It’s been a long journey, and getting here has entailed coming to terms not only with my own personal baggage, as it were, but also with the not insignificant cultural baggage that dogs the Speedo to this day. What’s so terrible about a guy wearing a woman’s bikini bottom? Well, beside the obvious point — that the vast majority of men don’t go to the gym every day — there’s the unspoken association of Speedos with a certain queasy strain of ’70s male sexuality. Squint your eyes at any halfway fit Speedo wearer and behind him you’ll see the shadow of a another, even less savory figure: the Chippendales male dancer. Chippendales premiered in Los Angeles in 1979, and within a few years daytime TV had firmly imprinted the icon of the male dancer in the popular imagination. With their oiled abs, white shirt cuffs, bow tie, and sleek briefs, the Chippendales embodied the final, unctuous exudation of the sexual revolution.

Chippendales dancers were a cartoon to begin with — a semi-sarcastic rip-off of their bare-breasted and bedazzling female counterparts, and the real problem with wearing a Speedo was how it catapulted you into that same cartoon category. Cartoons are fine when they stay on the page, but in real life — or even on the big screen — they tend to work less well. Remember the little red trunks that Christopher Reeve wore in the first Superman movie? The codpiece protected us somewhat from the peril of visualizing Superman’s parts, but even in this shining example of wholesome Americana there remained something a little troubling. The essential problem with Speedos is the way they distract attention from the face. How could anyone carry out a normal conversation with Superman when his bulge was leaping for their attention like some excitable dachshund?

Until 1993, virtually the only people wearing Speedos on U.S. beaches were Europeans, blissfully ignorant of Chippendales and all it represented. But then came Mark Wahlberg, who forever changed the way we think about men wearing underpants in public. Calvin Klein, in a stunning coup for the male groin, repackaged Wahlberg’s package as desirable fashion element. In the ensuing years, tight swim trunks began to seem somewhat less preposterous.

Still, it’s a long way from tight swim trunks to the banana hammocks with the one-inch sides that you spot in swim team locker rooms and on the shores of Europe. The turning point for the Speedo may have come when ’70s fashion came back into vogue. Suddenly it was cool to be sleazy. Wife beaters were de rigueur, along with flared pants, corduroy, vinyl, and spread collars. Sideburns lengthened, and hipsters toyed with ironic mustaches. The same retro fetish fueled the success of “Baywatch” (1989-1991), and its hero hunk, David Hasselhoff, a quintessential ’70s leading man (tall, hairy, handsome), and the subject of what is surely the most mind-blowing Speedo-related animation ever made. Finally, a guy in a Speedo, worn in the right spirit, could count on a little irony to cover up whatever the suit didn’t.

My swimwear of choice has always been regular, thigh-length shorts — roughly the sort I wore when I was 8, when everything was simple. This was less a fashion statement than a studied compromise: Boardies, the knee-length shorts that rose to prominence on a double wave of low-riding gangsta and surfer fashion trends, caused too much drag, and unlike Speedos, simple trunks spared the rest of the world the sight of my unsightlies — an important consideration for a citizen as responsible and socially conscious as myself.

But one fateful day, I forgot to bring my trunks to the pool, and the gym store offered only two options: boardies and noodle benders. Ever considerate, I selected the boardies. The first lap felt like I was caught in seaweed. Still, I swam on, flipping at the end of the lane and shoving off.

And that’s when it happened: Before I could say Hasselhoff, my Jimmy was out there in the blue, floating free like an astronaut.

If you’re a lap swimmer, you’ll see a good argument for Speedos every time some 19-year-old knifes past you in the fast lane. They don’t just make you faster; they separate the amateurs from the pros. Was I a pro? Scrambling around underwater, ass breaching, trying to hoist up my shorts, I decided that, indeed, I was. And with that, all the cultural baggage, the locker room insecurities, the reluctance to inflict optical damage on my fellow citizens — all got pushed aside. In the end, it comes down to pragmatism; hang the fashion consequences. There’s even a certain pleasure in being the object of stares from other swimmers, fearfully garrisoned in their voluminous trunks, while I strut the poolside, liberated.

I’ll admit, stepping into my Speedo for the first time, even in the privacy of my living room, I felt ridiculous. But then my wife, responding intuitively, started hooting and sticking dollar bills in my waistband. As if my magic, my hips started moving. Once you’ve crossed the line, what else can you do but play along?

