Maybe I could let myself off the hook by saying something about how the culture of ramen in Japan — fresh noodles in from-scratch broths, not the pre-hangover treat — is one of the great Japanese culinary traditions, an object of Everyman devotion that’s inspired at least one classic movie and is just now making its way to my town in a serious way. And while all that would be technically true, the fact is that I wasn’t mindful and vigilant of what I was eating, which is really what this whole challenge is about: learning to value my food more.

And, of course, talking about our choices and why we make them is important too. When Salon published my resolution a few days ago, I marveled at the intelligence, sensitivity, sense and, yes, intensity of many of the conversations in the comments, and wanted to share some thought-provoking highlights with you.

What about the people who can’t afford the sustainable stuff?

What is troubling is this “let ‘em eat cake” attitude — that everyone can eat like a wealthy yuppie in Park Slope or Berkeley, that everyone is a singleton or a couple (but not having to deal with children, teens or elderly family), that EVERYONE must have the same “foodie” ideals of perfection — organic, heirloom, regional, locavore, sustainable, ethical — when for most people, food is just food and they don’t want to turn it into a religion.

Food prices have already doubled or tripled for most people in most parts of the country, while wages have stayed flat or fallen — buying food now takes a bigger part of most people’s income than it did 10 or 15 years ago. Yet Salon (and Mr. Lam) remain clueless and tone-deaf, choosing instead to hector people to eat MORE expensive, more trendy and more exclusive foods — to prove they are “correct thinking” and that they belong in this “exclusive club.”

Hint: Not everyone is a childless, white, vegan, atheist freelance writer living in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

– Laure1962

In the middle of the worst jobless slump since Reaganomics was first forced on us, I’m thinking a lot of people will find it awfully hard to avoid “cheap chicken.” Or indeed cheap anything. Just saying.

– Douglas Moran

But maybe you can both buy more expensive chicken and be more economical about it:

My income is below median and I’m feeding a teenaged boy. We eat free-range, cage-free and/or organic, depending on what’s available.

Cut meat consumption in half, and the better stuff becomes a lateral move, if not savings. How do you get a teenaged boy to eat beans and whole grains? Serve him chili. Navy bean soup goes over well, too, as do curries. Tonight’s main dish, a few chicken legs cooked with brown rice, Adzuki beans and some Asian-ish spicing, went over great. A lot of this stuff heats up well, so he can eat it the next day for lunch or a snack.

Factory meat isn’t high-quality protein. It’s the meat equivalent of refined carbs. You just don’t get nutritious results from low-quality feed, inadequate exercise and disease-breeding living conditions.

Which brings me to another reason why this worked. Good meat has a stronger flavor. Even if I use half the ground beef in a chili recipe, I can still taste it in every bite. If you start with a recipe that relies on meat mostly for flavor, you can get away with using a lot less if you go pastured.

Cutting back on meat doesn’t have to mean radical alterations in diet. Mostly it means giving some classics, like red beans and rice, pride of place on the dinner plate.

– Anonymous_Too

One properly raised chicken meal may cost $20, so, next day have beans. Humans at no time were entitled to meat, chicken or fish every day. Cherish the chicken.

– Stellaa

Which is more effective, boycotting or buying in?

The fact is that opting out does not spur change. Opting in to the practices you approve of, at a fair price, does.

I rarely eat meat still, but when I do, I happily pay $24 for a chicken and appreciate what it took to get it to our plates.

– farmette

Balancing your choices with the generosity of others

Visiting [my family] definitely raises cultural and class issues regarding food. In my family, food (no matter the origin) is never wasted and must always be appreciated. My mother occasionally sends me (via USPS), from Los Angeles to Los Alamos, New Mexico, containers of chicken adobo. I know she’s not paying for the organic, free-range stuff. She scours Los Angeles’ Asian neighborhood stores for chicken cheaper than 49 cents/lb. I do the mental gymnastics of rationalization: The factory chicken is dead. My mother has lovingly triple-wrapped the plastic container in foil, Ziploc, and grocery plastic bag; stuffed it in a box with styrofoam popcorn; then spent more than the cost of chicken on mailing the package. The postal worker has trudged through snow to make her delivery. So, I cook a pot of rice after a long day at work and eat. I enjoy and am repelled at the same time.

– e-mailed from reader Luce

If we’re concerned about meat eating’s ethical impact, should we consider how many individual animals we eat per meal? And which farmed animals have more or less environmental impact?

As a carnivore who is nonetheless compelled by concerns about animal suffering, I wind up performing all kinds of odd calculations about the food I eat. I’m convinced that factory-farmed chickens suffer a uniquely horrible fate — my response to that is peculiar: In restaurants I generally eat pork instead.

