to look.

No doubt the sight of some of these places would turn many people into vegetarians. Many others would look elsewhere for their meat, to farmers like Salatin. There are more of them than I would have imagined. Despite the relentless consolidation of the American meat industry, there has been a revival of small farms where animals still live their “characteristic form of life.” I’m thinking of the ranches where cattle still spend their lives on grass, the poultry farms where chickens still go outside and the hog farms where pigs live as they did 50 years ago–in contact with the sun, the earth and the gaze of a farmer.

For my own part, I’ve discovered that if you’re willing to make the effort, it’s entirely possible to limit the meat you eat to nonindustrial animals. I’m tempted to think that we need a new dietary category, to go with the vegan and lactovegetarian and piscatorian. I don’t have a catchy name for it yet (humanocarnivore?), but this is the only sort of meat eating I feel comfortable with these days. I’ve become the sort of shopper who looks for labels indicating that his meat and eggs have been humanely grown (the American Humane Association’s new “Free Farmed” label seems to be catching on), who visits the farms where his chicken and pork come from and who asks kinky-sounding questions about touring slaughterhouses. I’ve actually found a couple of small processing plants willing to let a customer onto the kill floor, including one, in Cannon Falls, Minn., with a glass abattoir.

The industrialization–and dehumanization–of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it this way. Tail-docking and sow crates and beak-clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering 400 head of cattle an hour would come to an end. For who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals, we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony and respect they deserve.

This morning’s inspection tells Salatin that he’ll be able to move cattle into this pasture in a few days’ time. They’ll then get a single day to feast on its lush salad bar of grasses before being replaced by the “eggmobile,” a Salatin-designed-and-built portable chicken coop housing several hundred laying hens. They will fan out to nibble at the short grass they prefer and pick the grubs and fly larvae out of the cowpats—in the process spreading the manure and eliminating parasites. (Salatin calls them his sanitation crew.) While they’re at it, the chickens will apply a few thousand pounds of nitrogen to the pasture and produce several hundred uncommonly rich and tasty eggs. A few weeks later, the sheep will take their turn here, further improving the pasture by weeding it of the nettles and nightshade the cows won’t eat.

To its 400 or so customers—an intensely loyal clientele that includes dozens of chefs from nearby Charlottesville, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.—Polyface Farm sells beef, chicken, pork, lamb, rabbits, turkeys, and eggs, but if you ask Salatin what he does for a living, he’ll tell you he’s a “grass farmer.” That’s because healthy grass is the key to everything that happens at Polyface, where a half-dozen animal species are raised together in a kind of concentrated ecological dance on the theme of symbiosis. Salatin is the choreographer, and these 100 acres of springy Shenandoah Valley pasture comprise his verdant stage. By the end of the year, his corps de ballet will have transformed that grass into 30,000 pounds of beef, 60,000 pounds of pork, 12,000 broilers, 50,000 dozen eggs, 1,000 rabbits, and 600 turkeys—a truly astonishing cornucopia of food from such a modest plot of land. What’s more, that land itself will be improved by the process. Who says there’s no free lunch?

“Sustainable” is a word you hear a lot from farmers these days, but it’s an ideal that’s honored mostly in the breach. Even organic farmers find themselves buying pricey inputs—cow manure, Chilean nitrate, fish emulsion, biological insect controls—to replace declining fertility of the soil or to manage pest outbreaks. Polyface Farm isn’t even technically organic, yet it is more nearly sustainable than any I’ve visited. Thanks to Salatin’s deft, inter-species management of manure, his land is wholly self-sufficient in nitrogen. Apart from the chicken feed and some mineral supplements he applies to the meadows to replace calcium, Polyface supplies its own needs, year after years.

Salatin takes the goal of sustainability so seriously, in fact, that he won’t ship his food—customers have to come to the farm and pick it up, a gorgeous adventure over a sequence of roads too obscure for my road atlas to recognize. Salatin’s no-shipping policy is what brought me here to Swoope, Virginia, a 45-minute drive over the Blue Ridge from Charlottesville. I’d heard rumors of Polyface’s succulent grass-fed beef, “chickenier” chicken, and the superrich eggs to which pastry chefs attribute quasimagical properties—but Salatin refused on principle to FedEx me a single steak. For him, “organic” is much more than a matter of avoiding chemicals: It extends to everything the farmer does, and Salatin doesn’t believe food shipped cross-country deserves to be called organic. Not that he has any use for that label now that the USDA controls its meaning. Salatin prefers to call what he grows “clean food,” and the way he farms “beyond organic.”

That it certainly is. The fact that Salatin doesn’t spray any pesticides or medicate his animals unless they are ill is, for him, not so much the goal of his farming as proof that he’s doing it right. And “doing it right” for Salatin means simulating an ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, and allowing the species in it “to fully express their physiological distinctiveness.” Which means that the cows, being herbivores, eat nothing but grass and move to fresh ground every day; and that chickens live in flocks of about 800, as they would in nature, and turkeys in groups of 100. And, as in nature, birds follow and clean up after the herbivores—for in nature there is no “waste problem,” since one species’ waste becomes another’s lunch. When a farmer observes these rules, he has no sanitation problems and none of the diseases that result from raising a single species in tight quarters and feeding it things evolution hasn’t designed it to eat. All of which means he can skip the entire menu of heavy chemicals.

You might think every organic farm does this sort of thing as a matter of course, but in recent years the movement has grown into a full-fledged industry, and along the way the bigger players have adopted industrial methods—raising chickens in factory farms, feeding grain to cattle on feedlots, and falling back on monocultures of all kinds. “Industrial organic” might sound like an oxymoron, but it is a reality, and to Joel Salatin industrial anything is the enemy. He contends that the problems of modern agriculture—from pollution to chemical dependence to foodborne illness—flow from an inherent conflict between, on one hand, an industrial mind-set based on specialization and simplification, and, on the other, the intrinsic nature of biological systems, whose health depends on diversity and complexity.