In the 500 years since chocolate was introduced in Europe, by Fernando de Soto, who swiped it from the Mayans, chocolate has been a primarily downwardly mobile commodity. Initially blended with cinnamon and sugar and served as a hot beverage to the privileged classes, by 1830 advances in manufacturing techniques had given rise to the chocolate bar, and with the invention of milk chocolate in 1875, the way was clear for companies like Cadbury, Nestli and Hershey’s to begin producing on a mass scale. It wasn’t long before chocolate lost its class connotation and rode these mighty brands — Hershey’s in particular — to become the candy of the people. The trend reached its zenith during WWII, when chocolate was accepted as a universal currency of good will, handed out to children by friendly GIs set on winning hearts and minds en route to Berlin. Over the course of the war, roughly 3 billion chocolate bars, in poison-gas-proof packaging, were distributed to GIs across the globe, the vast majority produced by Hershey’s. In 1964, Roald Dahl gave the world “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the popular children’s book in which a common chocolate bar serves as the key to a magical kingdom — a poor boy’s fantasy of infinite riches. Today, tourists can get a real taste of that kingdom when they visit Hershey, Penn., where the Hershey Co. has built its own chocolate-themed amusement park, marking the definitive end of chocolate’s 500-year downmarket slide.

But a few years ago, something interesting started happening. A new kind of chocolate began cropping up in health food stores and specialty boutiques, recognizable by the cacao percentage printed on the front of the label. The cacao percentage indicates what percent of the chocolate comes directly from the cacao bean. With percentages usually ranging somewhere between 50 percent and 80 percent, the new chocolate seemed expressly designed to take the piss out of industry giants like Hershey — whose most popular bar is rumored (they won’t say) to contain around 11 percent cocoa — and, more important, to rope in a new class of consumer, the kind of diet-conscious, urban sophisticates who favor organic, and for whom the opportunity to repudiate “big chocolate” is in itself a valuable commodity.

European chocolate companies have always labeled their chocolate with cacao percentages, but it was the Berkeley, Calif., Scharffen Berger chocolate company that, in 1997, introduced the practice to the States, and made it a central element of its marketing strategy. Other companies, like Guittard, in Burlington, Calif., and Ghirardelli, in San Leandro, Calif., soon followed suit. Some emphasized that their beans came from a specific region, or “terroir,” as it’s called in wine snob parlance, and produced only limited “vintages.” Others, like Milwaukee’s Omanhene Cocoa Bean Co., provided instruction in chocolate appreciation, explaining how the chocolate should be best enjoyed (“Hold the bar firmly between the thumb and forefinger at each end and briskly snap the bar in half. Fine chocolate should give a satisfying snap and result in a smooth surface along the break”). Still others, like health and fitness advocate Gary Null, focused on the health benefits, pumping their chocolate full of antioxidants, phytonutrients and heart-healthy phytosterols.

While health benefits have been attributed to chocolate for, oh, about 3,500 years, it was the discovery, in 1998, of the scientific basis of these benefits that really cleared the way for the ascendence of luxury chocolate. “The presence of antioxidant phenols in chocolate, which are also present in red wine, could help to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease,” the press release said, citing a paper that appeared in the December issue of the British Medical Journal. Last January, a new generation of chocolate researchers from the University of California at Davis, working in Panama with a population of Kuna Indians, known for their cocoa-rich diets, finally put their finger on the key ingredient, which is called, for what it’s worth, Epicatechin.

Of course, luxury chocolate has been popular in the States since at least 1966, when Campbell’s bought the Belgian company Godiva and made it a staple of high-end suburban shopping malls. But never before has the appeal been so … intellectual. And here’s the great irony: that a product that has long enjoyed an enriching association with hedonism and carnality should now succumb (as wine occasionally does) to the cerebral. It’s the cerebral element that makes luxury chocolate fertile ground for snobbery, which reveals itself mostly in the language, largely pillaged from the world of wine. “Aroma brings a strong suspicion of a milky nature,” writes one chocolate reviewer on the chocophile Web site SeventyPercent.com, reviewing a new bar by Michel Cluizel, “with an upfront creamy and cheesey tone, very much dairy in initial impression. Later the chocolate comes out, expressing cherry cordial fruitiness, along with some tobacco. It can’t be said that this is exactly typical of Madagascar beans, and yet it’s not bad, just, perhaps, a little disconcerting at first. Are there troubles to follow in the flavour?”