This is based on two pieces of half-baked justification, and one solid one: A friend who worked in the field of farm-animal health convinced me that the feedlot pigs she worked with seemed consistently “happy and healthy.” And, if I make a cruel calculation of deaths per meal, it’s clear that I would be killing dozens of chickens in exchange for the one biannual pig that makes up my bacon-heavy diet.

Environmentally speaking, pork has a bad rap since it’s generally lumped in with other “red meats.” I’ve done the math, and my meat-heavy diet that trades pork for both beef and chicken winds up having a very small footprint compared to the average burger-heavy diet. I’ve got data: http://bogott.net/unspecified/2009/09/13/meaty/ [Editor's note: We haven't verified this data.]

– eraserbones

On the conflict between only buying sustainable, humane chicken and supporting working-class restaurants and cuisines

As for prepared chicken, at least I stick with local vendors. I worry less about where the taqueria cart got its meat and more about supporting the local economy.

Remember the key word: Local. Stay away from mass-market, and you are ahead.

And don’t forget a little activism. Costco, for example, is touting the healthy raising of the chickens in at least some of its products. Low-cost and environmentally better, thanks to input from its members.

– SteveW

I wouldn’t count Charles’ fried chicken in my list of what “cheap” chicken means. Grow your own sustainably if you can, buy from a farmer who’s not afraid to show you how she does things where raising animals for food is concerned. But remember that the fried chicken being made by someone who is cooking food he’s learned how to cook via tradition has to be sustained, too. We have so little valid, true food culture here in North America that losing any of it means we lose it to fast food.

Even if he uses the same stuff sold in every supermarket in the world, make sure you keep that fried chicken master employed and busy.

– aurumgirl

And finally, the best suggestion yet on how to deal with the times I go ahead and eat that chicken from a taco cart:

On cheap chicken … you could vow to donate $20 to a sustainable chicken farm/cause every time you cheat …

–  Tweet from reader Macheesmo

Following in Hawaii’s footsteps, Washington, Oregon and, most significantly, California have introduced statewide legislation that would make it illegal — and highly fineable — to serve or even possess shark’s fin. (Hawaii’s law calls for fines of $5,000 to $15,000 for even first-time offenders.)

Ban supporters talk about the trade’s inhumane treatment of sharks and an outsize environmental impact. The “Ew-ick-how-can-you-do-that” argument is that fins are largely harvested by cutting them off of live sharks, then dumping the shark back in in the water to die. But the more big-picture concern is about the scale of finning: researchers estimate that 73 million sharks are killed every year to feed an exploding demand in fins by a huge, growing middle class in China. Some scientists estimate that ocean shark populations are just 10 percent of what they used to be, and there’s no telling what kind of impact that can have. As Dan Cartamil, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said on the KPBS radio show “These Days,” “You take away the sharks, and, for example, many coral reef ecosystems become degraded. There are suddenly lots of stingrays, because now they have no natural predators, and then they may eat all the oysters, which is a commercial fishery.” And on and on. So the current scale of shark finning is a real problem.

But then I think, again, of my grandfather, and the night he took a teenage me to a nondescript, fluorescent-lit noodle shop in an undistinguished, vaguely smelly part of Macau. Walking past folding tables with diners on stools, going through an unmarked door behind a curtain, we found ourselves suddenly in a plush, one-table dining room, with relatively regal carpeting and a tablecloth of bright red, the color of celebration. I remember the dinner being wonderful, and that the strands of shark’s fin in the soup were thicker than spaghetti, a sign of quality … and extravagant expense. And it became clear that the room, the table, the whole dinner — so strange and luxurious amid such undistinguished circumstances — was built around the event of that soup; the metaphor of that soup was undeniable. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that much of my grandfather’s life was built around that soup, built around the idea that he could show the world and himself that he’d finally made it, that he could literally feed his family his success. For him, and tens of millions like him, that feeling of satisfaction must be unparalleled.

And so foes of the ban, including Chinese American California state Sen. Leland Yee, are tempted to say things like, “This is an attack on Asian culture.” And Jon Kauffman of SF Weekly sharply noted that it’s not hard to see “an anti-Chinese subtext in the ban,” with the language of the debate rife with “echoes of Americans’ fear of the rising Chinese middle class, and the persistent suspicion and disgust many Americans feel toward other cultures’ foods.”

But, Kauffman continues:

“Globally, we’ve reached the point at which the collapse of an ecosystem has to take precedence over one culture’s culinary heritage. No matter who the primary ‘market’ is, overconsumption is taking sharks — and bluefin tuna, and Atlantic cod, and hundreds of other species — away from all of us, and we all have a right to demand action. The situation is becoming drastic, and drastic, across-the-board bans are warranted.”

