We had the first conversation at our house last night contemplating a different family approach to eating protein. It arose from a couple of threads that have been entwining in my mind for a while: the processed nature of soy protein and the environmental values of grass-fed animals and getting it locally.

Do I have hope? Yes, I have hope because, as Michael Pollan wrote in "The Omnivore’s Dilemma," what it means to say that something is “unsustainable” is that it will stop. And we have an unsustainable food supply.

The speaker is Joan Dye Gussow, "the mother of the sustainable food movement," as ID'd by writer Paula Crossfield, setting up her interview on Grist (and, previously, on  Civil Eats).

I have written previously (perhaps approaching cliche by now; you decide) about having two blogs and wanting to have one — not by jettisoning one by having them merge organically. Here's another post that fits in both places — about sustainable living (no link; you're reading it) and food issues, at fisherblue.com/blog; in fact, I starting writing this at the other one.

Longtime readers know I'm a committed Michael Pollan fan, ever since "Omnivore's Dilemma," which, to me, is not only brilliant in the extreme but also a model for my professional aspirations

At Tara Pope Parker's blog at nytimes.com, Pollan is collecting our collected wisdom on sage and healthy eating. It appears that the post went up on the 9th, and that in less than a week, more than 2,100 readers have left their tips, including me.

It was a sure bet that the headlines on Earl Butz's obit this week would focus on the racial slur that torpedoed his public life, and it was in every one I saw. But Butz, agriculture secretary under Nixon and Ford in the '70s, was perhaps one of the most influential figures in 20th century America, although not exactly in a salutary way. He blessed, and hastened, the demise of the family farm, for example, stating baldly and  unapologetically that farming was now the domain of corporations, and the family farmer would just have to get used to it.