My neighbor Christine raises a dozen hens in her backyard, and the other day I bought 18 of their eggs, two of which were laid that very day (I saw them in the straw when the hen left her laying box). See how they’re different colors, even a light green? The color depends on the breed and what they’re fed.

When I eat these eggs I feel like I’m in a drug-induced state of heightened awareness. They’re just eggier than any other egg I’ve ever eaten. I don’t want to adulterate them with anything but salt, pepper, and toast.

When you crack them into a bowl, you see a bright, deep orange yolk with great posture: it practically stands straight up. Beating them requires a bit more effort than usual because the yolks are so sturdy. The orange yolk is because their diet is rich in carotenoids and they’ve pecked away at plenty of insects (needless to say, they’re not fed exclusively corn). There’s also a rumor that the deeper the orange, the less stress the hen was under, but admittedly that sounds like an old wives’ tale.

I was there for snack time, which included chopped grapes and other fruit, and various greens. I even got to hold one of these lucky girls (it was more difficult than one would imagine).

Three different breeds, pecking in perfect harmony: Rhode Island Reds, Araucanas, and Wyandottes. Araucanas lay pale green eggs.

I’m relieved we have a source of eggs from well-treated chickens, given the hellish lives of laying hens in factory farms. And backyard hens are sweeping the country. Take one bite of an egg from a well-raised hen, and it’s easy to see why.

You know how when you learn a new word, you suddenly hear and read it everywhere? It seems like some amazing personal coincidence, but then you realize it’s been there all along. You never noticed it before, but once you’ve learned it, your ears perk up when you hear it.

That’s how it’s been for me with food politics. Over the last few years, and especially in the three months I’ve been writing this blog, it seems like everywhere I turn there’s someone taking a stand against the current state of industrial food production: The neighbors with their backyard hens, literally taking their food supply into their own hands, or the chefs who have started meticulously sourcing their ingredients and teaching food lovers about them. There are the vendors and patrons of farmers’ markets, who turn parking lots into Main Street USA’s once a week, and there’s our beloved Park Slope Food Coop, which just started carrying vegan beer. Even Cookie Monster is now eating fresh fruits and vegetables while advising kids that junk food is “sometimes food,” not “anytime food.”

As Michael Pollan notes in “Food Movement Rising” in the latest The New York Review of Books, the movement takes many forms:

• school lunch reform
• the campaign for animal rights and welfare
• the campaign against genetically modified crops
• the rise of organic and locally produced food efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes
• “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes)
• farm bill reform
• food safety regulation
• farmland preservation
• student organizing around food issues on campus
• efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food
• initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools
• farm worker rights
• nutrition labeling
• feedlot pollution
• various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids

No matter what tack activists take, the movement is unified the shared conclusion that our system of food production needs to change, because its costs–whether environmental, health-related, or animal-welfare-related–are simply too high.

So, yay! The issue that’s been occupying so much space in my head, heart, and belly is undeniably a movement that’s coming of age in the mainstream. I’m delighted that so many others are as disgusted as I am. I’m even glad that we are disgusted in different ways, for different reasons. They all lead to the same demand for change: nourishing food, produced ethically, marketed honestly.

Last night I went to the release party for the children’s book Our Farm: By the Animals of Farm Sanctuary by Maya Gottfried (paintings by Robert Rahway Zakanitch). This beautifully illustrated book features poems by 15 rescued farm animals, all of whom now live good lives at Farm Sanctuary. Poetry seems the perfect medium for conveying animals’ possible thoughts. For instance, here’s Cece the Rabbit’s haiku:

I’m very nervous
A noise back there! Must. Keep. Still.
When it’s safe, I’ll run.

Along these lines, I’ve always thought the ASPCA’s slogan, “We Are Their Voice”, with animals holding blank, cartoonish speech balloons in their mouths, was clever and effective. Animals can’t stick up for themselves; humans have to act for them.

Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior takes another tack. Dr. Grandin, an animal scientist, has autism and is somewhat alienated from human interaction and emotion. However, she understands animals in a way that most humans can’t, and her book is full of a skilled interpreter’s observations.

We don’t have to be poets, campaign directors, animal scientists, or Dr. Dolittle to guess what animals would say to us if they could. Nor do we need to have Cesar Millan’s innate, intuitive understanding of animals’ experiences. We just have to think about how we like to live our own lives–safe, well-fed, loved, and comfortable (and who doesn’t want a quick, painless death?)–and try to provide this for all animals.

This is from Semil Shah, a great guy who married my cousin Sara. He is of Indian descent and was born in the U.S. and raised in a strictly vegetarian Jain home. I’ve been interested in this ancient Indian religion since I learned that not only are Jains strict vegetarians, they run animal shelters all over India! I wanted Semil’s take on meat-eating (he’s now a full-fledged carnivore); here’s what he wrote:

The opening line of Wikipedia’s entry on Jainism lays out its high ambitions: “Jainism… prescribes a path of nonviolence towards all living beings. Its philosophy and practice rely mainly on self-effort to progress the soul up the spiritual ladder to divine consciousness.” Vegetarianism is so deeply ingrained in Jainism that its orthodox subscribers do not even eat root vegetables like potatoes and garlic because worms and other organisms are harmed during their excavation.

That means no home fries, homies!

Jainism as faith, and its own brand of vegetarianism, are based on a path of nonviolence, or ahimsa, which means “no harm.” This term has been famously and effectively politicized by the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King. Both built movements by invoking a path of nonviolence as a means of protest through civil disobedience.

In the same way that Gandhi and King drew on ahimsa for political movements, Jain immigrants to the U.S. (like my parents) tried to instill in their children a food-related path of nonviolence as well. One can’t fault them for this; it’s very likely that I will also impose some food rules on my children, like not eating at McDonald’s!

Even in India today, it’s somewhat hard to be a vegetarian Jain in modern times. The food production chain in India–from origin to table to mouth–is changing rapidly. New industrial processes are forming: machine manufacturing, refrigeration, organized retail. In India, which is becoming more urban, “eating Jain” is going to become very tough, very expensive, or both.

Being a vegetarian Jain in the United States is, naturally, even more difficult. Only in the last one or two decades have vegetarian options become more mainstream at restaurants. Surely with enough willpower and disgust for meat, anyone can be vegetarian, but most of those folks probably couldn’t go the extra mile to give up root vegetables. Even most Jains in the U.S. admittedly wouldn’t want to give that up.

At age eight, I finally elected to break my faith in a truly American way–at Burger King.

After watching so many friends eat fast food, I was chomping at the bit to get in the game. The irony is that my uncle, who had just immigrated to America, worked at the Burger King. I remember that day: my friend from the neighborhood and I walked down to the BK. My uncle wasn’t working that day; I had finally gotten permission from my folks. I ordered a hamburger. I had a taste of it and finally satisfied my curiosity and appetite. I liked it. The first experiment was a success.

Since that day, I have been a carnivore, but without any dilemma. At that age, the intensity of my curiosity completely outshone any personal, faith-based reservations I had about breaking with tradition. Since the Burger King episode, I have never once wondered if I had made the right decision to venture into carnivorous eating. There was no Carnivore’s Dilemma, even in hindsight. The only regret is that I didn’t start sooner.

I believe that the strictness in Jain vegetarianism propelled me in the opposite direction and made me interested in all types of food. Eventually, over the years, I actually become a cook at a professional level. Since “going carnivore,” I have tasted and/or cooked a wide variety of meats and game: roast bear, alligator, insects, and even a shot of cobra heart in its own blood, like any good Indian would dream of. My exposure to Jainism seeded my curiosity about eating meat, rather than repressing it.

Good, strict religion is excellent for rebellion, right?