But from the title shot of the movie — Bras spooning sauces onto a plate in tight lines and deliberate smears — I was stunned. I recognized his swoops and dramatic arcs as signature plating styles of some of my favorite chefs today; I had no idea food could have looked like that a decade ago. I sat up.

Bras is known as kind of a vegetable savant, and so the film begins with him at the market before dawn, selecting, and soon we see him preparing them with his team.

Vegetable prep in every kitchen I’ve ever worked in is a chore, shit work, a task where you find satisfaction mainly in getting something done more quickly than you did it yesterday. It’s about powering your way through, leaving trails of carrot peels in your wake. So watching Bras work is stunning. He hones two short paring knives; he pulls on a glove; and for the next few shots we see him peel and trim with his head down. There’s a quality of dignity and purpose to his movements. He handles the vegetables with both hands; he handles them in his hands, not, in the manner of badass cooks, with a knife against the cutting board. He holds up a turnip and gently, swiftly, separates it from its skin. He works with one stalk of leek, one shell of peas at a time. Efficiency is not his priority; there is something greater.

“I try to relate to the produce, to communicate with it,” he says. It’s the kind of statement that usually makes my eyes want to roll, the kind of thing people who think they’re elves say. But then he talks about how the vegetables change from day to day, and how he adjusts the dish: One day, a squash might be cooked a little more to highlight its tenderness; the next, it might come in a little firmer, so he cooks it less to give the dish more texture. When you see him handle that turnip, peering at it from behind wire-rimmed glasses, he convinces you that it’s not about goofy spirituality but about care and respect and mastery.

I’m interested in mastery as much as I am in cooking. When a master takes his or her tools out, when they stack their unceremonious crates of ingredients, I am transfixed. In part I try to see if I can make sense of what they’re doing or what lies ahead, and in part I just take in how they move, the mannerisms of hands and bodies. Is there something to them? Something that speaks of how they do what they do? Are their movements fluid or sharp? Smooth or jarring? Confident? Powerful?

There’s a scene later in the film where Bras cooks a dish he calls “Shadows and Light,” for the way the dense obscurity of black olives and the shiny, almost liquid whiteness of just-cooked monkfish look against one another. The technique he uses is a classic but involved one, where he sets the fish in a puddle of hot oil and bastes it constantly, heating it from above and below. He adds danger to the technique by using oil blended with black olives — it gives him flavor and stains the outside of the fish, but, because of the sediment, threatens to burn at every moment. The shot is mesmerizing. He cooks cleanly, keeping the oil moving so it doesn’t scorch at the bottom of the pan, scraping the liquid in quick, gathering strokes and sweeping it up into the spoon. His hand quickens, raining hot, olivey fat on the fish and dipping back into the pan in fluid, graceful circles. The oil bubbles impatiently; the burning feels imminent, but Bras is unhurried, his actions deliberate. He prods the fish with his spoon, feeling the resistance. He takes it out and cuts it. It’s perfect.

In a world where the word “locavore” exists, it can be a cliché to say that a chef is inspired by a sense of place. But Bras speaks of his inspiration in terms beyond who his farmers are and the dirt they work. “Shadows and Light” is an attempt to express the experience of watching the sun and clouds play on his valley. The idea sat with him for years before it occurred to him to pair inky olives and pearlescent fish. In the film, he sits on a rock, where he observes the light, talking about his fascination with monkfish, how it cooks to a quality of translucence. He tries to connect the dots between his inspiration and how he realized his vision, but is frustrated. He balls his hands into little fists, like a boy who can’t find his words. Finally, he finds the thought that eluded him: that this dish, focused so literally on showing the visual qualities of shadow and light that inspired him, is still fundamentally symbolic. It speaks of his love and fascination with his land, and yet to express that, he ironically uses monkfish and olives — ingredients not of that land. It’s a dish of abstraction, not representation.

