With farming and ranching moving to an industrial scale and model worldwide, the mechanization of all things edible, and the ready availability of foods imported from across the globe, our relationship with our food has become more complex than ever before. Add to that the mind-melting array of different diets espoused as the best (or only) option and deciding “what's for dinner?” has become a question of health, environmental concerns, and ethics. As with anything this complicated, no one side is ever 100% right, so we had to take a closer look.

This is not a discussion of the broad strokes of agriculture and how we get our food—it is a close look at how people find themselves engaging with the massively complex systems that come between the food on our plates and the farms from whence it came. It’s about personal ethics and cultural philosophies. It does get a little heated when the question of ethics comes up, but that only serves to show how deep, how meaningful the whole enterprise of feeding ourselves actually is.