With more than 10 brands of high-percentage chocolate cluttering the shelves of upscale grocery chains like Whole Foods and Wild Oats, chocolate snobs are springing up like toadstools after a rain. There are chocolate tasting clubs that will ship samples to you monthly, along with detailed tasting menus, score cards and “chocolate tasting batons” for sampling flavors. At the Web site for Richart chocolates (Paris), you are told to “expand the chocolate’s surface area by chewing five to ten times.” Also, the chocolate should be “between 66 and 75 degrees fahrenheit.” “True chocolate aficionados let the chocolate melt on their tongue and enjoy the various degrees of intensity and sensual feelings while it liquefies,” the Lindt Web site explains. “At the beginning,” one independent reviewer on a chocolate tasting Web site says, following Lindt’s lead, “we were quite lax in our chocolate choices, we took everything from 45% chocolate solids on up — even some chocolate that wasn’t labeled with the amount of chocolate solids. Every year since then we have upped the minimum requirements so that lately we are only considering chocolates over 70%. Sorry folks, Ghiradelli [sic] and the like don’t cut it.” On another tasting site, a reviewer says she won’t review common bars like Snickers because they are “candy,” not “chocolate.”

It’s hard to know who to blame for this orgy of pretentiousness, the consumers or the chocolatiers. Both parties seem equally eager to replace chocolate eating with chocolate tasting. Who knows — soon the more dedicated connoisseurs may start spitting out their chocolate as if it were wine. Whatever the case, the trend is helping to push the gourmet chocolate market to record profit levels. In 2004, MarketResearch.com estimated the retail sales of gourmet chocolate at $243 million, expected to reach $395 million by 2008. The Center for Culinary Development recently cited chocolate (along with white tea and tropical fruit) as among the top three anticipated food trends of 2006. These days you can walk into the specialty foods section of any Whole Foods store and find piles of roughly hewn chunks of chocolate, right next to the imported cheeses and the tinned tea, wrapped in cellophane and plainly labeled by cocoa percentage and provenance. “The basic chocolate, the M&Ms and Snickers and all those, they grow 3 to 4 percent per year,” says Jacques Torres, who opened his own New York chocolate boutique, famous for such esoteric edibles as Taittinger champagne truffles and pineapple pastis, five years ago. “If you look at the high-end market, it’s growing almost 20 percent a year. For the same thing! For chocolate!”

If nothing else, the ascendence of luxury chocolate is a triumph of marketing. In a few short years, the gourmet chocolate industry, working within the currents of existing food trends (organic, health-conscious) and emerging scientific data, has managed to rebrand a product previously considered junk food into something once again approaching the high-class delicacy enjoyed by the Spanish court in 1585. It’s brilliantly synthesized a new market: a population rich enough to afford expensive chocolate, and politically sensitive enough to care about socially conscious businesses; refined enough to always prefer handmade products over manufactured products; educated enough to enjoy quibbling over cocoa percentages and the characteristics of various bean types, and to expect something more like a full-blown aesthetic experience from their dessert, as opposed to just a good sugar kick; intelligent enough to have quit smoking, but still human enough to crave something sinful after a meal.

But surely there’s something, well, bittersweet, about a world that can’t bring itself to sin without an intellectual excuse. When we were children, eating chocolate was usually a matter of not getting caught, particularly in the chaste hours before noon, when the day was still too young for any treat to have been earned. Now, though, we are absolved; there’s even a Web site to reassure us that when it comes to chocolate tasting, “morning is preferable, when one’s discernment is at its zenith.” Perhaps, whether it’s Bernard Castelain’s Tradition (71 percent) or Côte d’Or’s Noir de Noir Intense (70 percent), Dolfin’s Chocolat Noir (70 percent) or Michel Cluizel’s Amer (72 percent), those who struggle to enjoy chocolate’s naughty pleasures now are simply trying to rediscover what the treat first tasted like — when their palates were as pure as their consciences.

Singer’s ethics are strictly utilitarian. In his view, all actions are judged by the objective measure of suffering they cause; there’s little place here for subjectivity. In his essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” for instance, he argues against the injustice of some people living in comfort while others starve. We have a moral obligation, he says, to do all we can to alleviate the suffering of others up to that point where the suffering of our sacrifice is equal to the suffering of those we are trying to help. (Singer himself donates 20 percent of his salary to Oxfam and UNICEF.) When confronted with the question of whether it’s justifiable to save the life of one’s daughter at the expense of the lives of two strangers, Singer’s response is even more matter of fact. The choice, he would say, is a foregone conclusion: Two lives are better than one.

