Ayurvedic medicine

The belief I’m about to argue — that eating meat is ethical — has been, for me, 25 years in the making. For much of this time, paradoxically, I was a vegetarian because I thought eating animals was morally reprehensible.

What a self-righteous twit I was.

At my in-laws’ traditional Thanksgiving dinner, I recited graphic details about industrially raised turkey. (Do you know what debeaking is?) At the counter in a fast-food restaurant, I’d loudly order a cheeseburger with no meat. (I want a bun, cheese, pickles, lettuce and onions…but no meat!) At a neighborhood pig roast, I asked the host if he had ever read Charlotte’s Web. (You would never be able to eat pork if you had.)

Although the Minnesota apple harvest begins in August, for a lot of folks apple season goes hand in hand with the changing and falling of leaves. Apples are a fantastic late summer treat, but there’s nothing like a crisp, freshly-harvested apple (or a hot apple crisp!) on a brisk autumn day.

Walk into a typical supermarket and you’ll see several shades of these sweet treats proudly taking up some serious real estate in the produce aisle. Yet this is a mere smattering of the 7,500 varieties grown around the world. According to Rebecca Wood, author of The New Whole Foods Encyclopedia, “Because every apple seed contains unique genetic material, you can plant ten seeds from a single apple and get ten different kinds of apple trees. However most of our commercial varieties lack genetic diversity.”