And yet, his cuisine can also be pointedly direct. “One day, I was running,” he said during the interview. “It was a dark day, a low sky. I came around a bend, and a smell provoked me, impressed me, almost scared me. Almonds, honey — like an old woman. It was an herb, Queen-of-the-Meadow. How was this herb going to inspire me? That’s my relationship with the world around me.” It’s a sense of wonder that guides him, a sense that there is always something more to be found in what you already know.

And yet, what finally canonized Bras for me was his silverware. His is a Michelin three-star restaurant, a recipient of the highest honor of France’s most esteemed culinary guide, which is to say that it is fancy. And so guests are confused when, between courses, servers float by and take away the dishes and used silverware, leaving their dirty knives. But Bras is from Laguiole, home of the famous knives of that name, and where the custom is for children to receive a knife from their parents when they become adults, one that they are to keep forever. And so Bras asks his guests to keep their knives throughout their time with him. “I don’t call it my restaurant,” he said. “It is my place. You are at our home.”

For this grand cuisinier, cuisine is not about the ego on the plate. It’s about genius and creativity and craft, but also about humility, also about understanding and sharing, about bringing people together.

A man in the interview audience stood up. He asked Bras a question, pointing to his innovative technique, about being a father of avant garde cuisine. Bras took in the translation and smiled nervously. He demurred. “I love my work,” he said, “because I am in the business of happiness.” And then he disappeared, coming back a moment later with a few sheets of paper.

They were letters he received from a guest, a woman with a husband who’d been hurt in an accident, a paraplegic. They were young and loved food, and they used to plan their trips around special meals. In the hospital, they talked about going to Michel Bras as soon as he was well enough to, and so they finally went. She wrote to Bras afterward: “Thank you, so much, for our several hours of perfection.”

Two years later, she wrote him another letter: Her husband could walk again. They have a child. And she wanted to share this news with him, because of that dinner they had in his place. “That,” Bras said, “was a great moment in my life.” 

For me, the whole wine thing began when I would carry cases of wine home and stock the cellar, stock wines in the restaurant, and eventually open up bottles of wine while working in the restaurant. And so that’s how I came to it; I was very young. And my kids have the same kind of experience, having wine in our home, in the cellar and in the restaurants. They help me carry cases in and out. They go to the winery. So it’s part of their lives.

I had a real coming-of-age after working on Wall Street. I moved to Italy and developed a passion for wine and food. It had always been a part of my life, but that’s kind of really when I fell in love with it. Living alone in Italy at the age of 22 for a year and a half — that’s when I had the catharsis and I knew that this would be the central thing in my life.

It’s a very humbling thing, because you’re really just participating in the national cycle of wine culture. In a world where we control everything, the idea that there’s something we can’t control, where we’re just participants — that’s been very powerful for me. It’s kind of the core of who we are as a people. It allows us to live in multiple generations and centuries — and it allows us to participate in something that is bigger than our 80 or 90 years on this earth. You learn a sense of our own humanity in the world and our place in it.

I hope it would affect my kids in the same way, but you never can tell. If you’re lucky, your kids will carry on your legacy. They enjoy it. They love going to Italy, being there and being involved in it. But, you know, it’s a little hard to tell at this point. You let them experience it and live it — and then they have to make their own decision.

The pithy description fueled an uproar that resulted in the main company behind the filler, Beef Products Inc., closing three meat plants this month. The controversy over the filler, which is made of fatty bits of beef that are heated and treated with ammonium to kill bacteria, shows how a simple nickname can forever change an entire industry.

In fact, beef filler had been used for decades before the nickname came about. But most Americans didn’t know — or care — about it before Zirnstein’s vivid moniker was quoted in a 2009 article by The New York Times on the safety of meat processing methods.

Soon afterward, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver began railing against it. McDonald’s and other fast food companies later discontinued their use of it. And major supermarket chains including Kroger and Stop & Shop vowed to stop selling beef with the low-cost filler.

Bettina Siegel, a food blogger who posted an online petition asking the USDA to stop using the filler in school lunches, said the controversy isn’t based on the term alone. She said consumers are just upset that the filler is not what they think they’re getting when they buy “100 percent ground beef.”