If the science is correct, I’d have to agree. (Sorry, grandpa. Really. I’m sorry.) I mean, the cultural import of the dish is, to be frank, as much about the demonstration of status as anything else, and there is no limit to the creativity of aspirational culture to come up with the next big status symbol. I mean, go ahead and buy another pair of Prada shoes instead of taking me out for shark’s fin. It’s fine. I don’t mind, and after a while, you’re not going to mind either. After all, the nature of status symbols is that the more they’re attained, the shallower their actual meaning, and the more attractive the next, other thing eventually becomes.

And cultures evolve. As Judy Ki, of a pro-ban group called Asian Pacific Americans Ocean Harmony Alliance, said, “I personally don’t think our culture is that fragile that it would fall apart without one little delicacy. My grandmother’s feet were bound. That was part of ‘our culture,’ and I’m very glad we’ve said that’s wrong.” (It’s worth noting that several California Chinese American legislators support the ban — and the bill was originally co-sponsored by a Chinese American assemblyman.)

But there is something disconcerting about this ban. A Chinese American chef, Jonathan Wu, noted, “It’s a tough call, but I support the ban. While we are at it, I’d also ban Caspian caviar and bluefin tuna [Caspian sturgeon and bluefin tuna are both considered endangered by many scientists] until their fisheries recover — no doubt, that would raise an uproar in certain other cultural communities.”

And that’s the thing: It’s not that this ban is “racist” as some have put it, it’s that it’s the kind of thing that smells a bit of cynical political posturing, scoring cheap environmental points because no politician is going to lose any votes that matter. Get rid of a grody-sounding food that only the Chinese are stupid enough to save up their money for? Easy! Try to take away the endangered tuna from voters’ Friday night sushi date, though, and there’ll be hell to pay. And don’t even think about doing anything about factory farming, the cheap-meat industry that is unequivocally ruining huge swaths of our ecology and our health. It’s not a good state of affairs when we can easily get up a head of steam behind laws that take away others’ pleasures, but refuse to even take a hard look at our own. 

So, when you’re shopping for chicken, what do labels like “free range” or “pastured” really mean? Which chickens fall in line with everything you want, and which ones do you know you might make some kind of compromise for? I called two experts, Tom Schneller, who teaches meat identification and butchery at the Culinary Institute of America (and the man who taught me how to break down chicken), and Mark Kastel, co-founder of the Cornucopia Institute, an advocacy group for family farms and a fierce “organic” production watchdog.

The first thing Mr. Kastel said to me was kind of dispiriting: “Well, some of those labels just mean whatever the marketer happens to want them to mean.” Some terms, like “organic,” have legal definitions and actual enforcement. Others have definitions but not much enforcement infrastructure, and some, still, are utterly unmoored to the law. Here’s a breakdown.

Free range

Many consumers have a vague sense of the incredibly crowded factory-like conditions of industrial chicken production, if not outright horror at them, and so “free range” became a hot term to sell to those people, designed to calm their fears about the crowdedness of “grow-out houses” (and subsequent disease density, and, if you’re into this sort of thing, the unhappiness of the birds).

“Free range” does have an official definition: “Producers must demonstrate to the Agency that the poultry has been allowed access to the outside.”

The definition of “outside,” though, is shaky; does that mean there’s a window chickens could theoretically squeeze through? Do the birds actually go through it? And outside could be a gorgeous rolling hill or it could be … a parking lot. Some producers include a fenced-in section of open concrete in their grow-out houses, with enough room for maybe 5 percent of the thousands of chickens in that house, and this may technically satisfy the term. (Although Mr. Kastel is seeing indications that the Obama administration may crack down on this.)

Chef Schneller noted, though, that not all operations are cynical. “The chickens might have more space, access to sunshine. They won’t be foraging, though, so it’s not a taste or nutrition issue. It might be more humane.”

Pastured

What some producers and farmers call “pastured” chicken is much more in line what with many people think they’re getting with free range. This means that the birds are actually kept in coops at night, but are left to forage on grass, seeds, worms, etc., during the day. They might be fed grain as well, but they have access to a greater variety of food in their diet, and the result is much more richly flavored meat and eggs — and a much more humane life for the birds. It’s also much more expensive to raise chickens this way, because of the amount of space required and how that limits how many chickens you might be able to raise at a time. What’s more, chickens can quickly turn a field into a moonscape with their pecking, so true pastured chickens will often be moved around a very large pasture as areas they’ve torn up need time to regrow.

Unfortunately, “pastured” isn’t a legal term yet, so consumers have to do their own research on the brands that use this label.

Natural

This is one of the most classically misleading marketing terms in all of food. While it’s not entirely true that anything can be called “natural,” the term has nothing to do with how a chicken is raised. It simply means that nothing has been added to the bird after slaughter — no flavoring, no brines, no coloring, etc. In an effort to curb some of the confusion around this label, the USDA requires marketers to say specifically what they mean when they use the term, such as “no artificial flavors” or some such.

