Fresh is a great film about improving our food system. It’s more action-oriented than Food Inc., and has a more optimistic tone than, for instance, this blog. The film focuses on what many good, smart people are doing to affect change within our food system, and not on scaring viewers or bumming them out.

It also features lots of face time with some of the most important characters in the good food movement: Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, Will Allen of Growing Power, and George Naylor of the National Family Farm Coalition.

It’s in limited release and depends on grassroots distribution, so consider hosting a home or community screening. You can also order a DVD.

I just ordered Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I can’t wait to read it. Here’s the Publishers Weekly review:

Cooked cuisine was central to the biological and social evolution of humanity, argues this fascinating study. Harvard biological anthropologist Wrangham dates the breakthrough in human evolution to a moment 1.8 million years ago, when, he conjectures, our forebears tamed fire and began cooking… these innovations drove anatomical and physiological changes that make us adapted to eating cooked food the way cows are adapted to eating grass. By making food more digestible and easier to extract energy from, Wrangham reasons, cooking enabled hominids’ jaws, teeth and guts to shrink, freeing up calories to fuel their expanding brains. It also gave rise to pair bonding and table manners, and liberated mankind from the drudgery of chewing.

I have this image of early men and women around a campfire, cooking and sharing the meat the men hunted. This fire may be why people began sitting in circles in the first place (go into any PreK-grade 2 classroom and you’ll see kids having “morning meeting” in a circle; there’s something elemental about humans communicating and learning in that shape).

I like sitting at round tables to eat with people, as did the early humans. But the reasons we do so are different. They needed to share the fire and cook the meat (unknowingly propelling themselves forward evolutionarily). But more and more lately, I’m feeling like I’m involved in a kind of fire circle too, one that’s pushing humankind forward to the next level. It’s the animal welfare movement.

Now that we have these highly evolved brains, we can do amazing things with them; for instance, make the world better. Like a social group of hominids around a campfire, activists and advocates within a social or political movement share resources, throw wood on the fire, bring what we have to offer to the circle, and huddle together. One person distributes leaflets for an event, another person cleans cages at the shelter. One person goes into classrooms to spread the message of humane education, another collects pet food for food banks. It’s the same feeling of camaraderie and shared purpose as the campfire.

And sometimes our successes make me feel as warmed and as fed as a hominid with a belly full of roasted mammoth.

My last name, Einhorn, means “unicorn.” Family lore has it that in the shtetl, pharmacies were marked by a sign showing a single horn, because horns were ground down and used as the base of powdered drugs. So either we’re related to pharmacists, or more interestingly, connected to mythical beasts. Either way, most of the Einhorns I know, including myself, collect unicorn figurines the way a 12-year-old girl would.

I thought more about horns when I met this sweet billy goat Gruff at Farm Sanctuary a few weeks ago. This guy got lucky: most goats, sheep, and cattle used in industrial food production are dehorned or debudded (horns start as buds, hence the expression “nip it in the bud”). This is done by restraining the animal in a head gate and using a hot iron to saw off the offending part.

There’s living tissue in the horns, so it’s not like cutting fingernails. The reactions of the animals confirm the obvious: it’s terrifying and painful. USDA figures show that more than nine out of ten dairy farms practice dehorning, but fewer than 20 percent of dairy operations that dehorned cattle used analgesics or anesthesia during the process. Animal Welfare Approved, the best third-party certifier for meat and animal products, prohibits dehorning and disbudding.

It’s well known now that declawing cats is inhumane; it’s like cutting off the first segment of a finger. The same is true for horned animals, but agribusiness pushes them so far out of our sight (and minds), we don’t think about it.

The procedures are done for obvious reasons: they make the raising of large numbers of animals in confined spaces more efficient and convenient for the operator. Horned animals take up more room in feedlots and trailers, may get caught in fences, and are potentially more dangerous to the handlers. For these reasons, they’re also less valuable at livestock sales.

Animals use their horns for defense, dominance, and territoriality: not terribly convenient for farmers. But that’s how they arrive in the world and that’s how they should leave it. Taking away an animal’s body part isn’t our decision to make (spaying and neutering of cats and dogs is the exception; humans created the pet overpopulation crisis, it’s our responsibility to control it).

I’d like to live in a world in which the food I eat comes from animals that aren’t tortured, but sometimes, it feels as if that desire is as fantastical as my childhood wish for a pet unicorn.