As soon as I pay my library fines, I'm going to read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma."

Michael Pollan is a smart man, with an entrancing prose-style, several of whose books over the past dozen years or so I have read; one of which, the Botany of Desire, was as dear to my friend Marcus as it was to me, and cemented our friendship everlastingly, even now that Marcus himself is gone, and what remains of him, in fond remembrance, is our shared tastes (and, to some degree perhaps, aversions),  Anyway, Michael Pollan is indeed a smart, even a wise man, and what I have liked best about his elemental wisdom, is his take on the necessary business and ethos of agriculture/farming. Plainly, the correct understanding of our hominid species' special relationship to the planet, that we engage upon when we farm or garden, is this: we thereby create both an asylum (for some creatures, for a while) and (inevitably, ultimately)  a

killing-field, or abattoir, for a select number of plants and animals; and that we cannot have the one--whether affording special refuge, or harvesting/slaughtering--without the other.  So we must, if we are responsible agriculturists, accept our duty to manage both aspects, the nurturing and the slaying, as matter-of-factly and as humanely as possible.  The French, having beautiful and various soils and terrains, and an immense variety of livestock, and long experience in cultivating them, seem to have brought this sad but dry-eyed wisdom to its ultimate fulfillment, in their creation of the super-fatted livers of ducks and geese--arguably the most delicious substance in earth.  And what is wonderful to me is how calmly and rationally--indeed philosophically--French ducks and geese accept this fact of agricultural existence: They seem quite to like the farmworkers who care for them, and actually to enjoy the no-nonsense, business-like gavage they get at the hands of grandmotherly peasant ladies.