Naturally enhanced

According to Chef Schneller, this is a term that gets into a gray area. The chicken might be pumped up with a broth made from the bones of that animal. But it could also mean that sugar is added, or “natural flavoring,” whatever that might mean.

No hormones; No antibiotics

Actually, by law, hormones are not allowed at all in chicken production, so labels saying “no hormones” are just pure marketing. Antibiotics are a little more tricky, since they are allowed in conventional chicken production (not organic), but theoretically so long before the birds are turned into food that there should be no antibiotic residue in the finished product.

Air-chilled

This is a still-rare but increasingly popular technique. The vast majority of chicken is “water-processed,” meaning the meat is chilled in cold pools. But with that much meat going through these pools, the water has to be chlorinated to kill bacteria, so you might not really want that. (Realistically, you’ll get way more chlorine in you if you accidentally gulp down a little swimming pool water, but still.) Air chilling is a more time-consuming and more expensive process, but the chicken skips the chlorine dip. And many chefs report that air-chilled birds have better flavor and skin that gets crispier. Chef Schneller called it “a definite positive.”

What about slaughter?

Conventional chickens are slaughtered in a way that involves electrified water, which is there theoretically for the chickens’, er, “comfort.” (The idea is that an upside-down dip into the pool will shock and stun them immediately, before they go through the mechanized kill line.) But many report that it doesn’t always work that way; you can imagine the horror stories. Animal welfare superhero Temple Grandin is working with several companies to convert to a process that lulls the chickens to sleep before slaughter, and if that’s something you’re interested in, the brands are Bell & Evans and Mary’s Chickens.

But don’t expect labeling on this any time soon. One of the biggest problems with clarity on how your chicken was slaughtered is the fact that, well, no one wants to be reminded that the chicken he’s buying had to be killed. “Slaughtered without terrorizing or torturing the bird!” doesn’t quite have the marketing oomph that, say, “All natural” or “Clean as angel’s breath” has.

Halal; Kosher

These terms only refer to Muslim and Jewish religious criteria, respectively, mostly governing the slaughter of the birds. The labels have to be granted by religious authorities, not the government.

That said, some people insist on the higher quality and more humane treatment of birds with these labels. Both Chef Schneller and Mr. Kastel said that these claims can be true. Schneller noted that the simple fact of adding another layer of supervision, and especially, a more time-consuming slaughter that is done by hand (as opposed to the machines big producers use), may slow down the process enough that producers may be able to notice more that’s going wrong. And Kastel noted that one of the principles of kosher meat production is being very careful that the animal isn’t sick. So having someone specifically look for lesions and signs of disease in the birds is very helpful. Even though he lives near the site of the biggest kosher chicken scandal in history — a packer who was charged with abusing animals, exploiting workers, and a host of other crimes — he’s confident that the label is still mostly worthy of trust.

Finally, Schneller also adds that kosher birds are typically washed with salt, so they in a sense come pre-seasoned, and can taste better that way.

Organic: The best label of them all?

Mr. Kastel is a firm believer that, at this point, “organic” is the best and most powerful label in chicken production (but not necessarily the signifier of the absolute best quality and most humane treatment; for that, he suggests you get to know a chicken farmer).

It’s a term with legal weight and the USDA enforces it. What it means for a chicken is that 100 percent of its feed (except maybe mineral supplements) must be certified organic, which means in itself that it has been grown in a field that has not seen chemical fertilizers, fungicides, herbicides or genetically modified organisms for at least three years.

In addition to the feed, certain husbandry techniques are prohibited in organic production. Since antibiotics are not allowed at all, chickens can’t be contained in the literal wing-to-wing density that conventional producers use; with that cramming, it would be impossible to keep disease at bay without drugs.

By law, organic chicken also has to be “free range,” and while that term has its problems, the greater resources to inspect and certify organic producers means that this characteristic will at least be scrutinized to some degree in an organic bird.

“In general, you can trust the organic label, especially if you do the extra homework to look into the producer. It’s the only label that has legal bite,” Kastel says. That said, the really best way to know about the chicken you buy, he says, is to meet a farmer at a market and ask him or her to let you visit his or her chickens. “They are usually very enthusiastic about it. Good farmers are proud of what they do. They’re going to welcome visitors. And if they don’t, find a different farmer.” 

