Check out the Eat Well Guide, on the web at www.eatwellguide.org. Input your zip code, and it will tell you where to find cruelty-free, local and sometimes organic meat, eggs and dairy.

Why bother?

Check out Michael Pollan's May 29, 2006 entry from his "On the Table" New York Times blog. The meat and dairy industries in this country will do everything they can to keep the truth out of view, because they understand that our innate goodness will not let us support a system that systematically tortures animals.

Did you know that the US laws against animal cruelty simply don't apply to agriculture?

Yes, this is an ethical issue. But mostly not - the ethics are clear and unarguable. It's really an issue about whether we want to know the truth, when we know it's, in Al Gore's word, "inconvenient." The meat and dairy lobbies understand that we'd rather not have to face the inconvenient facts, so by dismissing people like me as "the food police," they give ordinary folks an excuse to bury their heads in the sand.

As Upton Sinclair wrote in a 1935 account of his losing campaign for governor of California, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Or his convenience, or the foods he enjoys, or a hundred other reasons.

Let's not make the mistake of equating a call for transparency - the consumer's right to know how our food is produced - with wanting to knock cheeseburgers out of people's hands and force them to eat tofu and bean sprouts.

As for the health implications of eating cruelly-treated animals and their milk and eggs, laden with hormones and antibiotics, no parent worth the name would knowingly expose their child to such poison. Yet factory-farmed animals comprise about 40% of the calories consumed in the USA. That's a lot of heads in the sand.

The main question, tackled by Pollan and other food writers such as John Robbins, is why bad food is much cheaper than good food. Why is healthy food, unprocessed and with a light environmental impact, so much harder to afford than heavily processed junk and diseased and medicated animals?

Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen…