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While consumers may be more shocked by pink slime or the feeding of Prozac to poultry, the routine feeding of millions of pounds of human antibiotics to chickens presents a much graver threat.

Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat.

We in America have gotten addicted to cheap food. The result of that is antibiotic-laden fish, foods that are bred to be portable.

Cutting meat out of your diet is the best thing you can do for animals and your own health.

Fortunately, when it comes to meat and poultry, I have the really wonderful situation of having producers and processors that produce and process a very high-quality product.

We domesticated pigs to turn food waste back into food. And yet, in Europe, that practice has become illegal since 2001 as a result of the foot-and-mouth outbreak. It's unscientific. It's unnecessary. If you cook food for pigs, just as if you cook food for humans, it is rendered safe. It's also a massive saving of resources.

It's commonly said that if slaughterhouses had clear glass walls, nobody would eat meat. I think people go out of their way to remain ignorant about how factory farm animals are treated.

If you want to save a species, simply decide to eat it. Then it will be managed - like chickens, like turkeys, like deer, like Canadian geese.

There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on.