Say hello to London-based Marine Stewardship Council, the world’s biggest certifier of sustainable seafood. Founded in 1997 as a partnership between food giant Unilever and the World Wildlife Fund and hailed as a groundbreaking partnership between industry and conservationists, it was quickly embraced by sustainability advocates, and it has certified more than 5,000 products. Intrepid James Beard Foundation Award-winning food politics reporter Barry Estabrook referred to it as the “gold standard” of sustainable seafood watchdogs, but, apparently, nothing gold can stay. As the demand for sustainable fish, meat, food, car tires, neckties, everything has grown, the market is suddenly flooded with products that use “sustainability” as a marketing buzzword and little more. And as the MSC is celebrating the awarding of its certification to its 100th fishery, Estabrook and others are growing uneasy with some of MSC’s certifications. A spokesman from Greenpeace recently commented to the Guardian that MSC consumers are “being duped.”

To get some clarity on the MSC and the larger question of what seafood sustainability is all about, we e-mailed with Paul Greenberg, a great lover of fishing and the eating of fish, a love that presumably led him to write the critically acclaimed “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food,” a grim but complex and at times hopeful investigation of what our insatiable hunger for seafood is doing to the seas. We talked about why there is so much conflicting information in sustainable seafood, the inherent contradiction of saving fish so that we can eat them, and living in the Boneless Era.

The MSC is under fire for certifying fisheries that some advocates say are in danger, or are too scientifically unclear to be rubber-stamped as being “sustainable.” Is the problem just a matter of scale or ideological purity? A MSC spokesman admitted to the Guardian that “for some of our critics, the MSC test of sustainability is not high enough,” but was still insistent that its work has been successful.

My personal opinion is that very, very large [and controversial -- Ed.] fisheries like Alaska pollock and New Zealand hoki have a hard time meeting the sustainability test because of the shear biomass removed from the ecosystem. Can any ecosystem tolerate the removal of 2-3 billions pounds of biomass year in and year out? Is the fundamental problem industrial fishing itself? Maybe. Maybe no degree of certification will ever bring that kind of removal into line with what the oceans can tolerate.

The other problem is a classic fox-in-the-henhouse dilemma that dogs all fisheries management. Most people really just don’t care very much about fisheries, except for fishermen, that is. And it’s fishermen or fishing company managers that have the incentive and the focus to keep both feet in a management or certification process over the long haul. Let’s face it, the details of fisheries management and certification are complex and often, well, dull. Nonprofits come and go. Activists come and go and can lose their enthusiasm. But fishermen depend on the fish being scrutinized for their living.

In line with the fox-in-the-henhouse problem is the way the certification is set up. There is a conflict of interest built into the MSC process in that it is the fishery who contracts the certifying company and then the certifying company certifies the fishery. What incentive is there for the certifying company to not certify the fishery if that is where its paycheck is coming from? MSC does not do any of the certification itself. They merely provide the labeling and define the broad standards for certification.

What kind of effect has certification really had, on markets and on fisheries?

The amount of fish on the market that has any kind of certification is still tiny. So the effect that MSC has had to date is more kind of symbolic. It’s the introduction of the idea that there should be a sustainability standard at all.

In that sense, MSC is a good thing in that it is a large-ish, reasonably sound institution whose very existence argues that certification and sustainability are not just passing fads but rather things that will eventually become industry standard.

As for my own opinion, I’d tend to side with one scientist I spoke with once who argued that if we tore down MSC we’d probably end up building a whole new institution to replace it that would look exactly like it. So, it should probably exist. But, alongside it, better regulations of the oceans need to be put in place. Consumer choice alone won’t get us to a sustainable ocean. We need more marine protected areas, better international institutional control over highly migratory fish like tuna and greater protection for things like forage fish that a lot of the fish we eat depend on for their sustenance. We also need to come up with a realistic idea of total biomass that can be removed from the ocean in aggregate before we start parsing subsets of that aggregate.

In addition to MSC, there are other organizations that try to certify or recommend particular fish to buy or to avoid to consumers. But why is there so often conflicting information coming from these sources?

Oftentimes it has to do with the geographic distance of the nonprofit in question from the fisheries it is adjudicating. An example: The other day I was looking up to see how Atlantic fluke (aka summer flounder) ranked. Monterey Bay Aquarium gives it a “red” — avoid. But Blue Ocean Institute gives it a green. I attribute this mostly to the fact that Blue Ocean Institute is on the East Coast and is literally a stone’s throw from where fluke can be found. They know that fluke are rebuilding well, that there is good management in place and that we are making progress. Monterey Bay, meanwhile, is on the West Coast and their ruling for fluke is a blanket ruling for all East Coast flatfish. Broadly speaking, they are right. There are a lot of problems with East Coast flatfish in general. But because Monterey Bay adjudicates over so many species, they may not have the time to parse all flatfish, species by species. Nevertheless the two organizations do speak to one another and I think there is an honest effort to weed out contradictions.

What makes calling a fishery “sustainable” complex and complicated? Is the “buy this fish, don’t buy that one” model hampered or inherently flawed?

My feeling is that the “choose the right fish” approach is an excellent way to teach consumers about the different aspects of fishing and aquaculture and that does have a multiplier effect over time. But as an economic lever for change it doesn’t really have that much effect. That’s mostly because fisheries are an international business. We import 80 percent of our seafood, so which lever are we throwing exactly when we choose Ecuador-grown tilapia over Chinese? If we don’t buy that Chinese tilapia the Chinese will gladly sell it elsewhere. The only exception to this would be in persuading really large buyers to change their ways. I know this is something Greenpeace has been trying to do.

What is the biggest problem in seafood sustainability, to your mind?

Well, one big one is that when we speak of wild fish, if you say that a certain fish is sustainable then everyone will eat it and then it won’t be sustainable anymore. It will be in our stomachs.

And all that said, are there sources that can be generally trusted? Can a casually concerned consumer make generally good choices, or are there no easy answers at all?

There are bests and worsts, certainly. With aquaculture fish, I’m encouraged by Arctic char because it is containment-grown, has low fish-in-fish-out requirements and also tastes good. To my knowledge there is no “bad” char on the market right now. I feel similarly about American farm-raised catfish. Again, containment grown, native species, provides wetlands for migrating birds. But, and there’s always a but, thanks to the catfish farmers we now have Asian carp swimming up the Mississippi to the Great Lakes.

As far as wild fish, the old chestnut of smaller is better seems to make sense. Anchovies, sardines and the like. But sometimes the enthusiasm for sardines can feel a bit over the top. When you go to Monterey you have to fight off all the smirking waiters telling you about local sardines. And there are people I know who just will never fight through all those bones.

During my book tour I said a number of times that when they go back through our middens 2,000 years from now, archaeologists will likely call our time “the Boneless Era” because of our tendency to spurn little boney animals and eat giant megafauna in huge, boneless portions. But I’m also reminded how my 16-year-old daughter — who joined me on my tour and heard me say that line a million times — finished up the summer. When the tour was all done we went to dinner and she ordered a big steak. Before tucking in she smiled and said, “I quite like the boneless era.”

Like most Hmong in the United States, our community was from Laos, transplanted here after an alliance with the CIA turned our isolated tribe of farmers into mercenaries — a failed secret war against the Communist Vietnamese that left Hmong as the targets of ethnic cleansing. Lifelong farmers-turned-international refugees, the older generation was ill-prepared to thrive in modern America. They settled into inner cities where many turned to social services as safety nets.

I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of poverty, illness and suicide. These were clan leaders who once commanded the respect of entire villages, tough guerrilla soldiers trained by the CIA — like my father — and proud providers who had, without writing, committed to memory centuries of the best farming practices. And they were humbled, receiving welfare and food stamps because there was no opportunity then in urban America for their main skill. Still, they farmed in the city for two necessities: food and a wistful connection to the old way of life.

We grew crops in every plot of soil that hinted of fertility — parking lots, front lawns, even inside discarded paint buckets, which made terrific homes for lemongrass and chili peppers. When I was in elementary school, the families in our apartment building worked a farm just outside of Sacramento. Every person, every age, had a job. Meals were planned around what we gathered: We scraped fresh cucumbers, serving them with sugar over ice on hot summer days; we pounded the signature Hmong mix of hand-picked peppers, cilantro, green onions and lime in a mortar and served it as a dip for meat and sticky rice. I remember loving our imperfectly shaped cucumbers because I got to watch each one grow into its own unique shape and thought they all had more character than the “beautiful” ones wrapped in plastic at the grocery store. And I loved mustard greens, which grew in abundance once a year but could be pickled for year-round consumption.

We bartered with each other. We raised chickens in the backyard, letting them out to roam and feeding them by hand. We didn’t have a label for this back then, though now I suppose people call it “free-range,” and it costs more. We slaughtered our own hens, sometimes with rituals honoring the sacrifice of the animal’s life.

With the costs of vegetables offset by our gardens, all the families pitched in to buy a pig or cow from the closest farmer, dividing the meat. This way, we could also afford to buy rice.

But we had to keep our locavore tendencies secret. America’s food rules, which seemed to us to go against nature, left us fearful of punishment. At the time, exactly one person from our clan had attended an American college and became our cultural broker, translating to shamans the world of Western medicine, and to lifelong hunters and fishermen the rules of hunting and fishing. What license was needed for what, how many of what thing could be caught during which season, if you could take fruit from a tree depending on which side of a fence it hung. All of it was too complicated to keep straight, and so it felt safer to keep our food producing regimens to ourselves. I can’t remember how many times my father built, tore down and rebuilt the chicken coop, afraid that neighbors who heard crowing would report us.

“Don’t tell the Americans,” my mother would always say, and, eventually, as I grew into adolescence, I couldn’t agree more. I was afraid of being judged.