On a farm, complexity sounds an awful lot like work and some of Salatin’s neighbors think he’s out of his mind, moving his cows every day and towing chicken coops hither and yon. “When they hear “˜moving the cattle,” they picture a miserable day of hollering, pickup trucks, and cans of Skoal,” Salatin told me as we prepared to do just that. “But when I open the gat, the cows come running because they know there’s ice cream waiting for them on the other side.” Looking more like a maître d’ than a rancher, Salatin holds open a section of electric fencing, and 80 exceptionally amiable cows—they nuzzle him like big cats—saunter into the next pasture, looking for their favorite grasses: bovine ice cream.

For labor—in addition to his six-foot, square-jawed, and red-suspendered self—the farm has Salatin’s wife, Teresa (who helps run their retail shop and does the bookkeeping), children Rachel and Daniel, and a pair of interns. (Polyface has become such a mecca for aspiring farmers that the waiting list for an internship is two years long.) Salatin, whose ever-present straw hat says “I’m having fun” in a way that the standard monogrammed feed cap never could, insists, however, that “the animals do all the work around here.” So the chickens fertilize the cow pasture, the sheep weed it, the turkeys mow the grass in the orchard and eat the bugs that would otherwise molest the grapes, and the pigs—well, the pigs have the sweetest job of all.

After we moved the cows, Salatin showed me the barn, a ramshackle, open-sided structure where 100 head of cattle spend the winter, ever day consuming 25 pounds of hay and production 50 pounds of waste. Every few days, Salatin adds another layer of wood chips or straw or leaves to the bedding, building a manure layer cake that’s three feet thick by winter’s end. Each layer he lards with a little corn. All winter the cake composts, producing heat to warm the barn and fermenting the corn. Why corn? There’s nothing a pig likes more than 40-proof corn, and nothing he’s better equipped to do than root it out with his powerful snout. So as soon as the cows go out to pasture in March, the “pigaerators,” as Salatin calls them, are let loose in the barn, where they proceed systematically to turn the compost in their quest for an alcoholic morsel.

“That’s the sort of farm machinery I like—never needs its oil changed, appreciated over time, and when you’re done with it, you eat it.” Buried clear to their butts in compost, a bobbing sea of hams and corkscrew tails, these are the happiest pigs you’ll ever meet. Salatin reached down and brought a handful of compost to my nose; it smelled as sweet and warm as the forest floor in summertime, a miracle of transubstantiation. After the pigs have completed their alchemy, Salatin spreads the compost on the pastures. There, it will feed the grasses so that the grasses might again feed the cows, the cows the chickens, and so on until the snow falls, in one long, beautiful, and utterly convincing proof that, in a world where grass can eat sunlight and food animals can eat grass, there is indeed a free lunch.

Did I mention that this lunch also happens to be delicious?

You’ll be speeding down one of Finney County’s ramrod roads when the empty, dun-colored prairie suddenly turns black and geometric, an urban grid of steel-fenced rectangles as far as the eye can see—which in Kansas is really far. I say “suddenly,” but in fact a swiftly intensifying odor (an aroma whose Proustian echoes are more bus-station-men’s-room than cow-in-the-country) heralds the approach of a feedlot for more than a mile. Then it’s upon you: Poky Feeders, population 37,000. Cattle pens stretch to the horizon, each one home to 150 animals standing dully or lying around in a grayish mud that it eventually dawns on you isn’t mud at all. The pens line a network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste lagoons on their way to the feedlot’s beating heart: a chugging, silvery feed mill that soars like an industrial cathedral over this teeming metropolis of meat.

I traveled to Poky early in January with the slightly improbable notion of visiting one particular resident: a young black steer that I’d met in the fall on a ranch in Vale, S.D. The steer, in fact, belonged to me. I’d purchased him as an 8-month-old calf from the Blair brothers, Ed and Rich, for $598. I was paying Poky Feeders $1.60 a day for his room, board and meds and hoped to sell him at a profit after he was fattened.

My interest in the steer was not strictly financial, however, or even gustatory, though I plan to retrieve some steaks from the Kansas packing plant where No. 534, as he is known, has an appointment with the stunner in June. No, my primary interest in this animal was educational. I wanted to find out how a modern, industrial steak is produced in America these days, from insemination to slaughter.

Eating meat, something I have always enjoyed doing, has become problematic in recent years. Though beef consumption spiked upward during the flush 90′s, the longer-term trend is down, and many people will tell you they no longer eat the stuff. Inevitably they’ll bring up mad-cow disease (and the accompanying revelation that industrial agriculture has transformed these ruminants into carnivores—indeed, into cannibals). They might mention their concerns about E. coli contamination or antibiotics in the feed. Then there are the many environmental problems, like groundwater pollution, associated with “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.” (The word “farm” no longer applies.) And of course there are questions of animal welfare. How are we treating the animals we eat while they’re alive, and then how humanely are we “dispatching” them, to borrow an industry euphemism?

Meat-eating has always been a messy business, shadowed by the shame of killing and, since Upton Sinclair’s writing of “The Jungle,” by questions about what we’re really eating when we eat meat. Forgetting, or willed ignorance, is the preferred strategy of many beef eaters, a strategy abetted by the industry. (What grocery-store item is more silent about its origins than a shrink-wrapped steak?) Yet I recently began to feel that ignorance was no longer tenable. If I was going to continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to myself, as well as to the animals, to take more responsibility for the invisible but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat. I’d try to own it, in other words.

So this is the biography of my cow.

The Blair brothers ranch occupies 11,500 acres of short-grass prairie a few miles outside Sturgis, S.D., directly in the shadow of Bear Butte. In November, when I visited, the turf forms a luxuriant pelt of grass oscillating yellow and gold in the constant wind and sprinkled with perambulating black dots: Angus cows and calves grazing.

Ed and Rich Blair run what’s called a “cow-calf” operation, the first stage of beef production, and the stage least changed by the modern industrialization of meat. While the pork and chicken industries have consolidated the entire life cycles of those animals under a single roof, beef cattle are still born on thousands of independently owned ranches. Although four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson’s subsidiary IBP, Monfort, Excel and National) now slaughter and market more than 80 percent of the beef cattle born in this country, that concentration represents the narrow end of a funnel that starts out as wide as the great plains.