But Siegel acknowledges that the name doesn’t hurt her cause, either. She said the term “filled a vacuum” in the public arena about the filler; her petition, “Tell the USDA to STOP Using Pink Slime in School Food” had more than 200,000 signatures within a week.

Beef Products, which makes the filler, blames its plant closings on what it calls unfounded attacks. About 650 jobs will be lost when plants in Amarillo, Texas, Garden City, Kansas, and Waterloo, Iowa close on Friday. Another plant in South Sioux City, Neb., will remain open but run at reduced capacity.

Still, the company, based in South Dakota, said it’s not considering changing the filler’s name. Instead, Beef Products set up a website, beefisbeef.com, to combat what it calls “media-perpetuated myths” about the filler.

Meanwhile, the author of the term “pink slime” makes no apologies about his creation. Zirnstein, who has since left the USDA, said he thinks “pink slime” is a better descriptor than “lean finely textured beef.”

“It says it’s lean. Great. But it doesn’t describe what kind of lean it is,” said Zirnstein, who doesn’t think the product should be mixed into beef. “Textured. What does that mean?”

Before his December escape, Sokha (a pseudonym) was the property of a deep-sea trawler captain. The 39-year-old Cambodian, his teenage son and two young nephews were purchased for roughly $650, he said, each through brokers promising under-the-table jobs in a fish cannery.

There was no cannery. They were instead smuggled to a pier in neighboring Thailand, where they were shoved aboard a wooden vessel that motored into a lawless sea. His uncle had fallen for the same scam five years prior and escaped to warn the others. But Sokha told his son, then just 16, that this venture would turn out differently. He was wrong.

“We worked constantly, for no pay, through seasickness and vomiting, sometimes for two or three days straight,” he said. “We obeyed the captain’s every word.”

Near-daily death threats reinforced the captain’s supremacy. So did his Vietnam War-era K-54 pistol, and the night he carved up another slave’s face in view of the crew. “For 20 hours a day, we were forced to catch and sort sea creatures: mackerel, crabs, squid.” It’s back-breaking work, under the searing tropical sun. “But the fish wasn’t for us,” he added.

So who was it all for?

The answer should unsettle anyone who closely examines Thailand’s multi-billion dollar wild-caught seafood industry and the darkest links in its supply chain.

“It’s an export-oriented market. And we know the countries where these products are exported to,” said Lisa Rende Taylor, chief technical specialist with the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking or UNIAP. “Do the math.”

For Americans, the calculation is worrisome. Thailand is the United States’ second-largest supplier of foreign seafood. Of America’s total seafood imports, one out of every six pounds comes from the Southeast Asian nation.

In 2011 alone, Thailand exported 827 million pounds of seafood worth more than $2.5 billion to the US, according to National Marine Fisheries Service figures. The only nation that consumes more Thai seafood exports is Japan.

Murder is an occupational hazard. But a monotonous job assembling iPads is heaven compared to slavery on a Thai trawler, where conditions are as grueling and violent as any 19th-century American plantation. The lucky escape within a year or so. Less fortunate are those traded several times over for years on end.

Denying that the fruits of forced labor reach the biggest importers of Thai seafood — Japan, America, China and the European Union — has become increasingly implausible.

The accounts of ex-slaves, Thai fishing syndicates, officials, exporters and anti-trafficking case workers, gathered by GlobalPost in a three-month investigation, illuminate an opaque offshore supply chain enmeshed in slavery.

A long trail of offshore operators — slave boats, motherships and independent fishmongers — can obfuscate the origins of slave-caught seafood before it ever reaches the shore. While the industry’s biggest earners rely on clannish and violence-prone fishing crews for raw material, they’re distanced from the worst abuses by hundreds of nautical miles and several degrees of middlemen.

The result is that many Thai factory bosses have no idea who caught the seafood they process for foreign consumers.

There are caveats. The majority of Thailand’s two largest seafood exports to the US — tuna and shrimp — are sourced differently. Most “Thai” tuna is actually imported from overseas and processed for re-export. The shrimp industry, though routinely accused of abusing poor migrants, is at least vulnerable to spot checks on seaside farms.