My mother sprinkled only fresh-cut grass in her garden, swearing by its ability to grow bigger and tastier vegetables. She often crossed dangerous lanes of traffic to get to a pile of lawn clippings. My sisters and I would jump out of the car to bag the grass, and we did it with the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, terrified of being seen by friends.

The parking lot of our neighborhood Kmart was a regular pickup spot for lawn clippings. In my teens, when merely being accused of shopping at Kmart was an epic embarrassment, you can imagine the horror I felt about being spotted stealing grass from its parking lot. “If anyone sees me, MY LIFE IS OVER!” I’d say. Unfortunately, dramatic teenage declarations of “life being over” didn’t fly in Hmong households, not when there would always be someone around to remind you of the time he narrowly escaped the death camps.

As the adolescent me tried to find her groove, navigating deeper into the treacherous social maze of an American high school, I tried to talk my mother out of picking cilantro and scallions from her garden, cleaning and separating and selling them for 50 cents a bunch at a local Hmong store. It never made her more than $20 a week, but she didn’t care. She was obsessed with the idea of doing something she knew how to do, something that could earn money.

My family searched for new places to grow food while I became increasingly afraid that outsiders would find out we lived in a replica Hmong village, built to resemble what the older generation knew as “home.” Then one day, I was outed by a classmate as a food stamp user as I stood in the collection line to count money for my mother. That was the day that I decided I hated everything about the way we got food — from the paint-bucket chili peppers to the communal pig, cut up in pieces, ready to be bagged and shared. I wanted to run away from this mess. I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I would feed myself like they do.

Now, as an adult, I don’t have a garden. Years after I finished college and was well into the working world, long after credit cards made checks obsolete at the grocery store, I still insisted on writing checks to pay for my brand-name groceries. The defiant child food stamp user in me still needs the validation that comes from putting pen to paper and declaring, in writing, that I earned the right to take this food home.

But who’d know that, just as I finally shed a former life of organic necessity, my mother would be the hip one? Now I go to the market and hear people boasting about the eggs in their backyards, or how much their garden looks like the one on the White House lawn. My best friend, also a former Hmong child gardener, laughs with me about collecting lawn clippings. If only we had had cool recyclable cloth bags with eco-friendly slogans, we joke. If only we could be heroic, claiming to be launching a food revolution. But for us, there was no room to think about glamour. That life just felt backward.

I imagine now how many “I told you so’s” my mother would impart on me if she could grasp the enormousness of today’s food movement: Pesticide-free produce, hand-fed chickens, cuisines boasting minimal ingredients all represent billions of dollars to be made. And, irony of ironies, now people’s food stamps can’t even cover the costs of organic and local produce at our markets.

But I stood recently at a popular farmers’ market in San Francisco, where I now live and where my relatives have a vegetable stall. Surrounded by a flurry of patrons enthusiastic about locally grown food, I felt … proud. Proud that Hmong farmers owned their own stalls, their tradition of necessity now trendy and profitable. That day, my uncle gave me a bag of cucumbers and tomatoes from his stall. He said he had heard all about my schooling and my travels, and that he was proud I had made it. But as I looked at my bag and at all the customers flocking to his stall, I couldn’t help thinking he was making it in his own right.

Pha Lo is a freelance writer/nutrition educator and teaches food budgeting skills to low-income parents.

I, too, will eat no more cheap chicken. From now on, it’s only the humanely, sustainably raised stuff for me. Great! Done! Next up … call Mom more often.

But wait. What exactly would it mean to give up cheap chicken? (And sorry, Boar’s Head; I owe my childhood to your ham, but your weird, basketball-sized breasts count as “cheap chicken” in my book too.) It would mean no more McNuggets. Well, fine, they’ve sucked since the ’90s anyway. It would mean no more 49-cents-a-pound thighs from the supermarket, or one-dollar bags of bones for chicken stock. Um, I guess I can still cook with those $20 chickens from the farmer’s market. And it means no more Charles Gabriel. OK, this is going to be a problem.

A year ago today I had the honor of meeting Charles Gabriel, a master fryer of chicken. He’s a legend among New York food dorks, his bird adored the way tweens coo for Justin Beiber’s hair. I met him while he was making banana pudding, and he welcomed me into his Harlem kitchen, a cramped room with so much oil vapor it stung my eyes. He showed me his frying pans, big as sleds — dwarfing his massive hands — and black with the ghosts of chickens past. He showed me how he fries chicken, but more importantly, as we spent the afternoon together, he told me why. He told me about moving up to New York from North Carolina 45 years ago, as a teenager, and how he found work cooking because it was what he could do, what he learned from his family of southern sharecroppers. He told me about how making his momma’s chicken is what he loves best, how it just feels natural to him as he smiled his big smile and slipped pieces 36 and 37 of this batch into his roiling pans.