The Blairs have been in the cattle business for four generations. Although there are new wrinkles to the process—artificial insemination to improve genetics, for example—producing beef calves goes pretty much as it always has, just faster. Calving season begins in late winter, a succession of subzero nights spent yanking breeched babies out of their bellowing mothers. In April comes the first spring roundup to work the newborn calves (branding, vaccination, castration); then more roundups in early summer to inseminate the cows ($15 mail-order straws of elite bull semen have pretty much put the resident stud out of work); and weaning in the fall. If all goes well, your herd of 850 cattle has increased to 1,600 by the end of the year.

My steer spent his first six months in these lush pastures alongside his mother, No. 9,534. His father was a registered Angus named GAR Precision 1,680, a bull distinguished by the size and marbling of his offspring’s rib-eye steaks. Born last March 13 in a birthing shed across the road, No. 534 was turned out on pasture with his mother as soon as the 80-pound calf stood up and began nursing. After a few weeks, the calf began supplementing his mother’s milk by nibbling on a salad bar of mostly native grasses: western wheatgrass, little bluestem, green needlegrass.

Apart from the trauma of the April day when he was branded and castrated, you could easily imagine No. 534 looking back on those six months grazing at his mother’s side as the good old days—if, that is, cows do look back. (“They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, with a note of envy, of grazing cattle, “fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy or bored.” Nietzsche clearly had never seen a feedlot.) It may be foolish to presume to know what a cow experiences, yet we can say that a cow grazing on grass is at least doing what he has been splendidly molded by evolution to do. Which isn’t a bad definition of animal happiness. Eating grass, however, is something that, after October, my steer would never do again.

Although the modern cattle industry all but ignores it, the reciprocal relationship between cows and grass is one of nature’s underappreciated wonders. For the grasses, the cow maintains their habitat by preventing trees and shrubs from gaining a foothold; the animal also spreads grass seed, planting it with its hoofs and fertilizing it. In exchange for these services, the grasses offer the ruminants a plentiful, exclusive meal. For cows, sheep and other grazers have the unique ability to convert grass—which single-stomached creatures like us can’t digest—into high-quality protein. They can do this because they possess a rumen, a 45-gallon fermentation tank in which a resident population of bacteria turns grass into metabolically useful organic acids and protein.

This is an excellent system for all concerned: for the grasses, for the animals and for us. What’s more, growing meat on grass can make superb ecological sense: so long as the rancher practices rotational grazing, it is a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food on land too arid or hilly to grow anything else.

So if this system is so ideal, why is it that my cow hasn’t tasted a blade of grass since October? Speed, in a word. Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and the modern meat industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef calf’s allotted time on earth. “In my grandfather’s day, steers were 4 or 5 years old at slaughter,” explained Rich Blair, who, at 45, is the younger of the brothers by four years. “In the 50′s, when my father was ranching, it was 2 or 3. Now we get there at 14 to 16 months.” Fast food indeed. What gets a beef calf from 80 to 1,200 pounds in 14 months are enormous quantities of corn, protein supplements—and drugs, including growth hormones. These “efficiencies,” all of which come at a price, have transformed raising cattle into a high-volume, low-margin business. Not everybody is convinced that this is progress. “Hell,” Ed Blair told me, “my dad made more money on 250 head than we do on 850.”

Weaning marks the fateful moment when the natural, evolutionary logic represented by a ruminant grazing on grass bumps up against the industrial logic that, with stunning speed, turns that animal into a box of beef. This industrial logic is rational and even irresistible—after all, it has succeeded in transforming beef from a luxury item into everyday fare for millions of people. And yet the further you follow it, the more likely you are to wonder if that rational logic might not also be completely insane.

In early October, a few weeks before I met him, No. 534 was weaned from his mother. Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will mope and bellow for days, and the calves themselves, stressed by the change in circumstance and diet, are prone to get sick.

On many ranches, weaned calves go directly from the pasture to the sale barn, where they’re sold at auction, by the pound, to feedlots. The Blairs prefer to own their steers straight through to slaughter and to keep them on the ranch for a couple of months of “backgrounding” before sending them on the 500-mile trip to Poky Feeders. Think of backgrounding as prep school for feedlot life: the animals are confined in a pen, “bunk broken”—taught to eat from a trough—and gradually accustomed to eating a new, unnatural diet of grain. (Grazing cows encounter only tiny amounts of grain, in the form of grass seeds.)

It was in the backgrounding pen that I first met No. 534 on an unseasonably warm afternoon in November. I’d told the Blairs I wanted to follow one of their steers through the life cycle; Ed, 49, suggested I might as well buy a steer, as a way to really understand the daunting economics of modern ranching. Ed and Rich told me what to look for: a broad, straight back and thick hindquarters. Basically, you want a strong frame on which to hang a lot of meat. I was also looking for a memorable face in this Black Angus sea, one that would stand out in the feedlot crowd. Almost as soon as I started surveying the 90 or so steers in the pen, No. 534 moseyed up to the railing and made eye contact. He had a wide, stout frame and was brockle-faced—he had three distinctive white blazes. If not for those markings, Ed said, No. 534 might have been spared castration and sold as a bull; he was that good-looking. But the white blazes indicate the presence of Hereford blood, rendering him ineligible for life as an Angus stud. Tough break.

Rich said he would calculate the total amount I owed the next time No. 534 got weighed but that the price would be $98 a hundredweight for an animal of this quality. He would then bill me for all expenses (feed, shots, et cetera) and, beginning in January, start passing on the weekly “hotel charges” from Poky Feeders. In June we’d find out from the packing plant how well my investment had panned out: I would receive a payment for No. 534 based on his carcass weight, plus a premium if he earned a U.S.D.A. grade of choice or prime. “And if you’re worried about the cattle market,” Rich said jokingly, referring to its post-Sept. 11 slide, “I can sell you an option too.” Option insurance has become increasingly popular among cattlemen in the wake of mad-cow and foot-and-mouth disease.