The same cannot be said for deep-sea trawlers, the favored vessel of slave-driving captains.

The species caught by Thai trawlers legal and illicit alike include sardines, mackerel, cuttlefish, squid, anchovies and “trash fish,” tiny or foul-tasting catch ground into animal food or preserved to create fish sauce. Americans consume these breeds en masse. One in five pounds of America’s imported mackerel or sardines comes from Thailand, according to US government records. For processed fish balls, puddings or cakes — made from trawlers’ trash fish — the figure is one in three pounds. Thai fish sauce supplies nearly 80 percent of the American market.

All that trawler catch ends up in familiar American fare: anchovy pizzas, squid linguine, smoked mackerel salads and fish fillets on ice. Even pets are entangled: trash fish is a common dog- and cat-food ingredient. But industry representatives in Thailand admit there’s often no way to tell whether a particular package of deep-sea fish was caught using forced labor.

Using bar codes, American shoppers can track packaged Thai-exported seafood to its onshore processing facility, said Arthon Piboonthanapatana, secretary general of the Thai Frozen Foods Association. “You can trace it back to the factories.”

But exporters, he said, are not in the business of policing the fishing syndicates that supply their factories. “We only have the power to enforce our members,” Arthon said. “We have no power to enforce other stakeholders such as boats or fishermen.”

American seafood importers consider themselves similarly powerless in overseeing far-flung Thai boats. “Western regulatory agencies have little or no reach, or authority, over various parts of the value chain,” said Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, America’s chief seafood trade organization and lobbying group based outside Washington, DC. The institute will promptly respond to allegations against specific factories, he said. But so far, it has not found an effective way to monitor conditions on deep-sea boats catching US-bound fish.

“We have started discussions with our members about just how far an audit could realistically go and whether, perhaps, there are dockside audits that could be developed,” Gibbons said.

The “nature of boats being at sea,” he said, presents a major challenge to industry’s self-policing efforts.

International pressure to rid Thailand’s seafood trade of slavery is mounting. Thailand teeters just above the US State Department’s worst human-trafficking ranking and could be downgraded this summer. Last year, during a visit that vexed Bangkok officials, a UN rapporteur declared that forced labor is “notoriously common” in Thailand’s fishing sector and even alleged police complicity.

“It’s not like monitoring brothels, plantations or factories … all this labor is at sea,” Rende Taylor said. “So it’s essentially a universe where captains are king. Some are out to make as much money as possible by working these guys around the clock and being as cruel as they want to be.”

Before you think this is a column merely about food, recognize that Pachirat’s question isn’t (only) about the immorality of the cheeseburger you had for lunch. It’s about the larger phenomenon whereby modern society has reconstructed itself to hide so many horrific consequences from view.

Calling this the “politics of sight,” Pachirat’s blood-soaked experience inside a slaughterhouse spotlights only the most illustrative example of how we’ve divorced ourselves from the means of producing violence — and how, in doing so, we have made it psychologically easier to support such brutality. Sadly, billions of factory-farmed animals dying barbaric deaths are just one subset of casualties in that larger process.

Today, for example, free trade policies that promote offshoring allow Americans to enjoy consumer goods at ultra-low prices without having to see that those low prices represent companies taking advantage of the developing world’s poverty wages, environmental destruction and human rights abuses. A veritable slave may have assembled the iPad you are reading these words on, but thanks to the supply chain’s geography and Apple’s lack of transparency, you can easily avoid dealing with the ethical implications of that reality.

Another example: Many Americans drive gas-guzzling SUVs, proudly slapping patriotic declarations on their bumpers. This seems perfectly reasonable, but only because many either don’t live near polluted oil-drilling sites or don’t have to personally experience the ramifications of our petroleum-focused military policies. Ultimately, by separating the consequences of gas consumption from the driver, we’ve created the psychological conditions for fossil fuel consumption to seem like an honorable statement of strength rather than an endorsement of environmental degradation and war.