I thought about the decades Mr. Charles has spent doing this, how much of that eye-stinging oil vapor he keeps in his lungs, how a man can spend an entire lifetime in hard work because it makes him feel at home when he has left his home. I did some math: X pieces of chicken a day, Y days a year, Z years, and I came to realize that he has fried something on the order of 5 million pieces of chicken. And precious few, I would wager, of those chickens were raised in a way sustainable food gurus would be happy about.

So this, then, is my omnivore’s dilemma: Which is more important to me? To stop having my money support chicken that is mass-produced at unbelievable scale, poisoning the earth and water for hundreds of miles, that is treated brutally, that goes through a disassembly line so fast and furious that it injures 1 out of every 3 poorly paid workers who works on it? Or to keep supporting Mr. Charles, to share in his chicken, to know what his work means to him? To have that chance to meet the many Charles Gabriels, the taco truck cooks and the noodle shop owners and all the other working-class cooks whose cuisines I adore and whose stories I want to hear and help tell?

In a way, it would be simpler to do the tougher thing: give up eating chicken (or, really, any other meat) entirely. Or I could make sure that I only buy chicken that is raised well. Both of these are important practices of discipline, and the idea of discipline is straightforward: You set a line, it’s clear, and you work towards not crossing it.

One year I gave up beef, and I was really good about not straying. It was for political reasons — a response to the Bush administration’s policy on mad cow disease, which was, basically, “Mad cow? Never heard of it. Next question.” But in retrospect, it was a silly and self-serving thing to do; it was the laziest kind of boycott. I didn’t miss beef — I simply ate other meat. I didn’t look further to learn more about the beef industry, to talk about it, to find out if there was beef I would be proud to support. I just stopped doing something that was easy to stop doing. And what I learned from that year was … that beef tastes really good once you haven’t had it in a while. This year’s resolution has to mean more than that. 

For starters, for my home, I will only buy chicken that is well raised, so that I will support the people doing that work. I will ask where the chicken came from, I will read up on farming practices. It’s possible that I may have to cross the cheap chicken line at some point for the sake of some personal or cultural connection. But to negotiate the ambiguity judiciously is part of this challenge: How will I figure out which exceptions would be justified, and which would be exploiting a loophole because of a drooling “I want”? (And isn’t “But I want” the phrase that has the power to ruin all good-intentioned resolutions?) 

I’m still working on the answer to that, but I think that nebulousness is actually at the heart of this challenge: to learn to make my eating choices deliberately, consciously. Because what does “cheap” mean but for something to not be valued? Price is supposed to be a reflection of that, not a determination. And what I’m saying is: I want to not ever take my food for granted. I want to earn my food by valuing it.

So why start with chicken? Well, that damned catchy commercial, for one thing. But there is something special about chicken, I think, and in part precisely because it is not a “special” food.

Bird is our default meat, our “safe” meat. Don’t eat pork for religious reasons? Doctor says no beef? No problem, there’s always chicken. Having a salad? For two bucks more you can add a grilled breast. Kids hungry? Just get them some breaded chicken fingers.

It makes sense that chicken is culturally ubiquitous. One of the new hotnesses in bourgeois life is raising chickens in your yard. For some it’s romantic fantasy and for some it’s an authentic connection to tradition, but either way, the point is that chickens, unlike big animals, are efficient — they take up little space and provide food in the form of eggs for months before being turned into soup. That efficiency helps to explain why chicken dishes exist in most every cuisine; people all over the world have always kept chickens.

And yet, my parents grew up with the belief that it was truly a special day when they could eat chicken; in leaner times, the most they would get on their birthdays was an egg to go with their rice. My mother, a vegetarian for 25 years and counting, still looks at us when we’re sitting bellies-full at the table and tells us to make sure we at least finish eating the meat. She carries with her a sense of its importance. And when Charles Gabriel was growing up, that fried chicken he learned to make was for Sundays.

I want to get back to that sense of value, of deliberate appreciation and enjoyment. (And, hopefully, it’s not going to happen from privation.) I’m going to learn about chicken. About how it’s produced, how it’s valued by the people who raise it and by the people who cook and serve it. I’m going to talk and share stories. I’m going to learn how chicken turned from something special to something common to something cheap.

And in doing so, I hope to always know what it means — and what it’s worth — whenever I eat it.

I’ll be sharing what I learn here on Salon. I hope you’ll join me for it, and help me think about these questions. What concerns might you have about the chicken you buy? Do you try to support specific farms or practices? Do you ever face the cheap-chicken quandary when you’re at that great-smelling fried chicken shack? What choices do you make, and why? I’m excited to have this conversation with you, and, I hope, help you find new ways to value your food, too.