Rich handles the marketing end of the business out of an office in Sturgis, where he also trades commodities. In fact you’d never guess from Rich’s unlined, indoorsy face and golfish attire that he was a rancher. Ed, by contrast, spends his days on the ranch and better looks the part, with his well-creased visage, crinkly cowboy eyes and ever-present plug of tobacco. His cap carries the same prairie-flat slogan I’d spotted on the ranch’s roadside sign: “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner.”

My second morning on the ranch, I helped Troy Hadrick, Ed’s son-in-law and a ranch hand, feed the steers in the backgrounding pen. A thickly muscled post of a man, Hadrick is 25 and wears a tall black cowboy hat perpetually crowned by a pair of mirrored Oakley sunglasses. He studied animal science at South Dakota State and is up on the latest university thinking on cattle nutrition, reproduction and medicine. Hadrick seems to relish everything to do with ranching, from calving to wielding the artificial-insemination syringe.

Hadrick and I squeezed into the heated cab of a huge swivel-hipped tractor hooked up to a feed mixer: basically, a dump truck with a giant screw through the middle to blend ingredients. First stop was a hopper filled with Rumensin, a powerful antibiotic that No. 534 will consume with his feed every day for the rest of his life. Calves have no need of regular medication while on grass, but as soon as they’re placed in the backgrounding pen, they’re apt to get sick. Why? The stress of weaning is a factor, but the main culprit is the feed. The shift to a “hot ration” of grain can so disturb the cow’s digestive process—its rumen, in particular—that it can kill the animal if not managed carefully and accompanied by antibiotics.

After we’d scooped the ingredients into the hopper and turned on the mixer, Hadrick deftly sidled the tractor alongside the pen and flipped a switch to release a dusty tan stream of feed in a long, even line. No. 534 was one of the first animals to belly up to the rail for breakfast. He was heftier than his pen mates and, I decided, sparkier too. That morning, Hadrick and I gave each calf six pounds of corn mixed with seven pounds of ground alfalfa hay and a quarter-pound of Rumensin. Soon after my visit, this ration would be cranked up to 14 pounds of corn and 6 pounds of hay—and added two and a half pounds every day to No. 534.

While I was on the ranch, I didn’t talk to No. 534, pet him or otherwise try to form a connection. I also decided not to give him a name, even though my son proposed a pretty good one after seeing a snapshot. (“Night.”) My intention, after all, is to send this animal to slaughter and then eat some of him. No. 534 is not a pet, and I certainly don’t want to end up with an ox in my backyard because I suddenly got sentimental.

As fall turned into winter, Hadrick sent me regular e-mail messages apprising me of my steer’s progress. On Nov. 13 he weighed 650 pounds; by Christmas he was up to 798, making him the seventh-heaviest steer in his pen, an achievement in which I, idiotically, took a measure of pride. Between Nov. 13 and Jan. 4, the day he boarded the truck for Kansas, No. 534 put away 706 pounds of corn and 336 pounds of alfalfa hay, bringing his total living expenses for that period to $61.13. I was into this deal now for $659.

Hadrick’s e-mail updates grew chattier as time went on, cracking a window on the rancher’s life and outlook. I was especially struck by his relationship to the animals, how it manages to be at once intimate and unsentimental. One day Hadrick is tenderly nursing a newborn at 3 a.m., the next he’s “having a big prairie oyster feed” after castrating a pen of bull calves.

Hadrick wrote empathetically about weaning (“It’s like packing up and leaving the house when you are 18 and knowing you will never see your parents again”) and with restrained indignation about “animal activists and city people” who don’t understand the first thing about a rancher’s relationship to his cattle. Which, as Hadrick put it, is simply this: “If we don’t take care of these animals, they won’t take care of us.”

“Everyone hears about the bad stuff,” Hadrick wrote, “but they don’t ever see you give C.P.R. to a newborn calf that was born backward or bringing them into your house and trying to warm them up on your kitchen floor because they were born on a minus-20-degree night. Those are the kinds of things ranchers will do for their livestock. They take precedence over most everything in your life. Sorry for the sermon.”

To travel from the ranch to the feedlot, as No. 534 and I both did (in separate vehicles) the first week in January, feels a lot like going from the country to the big city. Indeed, a cattle feedlot is a kind of city, populated by as many as 100,000 animals. It is very much a premodern city, however—crowded, filthy and stinking, with open sewers, unpaved roads and choking air.

The urbanization of the world’s livestock is a fairly recent historical development, so it makes a certain sense that cow towns like Poky Feeders would recall human cities several centuries ago. As in 14th-century London, the metropolitan digestion remains vividly on display: the foodstuffs coming in, the waste streaming out. Similarly, there is the crowding together of recent arrivals from who knows where, combined with a lack of modern sanitation. This combination has always been a recipe for disease; the only reason contemporary animal cities aren’t as plague-ridden as their medieval counterparts is a single historical anomaly: the modern antibiotic.

I spent the better part of a day walking around Poky Feeders, trying to understand how its various parts fit together. In any city, it’s easy to lose track of nature—of the connections between various species and the land on which everything ultimately depends. The feedlot’s ecosystem, I could see, revolves around corn. But its food chain doesn’t end there, because the corn itself grows somewhere else, where it is implicated in a whole other set of ecological relationships. Growing the vast quantities of corn used to feed livestock in this country takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil—1.2 gallons for every bushel. So the modern feedlot is really a city floating on a sea of oil.

I started my tour at the feed mill, the yard’s thundering hub, where three meals a day for 37,000 animals are designed and mixed by computer. A million pounds of feed passes through the mill each day. Every hour of every day, a tractor-trailer pulls up to disgorge another 25 tons of corn. Around the other side of the mill, tanker trucks back up to silo-shaped tanks, into which they pump thousands of gallons of liquefied fat and protein supplement. In a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen; next to these are pallets stacked with 50-pound sacks of Rumensin and tylosin, another antibiotic. Along with alfalfa hay and corn silage for roughage, all these ingredients are blended and then piped into the dump trucks that keep Poky’s eight and a half miles of trough filled.