Speaking of war, the politics of sight sculpt our martial policies. We ended conscription, separating most of our fellow citizens from the consequences of military action; we conduct combat via unmanned aerial vehicles that remove the pilot-shooters from the populations being bombed; and both the military establishment and the media themselves suppress photographs of coffins or battlefield viscera that might show us what war really looks like.

Some of this, of course, is an inadvertent byproduct of larger trends like globalization that stretch supply chains across the planet. Some of it comes from a culture narcissism that teaches us to consider only on our immediate surroundings and nothing else. Much of it, though, is a deliberate effort to hide the truth. From the Pentagon’s photo policy to agribusiness now championing so-called ag gag laws to punish activists who expose factory farm atrocities, vested interests are exploiting the fact that “out of sight, out of mind” is a default setting in the human mind.

For his part, Pachirat ends his brave journey unconvinced that, unto itself, removing the veil will be enough to make us a more thoughtful — if not moral — society. He’s almost certainly correct. The atrocities that power modern life are now integral to what we define as the norm. And whether that norm is eating meat, driving massive cars or flippantly waging war, changing the status quo warrants more than just knowledge — it requires the will to change once knowledge is available.

Fortunately, history proves Americans can summon that will. However, without knowledge — without an end to the moment’s deceptive politics of sight — the most important changes can never happen.

She says she doesn’t particularly like killing animals, but she does kill from time to time, if she has good reason. A deer invaded her garden and she killed it with a machete, and she sometimes nets fish in the surf near her home on the coast of Guerrero, Mexico. It’s a skill born from practice and necessity: She grew up rural and poor. Her father abandoned her family when she was 8, and her mother, Esperanza, had to find a way to support seven children. “We ate a lot of natural things,” she says. “Things from the forest.  My brother used to kill iguanas. I’ve got a good iguana recipe if you want it. It’s the best meat as far as I’m concerned. There are two types of iguana: green and black. The black is good to eat. The green is too beautiful to kill. Last winter I found a big black one in my house! Can you believe it? The way you kill them is you step lightly on their heads and then pull on the tail.”

Humans worship athleticism, talent and perfection. We have a fascination with the tiny fraction of people who stand on the other side of the line that separates life from art: the grand master, the prima ballerina. We are drawn to people who embody something of the divine; the ones who, through their grace and inspiration, remind us that to be alive is majestic. Often these heroes in our spotlight are athletes. Sometimes they are leaders — warriors, politicians or rebels. Sometimes they are great chefs or composers or guitarists. But outside the spotlight and the enchantment of our collective worship, there are other artists, who turn mundane actions into magic, who approach humble tasks with perfect artistry. The masters of skills born of necessity and perfected to fulfill a pride that is autonomous from credit or accolades, a pride based on the perfection of the action itself, the economy of movement, the swiftness of results.

Jazmin Rudin is one such person. She possesses the grace and determination to execute any task at hand with astonishing efficiency. For example, she hunts shrimp in the river with a homemade metal spear. ”You take a long sharp piece of metal, filed at the end. It has to be really sharp. You attach that to a piece of surgical tubing so it snaps back to you when you throw it,” she says. She mimes aiming a spear, and remarks that on a good day she can spear two kilos of shrimp this way. I express disbelief. She shrugs.

“It’s a cultural thing. If you learn when you’re really little it’s easy enough. You have to learn because the shrimp are not going to come to your house and knock on your door.” She explains her technique: “The shrimp are under the rocks. You go underwater, and lift each rock. Don’t lift it all the way. You need to lift gently so they don’t see you.” She’s a demonstrative teacher. She talks slowly, and pauses to make eye contact. She’s checking to make sure I understand her. To help me get it, she uses hand motions. “They also like to hide in the roots of the trees that grow into the river; they hang out in there, caved up. Before you go for it, you have to check out all the potential exits they might have.” She mimes looking around and adds, “Sometimes you have to grab them with your hand, which can be prickly. But I say no! You’re for me. I don’t care if you bite me, you’re not escaping me!” She laughs. “But really, it’s all about taking aim. Just like hunting with a gun. When everything is correct you’ve got your shrimp.”

