In the same vein as Meatless Monday, the gourmand and food writer Mark Bittman has a “eat vegan before 6 pm” rule.

Bittman’s How to Cook Everything is my favorite app, now I love this idea of being two-thirds healthier, two-thirds more responsible, without a whole lot of thought and planning. His approach is so much less daunting than suddenly going 100% vegan (the thought of which, I must admit, still makes me feel like a deer in the headlights).

Check out Bittman’s less-meatarianism challenge.

Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.

—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

These words keep me going. Sometimes, like today, they even seem true: Pretty Good Things just happened in California and Ohio.

In California, Schwarzenegger just signed a bill that will make California a cage-free hen state by 2015; hens will be able to stand up, lie down, turn around, and fully extend their limbs without touching one another or the sides of an enclosure. Of course, any enclosed large-scale animal operation is not ideal, but getting rid of battery cages is a giant step in the right direction and I’m not going to be a buzz-kill today. Let’s hope California, with its forty million consumers, really is the harbinger state.

Arnold signed the bill just days after Ohio imposed a moratorium on new battery cage facilities in Ohio, the nation’s second largest egg production state. That was only part of Ohio’s broad range of important animal welfare reforms, including a ban on veal crates by 2017, a ban on new sow gestation crates in 2011, a ban on strangulation of farm animals, mandatory humane euthanasia methods for sick or injured animals, and a ban on the transport of cows too sick to slaughter. It also includes enactment of legislation establishing felony-level penalties for cock fighters, cracking down on puppy mills, and a ban on the acquisition of exotic animals as pets.

The arc of the moral universe usually feels too long, but sometimes you get a glimpse of its eventual destination. It will be great to live there someday, especially if you’re a hen in California or Ohio.

Every year, about four million homeless pets are euthanized in U.S. shelters, yet puppy mills are churning out about the same number (some breeds go for $1,000 a pup). The math couldn’t be easier; the pet overpopulation situation would be dramatically improved if puppy mills didn’t exist.

Like factory-farmed meat, the puppies are raised in large numbers with low-cost production methods, sold to a “middle man,” and delivered to retail, where the end consumer usually has no idea where the animal came from. At a puppy mill, not only are the breeding dogs cruelly confined, denied proper vet care, and isolated from human contact, but their offspring are inbred and often have serious health problems. Not only is this no life for man’s best friend, it’s no life for our worst enemy.

There are about 4,000 puppy mills in the U.S. (mostly in Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri). The puppies wind up in pet stores all over the country. How much is that doggie in the window? We should no longer be asking such a question. Here’s a better one: who isn’t doing their job? The answer, according to a May 2010 report from the Office of the Inspector General, is that the USDA fails to enforce the Animal Welfare Act against puppy mills. If they did, plenty of them would be shut down.

Best Friends Animal Society’s Puppies Aren’t Products Campaign is doing great work in this area, _as is the ASPCA_ [http://www.aspca.org/fight-animal-cruelty/puppy-mills/]. Join the ASPCA’s campaign to bring all commercial dog breeders under federal oversight; there’s an easy form here for e-mailing your federal legislator to support and co-sponsor the Puppy Uniform Protection and Safety Act.

On a much more local level, of course, adopt your next pet. If you’re totally committed to a specific breed (and those Puggles are hard to resist), check out breed rescue groups–every breed has one, and you’ll find what you’re looking for without participating in a gruesome industry.

Now, if only eating meat and animal products responsibly was this easy…

In The Cheese Conundrum I lamented the difficulty of finding dairy products from well-raised cows. I continue to lament how difficult it is to trace any our food to its source. But whereismymilkfrom.com actually does get you pretty close. You type in the little code stamped on the carton or jug (cheese, yogurt, and sour cream have codes too), and it tells you which dairy it came from.

Different brands of milk often come from the same dairy, possibly even the same cow. The site’s information is from the Interstate Milk Shippers list, which is published by the FDA in conjunction with the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Public Health Service. Notice the USDA does not involve itself here, but that’s another lament.

You might find that despite the “pastoral”-looking packaging, your milk came from a factory farm in the Midwest owned by Conagra, one of the more evil corporations of its kind. Or you might find that it came from Berkeley Farms, which buys milk from different small California farmers and whose web site claims the cows are pasture-raised.

Of course, the information provided on a company’s web site can be vague or misleading. Most have “contact us” links where you can ask for more detailed information about how the cows are raised. If they ignore your questions, there’s your answer.