The feed mill’s great din is made by two giant steel rollers turning against each other 12 hours a day, crushing steamed corn kernels into flakes. This was the only feed ingredient I tasted, and it wasn’t half bad; not as crisp as Kellogg’s, but with a cornier flavor. I passed, however, on the protein supplement, a sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and urea.

Corn is a mainstay of livestock diets because there is no other feed quite as cheap or plentiful: thanks to federal subsidies and ever-growing surpluses, the price of corn ($2.25 a bushel) is 50 cents less than the cost of growing it. The rise of the modern factory farm is a direct result of these surpluses, which soared in the years following World War II, when petrochemical fertilizers came into widespread use. Ever since, the U.S.D.A.’s policy has been to help farmers dispose of surplus corn by passing as much of it as possible through the digestive tracts of food animals, converting it into protein. Compared with grass or hay, corn is a compact and portable foodstuff, making it possible to feed tens of thousands of animals on small plots of land. Without cheap corn, the modern urbanization of livestock would probably never have occurred.

We have come to think of “cornfed” as some kind of old-fashioned virtue; we shouldn’t. Granted, a cornfed cow develops well-marbled flesh, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have learned to like. Yet this meat is demonstrably less healthy to eat, since it contains more saturated fat. A recent study in The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the meat of grass-fed livestock not only had substantially less fat than grain-fed meat but that the type of fats found in grass-fed meat were much healthier. (Grass-fed meat has more omega 3 fatty acids and fewer omega 6, which is believed to promote heart disease; it also contains betacarotine and CLA, another “good” fat.) A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with cornfed beef. In the same way ruminants have not evolved to eat grain, humans may not be well adapted to eating grain-fed animals. Yet the U.S.D.A.’s grading system continues to reward marbling—that is, intermuscular fat—and thus the feeding of corn to cows.

The economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory farm, there is no other kind. Calories are calories, and corn is the cheapest, most convenient source of calories. Of course the identical industrial logic—protein is protein—led to the feeding of rendered cow parts back to cows, a practice the F.D.A. banned in 1997 after scientists realized it was spreading mad-cow disease.

Make that mostly banned. The F.D.A.’s rules against feeding ruminant protein to ruminants make exceptions for “blood products” (even though they contain protein) and fat. Indeed, my steer has probably dined on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he’s heading to in June. “Fat is fat,” the feedlot manager shrugged when I raised an eyebrow.

F.D.A. rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to cows. (Feather meal is an accepted cattle feed, as are pig and fish protein and chicken manure.) Some public-health advocates worry that since the bovine meat and bone meal that cows used to eat is now being fed to chickens, pigs and fish, infectious prions could find their way back into cattle when they eat the protein of the animals that have been eating them. To close this biological loophole, the F.D.A. is now considering tightening its feed rules.

Until mad-cow disease, remarkably few people in the cattle business, let alone the general public, comprehended the strange semicircular food chain that industrial agriculture had devised for cattle (and, in turn, for us). When I mentioned to Rich Blair that I’d been surprised to learn that cows were eating cows, he said, “To tell the truth, it was kind of a shock to me too.” Yet even today, ranchers don’t ask many questions about feedlot menus. Not that the answers are so easy to come by. When I asked Poky’s feedlot manager what exactly was in the protein supplement, he couldn’t say. “When we buy supplement, the supplier says it’s 40 percent protein, but they don’t specify beyond that.” When I called the supplier, it wouldn’t divulge all its “proprietary ingredients” but promised that animal parts weren’t among them. Protein is pretty much still protein.

Compared with ground-up cow bones, corn seems positively wholesome. Yet it wreaks considerable havoc on bovine digestion. During my day at Poky, I spent an hour or two driving around the yard with Dr. Mel Metzen, the staff veterinarian. Metzen, a 1997 graduate of Kansas State’s vet school, oversees a team of eight cowboys who spend their days riding the yard, spotting sick cows and bringing them in for treatment. A great many of their health problems can be traced to their diet. “They’re made to eat forage,” Metzen said, “and we’re making them eat grain.”

Perhaps the most serious thing that can go wrong with a ruminant on corn is feedlot bloat. The rumen is always producing copious amounts of gas, which is normally expelled by belching during rumination. But when the diet contains too much starch and too little roughage, rumination all but stops, and a layer of foamy slime that can trap gas forms in the rumen. The rumen inflates like a balloon, pressing against the animal’s lungs. Unless action is promptly taken to relieve the pressure (usually by forcing a hose down the animal’s esophagus), the cow suffocates.

A corn diet can also give a cow acidosis. Unlike that in our own highly acidic stomachs, the normal pH of a rumen is neutral. Corn makes it unnaturally acidic, however, causing a kind of bovine heartburn, which in some cases can kill the animal but usually just makes it sick. Acidotic animals go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw at their bellies and eat dirt. The condition can lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, liver disease and a general weakening of the immune system that leaves the animal vulnerable to everything from pneumonia to feedlot polio.

Cows rarely live on feedlot diets for more than six months, which might be about as much as their digestive systems can tolerate. “I don’t know how long you could feed this ration before you’d see problems,” Metzen said; another vet said that a sustained feedlot diet would eventually “blow out their livers” and kill them. As the acids eat away at the rumen wall, bacteria enter the bloodstream and collect in the liver. More than 13 percent of feedlot cattle are found at slaughter to have abscessed livers.

What keeps a feedlot animal healthy—or healthy enough—are antibiotics. Rumensin inhibits gas production in the rumen, helping to prevent bloat; tylosin reduces the incidence of liver infection. Most of the antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed—a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged, leads directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.” In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between clinical and nonclinical uses. Public-health advocates don’t object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don’t want to see the drugs lose their efficacy because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn’t be sick if not for what we feed them.

I asked Metzen what would happen if antibiotics were banned from cattle feed. “We just couldn’t feed them as hard,” he said. “Or we’d have a higher death loss.” (Less than 3 percent of cattle die on the feedlot.) The price of beef would rise, he said, since the whole system would have to slow down.

“Hell, if you gave them lots of grass and space,” he concluded dryly, “I wouldn’t have a job.”

