Jidori chicken feet.

I come from a long line of Presbyterian missionaries who spent time in West Africa, India and Thailand. If you're thinking The Poisonwood Bible or Mormons in bike helmets, you can stop. My extended family's time overseas led to a love of board games, sweetened condensed milk and singalongs, but we are not an overtly evangelical bunch.

This may be why I never really learned guilt. Not like my Catholic or Jewish friends anyway, whose mothers -- it is usually their mothers -- seemingly heaped on the guilt daily, like the big spoonfuls of sugar I used to dump in my morning cornflakes. It probably sounds strange to those who grew up with a fully-developed sense of guilt, but I almost never feel guilty.

Except that lately I feel guilty every time I eat meat.

Let me first say straight out that I am not a vegetarian and do not think there is anything fundamentally wrong with eating another living creature, although I have no problem with those who choose to forgo meat and/or animal products entirely. What I do find fundamentally wrong is the entire intensive meat farming industry, the CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), the "high stocking densities," the antibiotics and growth hormones, the rows and rows of animals living and dying in misery, so that we can buy our boneless, skinless, tasteless chicken breasts for 99 cents a pound. It's not right. And I don't feel right eating it.

It's hard to not feel helpless, confronted with statistics that sketch out the sprawling, stinking behemoth that is the factory farming industry. But I've reached the point where I can't look at a piece of intensively farmed meat without visions of sad cows and suicidal pigs dancing through my head, so no matter how ineffectual it feels, I've decided to only eat sustainably farmed meat from now on.

This means only grass-fed beef, lamb, bison and goat, pastured chicken and duck and humanely raised pork. It also means a lot more research and work when I go shopping. Part of the problem is that the language surrounding meat and its origins is purposely vague, misleading and often meaningless. "Natural" means only that the meat is free of artificial colors and preservatives. "Organic" means the animal ate a completely organic diet, was not given hormones or antibiotics and was allowed access to the outdoors, but this could mean just a small door leading to a tiny concrete yard. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee the life of an organic chicken was any less horrific than that of its conventional cousin.

So I am turning to farmers markets, where shopping for humanely-raised meat is cheaper than Whole Foods and much more rewarding: I can actually look the farmer in the eye and ask him how his animals lived and died. The number of meat vendors at LA-area farmers markets is miniscule compared to the number of produce vendors, but seems to be growing steadily. I can personally recommend the pastured (jidori) chicken from Ana's Farm at the Alhambra Farmers Market and the grass-fed beef from J&J at the Atwater Village Farmers Market (and other markets throughout the week).

The one caveat? I am making an exception for special ethnic restaurants, simply because I am a weak, food-obsessed person who cannot live without soup dumplings from Din Tai Fung, boat noodles from Sapp and fried chicken from Kyochon. They are only occasional indulgences, so I don't feel guilty about the decision.

...Okay, maybe just a little. But my overwhelming feeling is relief. I am no longer hiding behind passivity and the mantra "What I don't know can't hurt me!" As I finish off the last of a small roast chicken -- small because it grew at a normal pace, without a freakishly large breast -- I am not swallowing guilt, shame or fear. Only chicken, really good chicken.

Some inspiration (and more thorough, eloquent thoughts on the meat industry):

Bitter melon. Photo courtesy of sfllaw. Licensed under Creative Commons.

I recently joined the Culinary Historians of Southern California, thereby fulfilling my dream of being a member of an organization with both a quarterly newsletter and a treasurer. YES. Further proof that CHSC and I were meant to be: it is closely affiliated with the LA Public Library and it hosts free monthly talks by noted food experts. Like Jonathan Gold, whose recent talk on "The Rise of Regional Cuisines in the San Gabriel Valley" covered a list of 25 or so restaurants which for him have defined regional Asian cuisine in the area. It was less like a lecture from a college professor and more like a peek into the journal of a man passionate about his hobby -- in this case, seeking out the best knife-cut noodles, Taiwanese slush and fake dogmeat in the county.

I won't regurgitate the whole list here, but I did want to bring up something I've been thinking about in the week since he spoke, a point he brought up when talking about number 15 on his list, the Taiwanese restaurant Nice Time Deli. He hated it for a long time. He hated the food, the stinky tofu and bitter melon, and couldn't understand why it always seemed to be packed with people clearly relishing their meals. But he kept eating there. He said he looked around the dining room, saw a roomful of professional-looking Taiwanese ex-pats who had obviously gone out of their way to eat at this restaurant and he decided to figure out what he was missing. Two months and sixteen meals later, he finally did.

I repeat: he ate there seventeen times before he started to actually enjoy himself, a mind-boggling feat for which I have the utmost respect.

While it's true that most food bloggers lack both the expense account and the time needed to dine at a restaurant 15+ times before publishing their opinions, many are also missing something even more crucial: a totally open mind. It was humbling to hear that Jonathan Gold -- arguably one of the most knowledgeable restaurant reviewers in the country, certainly one of the most respected -- sat back at the end of the meal and admitted to himself, I don't get this yet. He assumed the problem was not the food; it was him.

And then he ate and he ate until finally he understood the appeal of bitter melon ("not bitter like coffee, not bitter like dark chocolate -- bitter like cancer medicine"). Until maybe tofu that smelled like an alleyway of rotting garbage started to almost make sense.

I strive to be like that, a person who has devoted a good chunk of his life to learning all he can about the subject that interests him most, respected by others as an expert -- yet still able to say humbly and honestly, "I still have more to learn."

Because the only thing more bitter than bitter melon is a critic who thinks he knows it all. Right?