As I read the book, I didn't get the impression that Scully was forbidding any use of animals (which, Smith claims, would be unBiblical). It's his choice to be vegetarian, but he recognized that most people use animals for food, leather, and other purposes. He just argued that, specifically because these lives are *not* equal to human lives, because they are comparatively diminished in so many ways, and because they are wholly at our mercy, they deserve to be treated with respect for their brief, natural lives. To treat them as cogs in a machine diminishes *us*, dehumanizes. The examples in the book were so much worse than I'd ever imagined. Indeed, you wonder how any human can bear to work in such conditions and ignore such bewildered and helpless suffering.

The Scriptures definitely permit, and even demand eating meat; see St Peter's vision, where he is shown every kind of animal and told, "Rise, Peter, kill and eat" (Acts 10:13). But there is a tradition, at least in the Orthodox Church, of keeping a vegetarian diet among monks and nuns (others may also adopt it), in order to begin now living the life we'll have in heaven, where death will be no more. It is a way of participating in "the angelic life." Our fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year, and in longer fast periods such as the present Great Lent, includes abstaining from meat, fish, and dairy; a time when there is no participation in death. This custom of fasting is mentioned in Christian writings as early as the Didache, circa 70 - 80 AD.

Earlier I said that I wondered if it was a distinctively crunchy response, on learning the details of factory farming, to be so personally revolted that you want to avoid eating such meat in future. When I mentioned this, somebody — Caleb? — responded that a decision not to buy factory meat would make so little impact on the market that it wasn't necessary. it would be "superogatory."

That's what I don't get. If "crunchy" is a sensibility, it's one that has to do with how things impact us personally, on the Small, Local, Old, Particular level. It doesn't matter that my abstaining from factory meat won't stop the industry in its tracks. What matters is that I don't want that suffering on my table. I don't want to chew that tragic flesh. "Superogatory"? I don't get it.