Before heading over to Pen 43 for my reunion with No. 534, I stopped by the shed where recent arrivals receive their hormone implants. The calves are funneled into a chute, herded along by a ranch hand wielding an electric prod, then clutched in a restrainer just long enough for another hand to inject a slow-release pellet of Revlar, a synthetic estrogen, in the back of the ear. The Blairs’ pen had not yet been implanted, and I was still struggling with the decision of whether to forgo what is virtually a universal practice in the cattle industry in the United States. (It has been banned in the European Union.)

American regulators permit hormone implants on the grounds that no risk to human health has been proved, even though measurable hormone residues do turn up in the meat we eat. These contribute to the buildup of estrogenic compounds in the environment, which some scientists believe may explain falling sperm counts and premature maturation in girls. Recent studies have also found elevated levels of synthetic growth hormones in feedlot wastes; these persistent chemicals eventually wind up in the waterways downstream of feedlots, where scientists have found fish exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics.

The F.D.A. is opening an inquiry into the problem, but for now, implanting hormones in beef cattle is legal and financially irresistible: an implant costs $1.50 and adds between 40 and 50 pounds to the weight of a steer at slaughter, for a return of at least $25. That could easily make the difference between profit and loss on my investment in No. 534. Thinking like a parent, I like the idea of feeding my son hamburgers free of synthetic hormones. But thinking like a cattleman, there was really no decision to make.

I asked Rich Blair what he thought. “I’d love to give up hormones,” he said. “If the consumer said, We don’t want hormones, we’d stop in a second. The cattle could get along better without them. But the market signal’s not there, and as long as my competitor’s doing it, I’ve got to do it, too.”

Around lunch time, Metzen and I finally arrived at No. 534′s pen. My first impression was that my steer had landed himself a decent piece of real estate. The pen is far enough from the feed mill to be fairly quiet, and it has a water view—of what I initially thought was a reservoir, until I noticed the brown scum. The pen itself is surprisingly spacious, slightly bigger than a basketball court, with a concrete feed bunk out front and a freshwater trough in the back. I climbed over the railing and joined the 90 steers, which, en masse, retreated a few steps, then paused.

I had on the same carrot-colored sweater I’d worn to the ranch in South Dakota, hoping to jog my steer’s memory. Way off in the back, I spotted him—those three white blazes. As I gingerly stepped toward him, the quietly shuffling mass of black cowhide between us parted, and there No. 534 and I stood, staring dumbly at each other. Glint of recognition? None whatsoever. I told myself not to take it personally. No. 534 had been bred for his marbling, after all, not his intellect.

I don’t know enough about the emotional life of cows to say with any confidence if No. 534 was miserable, bored or melancholy, but I would not say he looked happy. I noticed that his eyes looked a little bloodshot. Some animals are irritated by the fecal dust that floats in the feedlot air; maybe that explained the sullen gaze with which he fixed me. Unhappy or not, though, No. 534 had clearly been eating well. My animal had put on a couple hundred pounds since we’d last met, and he looked it: thicker across the shoulders and round as a barrel through the middle. He carried himself more like a steer now than a calf, even though he was still less than a year old. Metzen complimented me on his size and conformation. “That’s a handsome looking beef you’ve got there.” (Aw, shucks.)

Staring at No. 534, I could picture the white lines of the butcher’s chart dissecting his black hide: rump roast, flank steak, standing rib, brisket. One way of looking at No. 534—the industrial way—was as an efficient machine for turning feed corn into beef. Every day between now and his slaughter date in June, No. 534 will convert 32 pounds of feed (25 of them corn) into another three and a half pounds of flesh. Poky is indeed a factory, transforming cheap raw materials into a less-cheap finished product, as fast as bovinely possible.

Yet the factory metaphor obscures as much as it reveals about the creature that stood before me. For this steer was not a machine in a factory but an animal in a web of relationships that link him to certain other animals, plants and microbes, as well as to the earth. And one of those other animals is us. The unnaturally rich diet of corn that has compromised No. 534′s health is fattening his flesh in a way that in turn may compromise the health of the humans who will eat him. The antibiotics he’s consuming with his corn were at that very moment selecting, in his gut and wherever else in the environment they wind up, for bacteria that could someday infect us and resist the drugs we depend on. We inhabit the same microbial ecosystem as the animals we eat, and whatever happens to it also happens to us.

I thought about the deep pile of manure that No. 534 and I were standing in. We don’t know much about the hormones in it—where they will end up or what they might do once they get there—but we do know something about the bacteria. One particularly lethal bug most probably resided in the manure beneath my feet. Escherichia coli 0157 is a relatively new strain of a common intestinal bacteria (it was first isolated in the 1980′s) that is common in feedlot cattle, more than half of whom carry it in their guts. Ingesting as few as 10 of these microbes can cause a fatal infection.

Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids—and go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow’s gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain’s barriers to infection. Yet this process can be reversed: James Russell, a U.S.D.A. microbiologist, has discovered that switching a cow’s diet from corn to hay in the final days before slaughter reduces the population of E. coli 0157 in its manure by as much as 70 percent. Such a change, however, is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry.

So much comes back to corn, this cheap feed that turns out in so many ways to be not cheap at all. While I stood in No. 534′s pen, a dump truck pulled up alongside the feed bunk and released a golden stream of feed. The animals stepped up to the bunk for their lunch. The $1.60 a day I’m paying for three giant meals is a bargain only by the narrowest of calculations. It doesn’t take into account, for example, the cost to the public health of antibiotic resistance or food poisoning by E. coli or all the environmental costs associated with industrial corn.

For if you follow the corn from this bunk back to the fields where it grows, you will find an 80-million-acre monoculture that consumes more chemical herbicide and fertilizer than any other crop. Keep going and you can trace the nitrogen runoff from that crop all the way down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created (if that is the right word) a 12,000-square-mile “dead zone.”

But you can go farther still, and follow the fertilizer needed to grow that corn all the way to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. No. 534 started life as part of a food chain that derived all its energy from the sun; now that corn constitutes such an important link in his food chain, he is the product of an industrial system powered by fossil fuel. (And in turn, defended by the military—another uncounted cost of “cheap” food.) I asked David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy, if it might be possible to calculate precisely how much oil it will take to grow my steer to slaughter weight. Assuming No. 534 continues to eat 25 pounds of corn a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil. We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.

