A hundred years ago, we ate what was local and easily grown in our county. Today we have Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, 7/11, and McDonald’s, who serve us food from around the world all year long. But it's a mixed blessing, this access and abundance, and it's easy to look around and not actually be so happy with our luck; to long for a time when chickens were given names and ran underfoot, playing with toddlers on the floor of the kitchen before being swept up by a firm hand to be killed and eaten. While the popular face of this nostalgia frames itself in terms of health and well-being — a return to slow food keeps us far from chemicals, preservatives, and other not-so-good stuff — I'm convinced these wistful thoughts really crop up because this pervasive, pre-Bronze-age desire to get our hands dirty in soil cannot be satisfied by the picture of a cornfield on the back of a box of cereal alone.

However you look at our reaction to the increasingly corporate way in which we get our food, it's a ripe topic for exploration — and seems to particularly lend itself to the sort of single-topic book that's defined gastronomic nonfiction for the past few years. Each of three recent titles — Fresh by Susanne Friedberg (buy on Amazon), Deeply Rooted by Lisa M. Hamilton (buy on Amazon), and Coop by Michael Perry (buy on Amazon) — takes on the issue by addressing the idea of the middleman, whether it's cutting him out or cutting him down to size.

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Picking up Nicolette Hahn Niman's Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (buy on Amazon), one can’t help feel a vague sense of foreboding and dismay. Like all great love stories – The Red and the Black, War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice – Righteous Porkchop, at first glance, offers up a bill of fare that appears to be significantly less than light.

At first glance, the book (with its earnest foreword from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) seems like yet another scholarly, impeccably researched, faultlessly sourced, stomach-turning philosophical tract on the sorry state of the animal husbandry industry in America. Well, brace yourselves, because it is. Niman, the vegetarian animal activist environmentalist wife of a meat-eating rancher (maybe you've heard of him? Yes, that Bill Niman), dishes out out bone-chilling facts about industrial farming that will undoubtedly chill the likes of Alice Waters in her very bones. But the book takes the issue far past standard-issue condemnation of factory farming, personalizing the concern by illustrating it alongside Niman's own life story.

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Slate runs a piece on how farmers produce so many birds for Thanksgiving:

With a little help from their human friends. The vast majority of turkeys sold in the United States are of the white broad-breasted variety. These birds have been bred to produce as much white breast meat as possible, resulting in males so large and unwieldy that they can't properly mount the females. Toms therefore have to be manually stimulated and "milked" for their semen, which is then inserted into a hen using a syringe.

Tuesday's Oprah, Conscious Choices, focused on Proposition 2 in California, "which seeks to increase cage sizes for egg laying hens, pregnant pigs and veal calves." Slim-margin, Matrix-style industrial cage-rearing versus organic free-range happy cuddling. Jezebel has some video.