But hunting isn’t Jazmin’s only talent. The lectures on killing iguanas and spearing shrimp are just digressions: I’m here in her Oregon kitchen for a lesson in grilling chicken, estilo Mexicana. She learned this recipe for pollo asado from her mother, who raises chickens. Her mother learned it from her grandmother. Both women have lived their entire lives in the same small Guerrero village. Jazmin describes her grandmother as “muy antiquada,” or very antiquated. “She has Indian ways, folk ways,” Jazmin says. “There’s something a little witchy about her.”

Jazmin starts by butterflying a chicken thigh with a deft stroke of her knife. When I admire her technique she says, “My mother always says: ‘I know how to cook chicken, but you are the chicken maestro.’” There’s too much delight and humor in Jazmin’s countenance for this revelation to sound boastful. Besides, as I watch her demonstration, I realize she’s just stating a truth. “Take the leg,” she says. “Find the thickest part and slice it open, like so. Don’t cut it all the way through. Leave a layer of flesh so that you can fold the meat back. When you fold it open, the bones and meat are on one side, and there’s pure meat on the other side. You want to cut it so both sides are of equal thickness.” She slams the chicken leg flat on her cutting board. “Chickens prepared this way absorb more sauce,” she says and gives me a challenging look. I’m not about to argue with someone who can kill living shrimp with a handmade spear.

After salting the butterflied chicken legs and breasts, she sets the meat aside in a bowl and works on the sauce. “You’ll want to put seven dried chiles guajillos to soak in a bowl of water,” she says, helpfully adding, “It’s important to soak the chiles first, because it helps the chile to retain the red color.” She assembles her spices: powdered oregano, cumin seed, ground cloves and whole peppercorns, which she’ll grind in a stone mortar and pestle, or molcajete. The basalt bowl stands on its own three legs; the grinding stone is the size and texture of an avocado. “In Mexico everyone has the rock,” she says, laughing. “But if you don’t have a molcajete, use the blender. It’s not quite the same, but it works.” To make the sauce, she places two cloves of garlic and strips of wet chile in the molcajete, and then deftly adds spices and water a little at a time. The finished result is a uniform liquid, which she ladles over the chicken.

While the chicken marinates and the grill heats, we talk. Jazmin’s pueblo on the coast of Guerrero sounds a lot like the village in coastal Jalisco where I spent part of my childhood. It’s a rural culture, rooted in farming and fishing and family. Jazmin has always felt different from the other girls in town; she’s never cared for makeup or clothes. “I’m old-fashioned like my grandmother,” she admits. But although her values may be old-fashioned, she’s not exactly a textbook campesina: Her great joy in life is surfing, she raves about Hank Williams III, and she’s taught her dog, Rambo, to ride on the front of her four-wheeler. She married Mark, an older guy from Oregon, when she was 19, so that could help explain her cultural idiosyncrasies. But as I watch Jazmin laugh uproariously at a silly joke, it strikes me that even without the foreign influence, she would have been an oddball. She’s one of those rare individuals who always cleaves true to some inner compass.

“The secret to barbecuing chicken is to make sure the flame isn’t too hot,” she says, holding her hand over the gas grill, which she views with some contempt. We’re standing on a back porch in Bend, Ore., and Jazmin has been waxing poetic about the superiority of Mexican chickens. “In Mexico, we get a chicken that’s been killed that day. And it’s double good when you grill it over real coals; these gas grills have nothing on real charcoal.” She slaps a chicken thigh on the grill. “Keep turning the chicken over and over again,” she instructs. “It’s a totally different style. Not as juicy maybe, but more flavorful.” She’s right; when we pull the chicken off the grill a scant 20 minutes later, the meat has a satisfying, chewy texture and the flavor sings, savory and complex. Jazmin gives me a look, as though to say, “I told you so.”

“What do you call this recipe?” I ask.

“It’s called pollo asado,” she says, grinning. Grilled chicken. The answer is pure Jazmin: no nonsense and uttered with the easy confidence of a maestro. Like any great artist, she knows to let her work speak for itself.