Sometime in June, No. 534 will be ready for slaughter. Though only 14 months old, my steer will weigh more than 1,200 pounds and will move with the lumbering deliberateness of the obese. One morning, a cattle trailer from the National Beef plant in Liberal, Kan., will pull in to Poky Feeders, drop a ramp and load No. 534 along with 35 of his pen mates.

The 100-mile trip south to Liberal is a straight shot on Route 83, a two-lane highway on which most of the traffic consists of speeding tractor-trailers carrying either cattle or corn. The National Beef plant is a sprawling gray-and-white complex in a neighborhood of trailer homes and tiny houses a notch up from shanty. These are, presumably, the homes of the Mexican and Asian immigrants who make up a large portion of the plant’s work force. The meat business has made southwestern Kansas an unexpectedly diverse corner of the country.

A few hours after their arrival in the holding pens outside the factory, a plant worker will open a gate and herd No. 534 and his pen mates into an alley that makes a couple of turns before narrowing down to a single-file chute. The chute becomes a ramp that leads the animals up to a second-story platform and then disappears through a blue door.

That door is as close to the kill floor as the plant managers were prepared to let me go. I could see whatever I wanted to farther on—the cold room where carcasses are graded, the food-safety lab, the fabrication room where the carcasses are broken down into cuts—on the condition that I didn’t take pictures or talk to employees. But the stunning, bleeding and evisceration process was off limits to a journalist, even a cattleman-journalist like myself.

What I know about what happens on the far side of the blue door comes mostly from Temple Grandin, who has been on the other side and, in fact, helped to design it. Grandin, an assistant professor of animal science at Colorado State, is one of the most influential people in the United States cattle industry. She has devoted herself to making cattle slaughter less stressful and therefore more humane by designing an ingenious series of cattle restraints, chutes, ramps and stunning systems. Grandin is autistic, a condition she says has allowed her to see the world from the cow’s point of view. The industry has embraced Grandin’s work because animals under stress are not only more difficult to handle but also less valuable: panicked cows produce a surge of adrenaline that turns their meat dark and unappetizing. “Dark cutters,” as they’re called, sell at a deep discount.

Grandin designed the double-rail conveyor system in use at the National Beef plant; she has also audited the plant’s killing process for McDonald’s. Stories about cattle “waking up” after stunning only to be skinned alive prompted McDonald’s to audit its suppliers in a program that is credited with substantial improvements since its inception in 1999. Grandin says that in cattle slaughter “there is the pre-McDonald’s era and the post-McDonald’s era—it’s night and day.”

Grandin recently described to me what will happen to No. 534 after he passes through the blue door. “The animal goes into the chute single file,” she began. “The sides are high enough so all he sees is the butt of the animal in front of him. As he walks through the chute, he passes over a metal bar, with his feet on either side. While he’s straddling the bar, the ramp begins to decline at a 25-degree angle, and before he knows it, his feet are off the ground and he’s being carried along on a conveyor belt. We put in a false floor so he can’t look down and see he’s off the ground. That would panic him.”

Listening to Grandin’s rather clinical account, I couldn’t help wondering what No. 534 would be feeling as he approached his end. Would he have any inkling—a scent of blood, a sound of terror from up the line—that this was no ordinary day?

Grandin anticipated my question: “Does the animal know it’s going to get slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched them, going into the squeeze chute on the feedlot, getting their shots and going up the ramp at a slaughter plant. No difference. If they knew they were going to die, you’d see much more agitated behavior.

“Anyway, the conveyor is moving along at roughly the speed of a moving sidewalk. On a catwalk above stands the stunner. The stunner has a pneumatic-powered ‘gun’ that fires a steel bolt about seven inches long and the diameter of a fat pencil. He leans over and puts it smack in the middle of the forehead. When it’s done correctly, it will kill the animal on the first shot.”

For a plant to pass a McDonald’s audit, the stunner needs to render animals “insensible” on the first shot 95 percent of the time. A second shot is allowed, but should that one fail, the plant flunks. At the line speeds at which meatpacking plants in the United States operate—390 animals are slaughtered every hour at National, which is not unusual—mistakes would seem inevitable, but Grandin insists that only rarely does the process break down.

“After the animal is shot while he’s riding along, a worker wraps a chain around his foot and hooks it to an overhead trolley. Hanging upside down by one leg, he’s carried by the trolley into the bleeding area, where the bleeder cuts his throat. Animal rights people say they’re cutting live animals, but that’s because there’s a lot of reflex kicking.” This is one of the reasons a job at a slaughter plant is the most dangerous in America. “What I look for is, Is the head dead? It should be flopping like a rag, with the tongue hanging out. He’d better not be trying to hold it up—then you’ve got a live one on the rail.” Just in case, Grandin said, “they have another hand stunner in the bleed area.”

Much of what happens next—the de-hiding of the animal, the tying off of its rectum before evisceration—is designed to keep the animal’s feces from coming into contact with its meat. This is by no means easy to do, not when the animals enter the kill floor smeared with manure and 390 of them are eviscerated every hour. (Partly for this reason, European plants operate at much slower line speeds.) But since that manure is apt to contain lethal pathogens like E. coli 0157, and since the process of grinding together hamburger from hundreds of different carcasses can easily spread those pathogens across millions of burgers, packing plants now spend millions on “food safety”—which is to say, on the problem of manure in meat.

Most of these efforts are reactive: it’s accepted that the animals will enter the kill floor caked with feedlot manure that has been rendered lethal by the feedlot diet. Rather than try to alter that diet or keep the animals from living in their waste or slow the line speed—all changes regarded as impractical—the industry focuses on disinfecting the manure that will inevitably find its way into the meat. This is the purpose of irradiation (which the industry prefers to call “cold pasteurization”). It is also the reason that carcasses pass through a hot steam cabinet and get sprayed with an antimicrobial solution before being hung in the cooler at the National Beef plant.

