The food chapter? You guessed right, you clever person!

Here’s the opening of that chapter:

“Food is the first thing, morals follow on.”*
— Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera

In Brecht’s world of thieves, whores, and orphans, morality may have been a luxury only to be considered on a full belly, but moral questions in twenty-first-century America start well before you get to the table. Chicken or tofu? Grass-fed or corn-fed? Kosher or trayf? Imported organic or pesticide-sprayed local? And is “free-range” just another word for nothing left to lose?

*Another popular translation from the original German, “First you must feed us, then we’ll all behave,” strongly suggests that the translator never hosted a children’s birthday party.