It wasn’t until after the carcasses emerged from the cooler, 36 hours later, that I was allowed to catch up with them, in the grading room. I entered a huge arctic space resembling a monstrous dry cleaner’s, with a seemingly endless overhead track conveying thousands of red-and-white carcasses. I quickly learned that you had to move smartly through this room or else be tackled by a 350-pound side of beef. The carcasses felt cool to the touch, no longer animals but meat.

Two by two, the sides of beef traveled swiftly down the rails, six pairs every minute, to a station where two workers—one wielding a small power saw, the other a long knife—made a single six-inch cut between the 12th and 13th ribs, opening a window on the meat inside. The carcasses continued on to another station, where a U.S.D.A. inspector holding a round blue stamp glanced at the exposed rib eye and stamped the carcass’s creamy white fat once, twice or—very rarely—three times: select, choice, prime.

For the Blair brothers, and for me, this is the moment of truth, for that stamp will determine exactly how much the packing plant will pay for each animal and whether the 14 months of effort and expense will yield a profit.

Unless the cattle market collapses between now and June (always a worry these days), I stand to make a modest profit on No. 534. In February, the feedlot took a sonogram of his rib eye and ran the data through a computer program. The projections are encouraging: a live slaughter weight of 1,250, a carcass weight of 787 pounds and a grade at the upper end of choice, making him eligible to be sold at a premium as Certified Angus Beef. Based on the June futures price, No. 534 should be worth $944. (Should he grade prime, that would add another $75.)

I paid $598 for No. 534 in November; his living expenses since then come to $61 on the ranch and $258 for 160 days at the feedlot (including implant), for a total investment of $917, leaving a profit of $27. It’s a razor-thin margin, and it could easily vanish should the price of corn rise or No. 534 fail to make the predicted weight or grade—say, if he gets sick and goes off his feed. Without the corn, without the antibiotics, without the hormone implant, my brief career as a cattleman would end in failure.

The Blairs and I are doing better than most. According to Cattle-Fax, a market-research firm, the return on an animal coming out of a feedlot has averaged just $3 per head over the last 20 years.

“Some pens you make money, some pens you lose,” Rich Blair said when I called to commiserate. “You try to average it out over time, limit the losses and hopefully make a little profit.” He reminded me that a lot of ranchers are in the business “for emotional reasons—you can’t be in it just for the money.”

Now you tell me.

The manager of the packing plant has offered to pull a box of steaks from No. 534 before his carcass disappears into the trackless stream of commodity beef fanning out to America’s supermarkets and restaurants this June. From what I can see, the Blair brothers, with the help of Poky Feeders, are producing meat as good as any you can find in an American supermarket. And yet there’s no reason to think this steak will taste any different from the other high-end industrial meat I’ve ever eaten.

While waiting for my box of meat to arrive from Kansas, I’ve explored some alternatives to the industrial product. Nowadays you can find hormone- and antibiotic-free beef as well as organic beef, fed only grain grown without chemicals. This meat, which is often quite good, is typically produced using more grass and less grain (and so makes for healthier animals). Yet it doesn’t fundamentally challenge the corn-feedlot system, and I’m not sure that an “organic feedlot” isn’t, ecologically speaking, an oxymoron. What I really wanted to taste is the sort of preindustrial beef my grandparents ate—from animals that have lived most of their full-length lives on grass.

Eventually I found a farmer in the Hudson Valley who sold me a quarter of a grass-fed Angus steer that is now occupying most of my freezer. I also found ranchers selling grass-fed beef on the Web; Eatwild.com is a clearinghouse of information on grass-fed livestock, which is emerging as one of the livelier movements in sustainable agriculture.

I discovered that grass-fed meat is more expensive than supermarket beef. Whatever else you can say about industrial beef, it is remarkably cheap, and any argument for changing the system runs smack into the industry’s populist arguments. Put the animals back on grass, it is said, and prices will soar; it takes too long to raise beef on grass, and there’s not enough grass to raise them on, since the Western range lands aren’t big enough to sustain America’s 100 million head of cattle. And besides, Americans have learned to love cornfed beef. Feedlot meat is also more consistent in both taste and supply and can be harvested 12 months a year. (Grass-fed cattle tend to be harvested in the fall, since they stop gaining weight over the winter, when the grasses go dormant.)

All of this is true. The economic logic behind the feedlot system is hard to refute. And yet so is the ecological logic behind a ruminant grazing on grass. Think what would happen if we restored a portion of the Corn Belt to the tall grass prairie it once was and grazed cattle on it. No more petrochemical fertilizer, no more herbicide, no more nitrogen runoff. Yes, beef would probably be more expensive than it is now, but would that necessarily be a bad thing? Eating beef every day might not be such a smart idea anyway—for our health, for the environment. And how cheap, really, is cheap feedlot beef? Not cheap at all, when you add in the invisible costs: of antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation, heart disease, E. coli poisoning, corn subsidies, imported oil and so on. All these are costs that grass-fed beef does not incur.

So how does grass-fed beef taste? Uneven, just as you might expect the meat of a nonindustrial animal to taste. One grass-fed tenderloin from Argentina that I sampled turned out to be the best steak I’ve ever eaten. But unless the meat is carefully aged, grass-fed beef can be tougher than feedlot beef—not surprisingly, since a grazing animal, which moves around in search of its food, develops more muscle and less fat. Yet even when the meat was tougher, its flavor, to my mind, was much more interesting. And specific, for the taste of every grass-fed animal is inflected by the place where it lived. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but nowadays when I eat a feedlot steak, I can taste the corn and the fat, and I can see the view from No. 534′s pen. I can’t taste the oil, obviously, or the drugs, yet now I know they’re there.

A considerably different picture comes to mind while chewing (and, O.K., chewing) a grass-fed steak: a picture of a cow outside in a pasture eating the grass that has eaten the sunlight. Meat-eating may have become an act riddled with moral and ethical ambiguities, but eating a steak at the end of a short, primordial food chain comprising nothing more than ruminants and grass and light is something I’m happy to do and defend. We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that’s only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.