One expects such uncompromising arguments from college freshmen, but not the Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at Princeton University. The difference is that in the course of 36 books, dozens of articles and countless lectures, Singer has thoughtfully backed up each of his arguments, and stuck to his guns for over 30 years. From a distance, his career seems a long, uphill, at times quixotic battle against humanity’s latent selfishness. The emphasis on real-world application is the key to his appeal; his 1979 book, “Practical Ethics,” widely regarded as a classic, reads like a handbook for how to live ethically in a morally complex age, taking on, in turn, abortion, capital punishment and income disparity, among many other common ethical conundrums. At the same time, Singer’s unwavering focus on an ethical ideal often comes at the expense of real-world complexity, and can sometimes lend his arguments an air of absurdity, such as his remarks in 2001 in defense of bestiality, or his campaign to persuade the United Nations to award personhood to great apes.

Singer’s new book, “The Way We Eat,” co-written with Jim Mason, looks at the eating habits of three different American families: vegans, “conscientious omnivores” and a family eating the “standard American diet.” The elements of each diet and the production chain that brought it to the table are then carefully considered in light of environmental impact, fair trade, the organic movement, the grow-local movement, genetically modified foods, animal rights and the depredations of agribusiness.

Salon recently caught up with Singer at the State of the Planet conference at Columbia University, where Singer was speaking on “Changing Values for a Sustainable World.” Australian born, Singer is now 60 years old. His utilitarianism extends to his conversational style, which is measured and direct. He is not a hand-waver, and after enduring decades of attacks from one outraged group or another, he is not easily flappable. He is willing to entertain, for the sake of argument, virtually any suggestion. It’s this very equanimity that can sometimes make conversation with him a bit maddening.

One of the things that distinguishes your new book is all the field research that went into it. What most shocked you, over the course of doing this research?

Probably this video I saw of this kosher slaughterhouse, AgriProcessors. I guess I had this idea that kosher slaughter is more strictly controlled than normal slaughter, and when you see that video and you see these cattle staggering around with their throats cut, and blood pouring out — by no stretch of the imagination is this just a reflex movement. It goes on and on. And this happens repeatedly, with many different animals.

How are kosher animals supposed to be slaughtered?

They are supposed to be slaughtered with a single blow of a sharp knife across the throat. There’s a virtually instant loss of consciousness, because the brain loses blood so quickly. That’s the idea, anyway. But when you see this video, it’s so far from that, I really did find it quite shocking.

You mention in your book that cows today produce three times as much milk as they did 50 years ago. That’s a great advance, isn’t it?

It is an advance, but you have to consider how this has been achieved. Fifty years ago, cows were basically fed on grass. They walked around and selected their food themselves, food that we can’t eat, chewing it up and producing milk that we can eat. Now cows are confined indoors, and a lot of their food supply is grown specifically for them, on land that we could have used to grow food for ourselves. So it’s actually less efficient, in that we could have gotten more food from the land if we didn’t pass it through the cow.

Most of us have an idealized notion of what an organic farm is like. You visited an organic chicken farm in New Hampshire. Did it meet your expectations?

I have to say that it didn’t. I guess I was expecting some access to pasture for the hens. When I got to this place, although it was in a beautiful green valley in New Hampshire, and it was a fine, sunny fall day, there were no hens outside at all. The hens were all in these huge sheds, about 20,000 hens in a single shed, and they were pretty crowded. The floor of the shed was basically a sea of brown hens, and when we asked about access to outdoors, we were shown a small dirt run which at the best of times I don’t think the hens would be very interested in. In any case the doors were closed, and when we asked why, we were told that the producer was worried about bird flu. So, yes, it was not really what I expected. It was still a kind of a factory farm production — although undoubtedly it was much better than a caged operation.

How much space are birds allotted in caged operations?

In the U.S., birds have as little as 48 square inches, a six- by eight-inch space. The United Egg Producers standards are gradually increasing over the next five years. We’ll get up to 67 square inches. But that’s still not the industry average, and even 67 square inches is just [the size of] a sheet of standard letter paper. In a cage, the birds are unable to stretch their wings. The wingspan of the bird is about 31 inches, so even if you lined one bird up on the diagonal, she wouldn’t be able to spread her wings. And there’s not just one bird in these cages, there are four or five. The weaker birds are unable to escape from the more aggressive birds. They end up rubbing against the wire and getting pecked, so they lose a lot of feathers, and they can’t lay their eggs in the nesting box.

One good thing about this organic farm in New Hampshire is that there was this row of nesting boxes. It’s been shown that hens have a strong instinct to lay in this kind of sheltered area. Conrad Lawrence, the science fiction writer and author of “The Council to Save the Planet,” once compared requiring a hen to lay in an open space to asking a human to shit in public. They don’t like it.

What if it were possible to genetically engineer a brainless bird, grown strictly for its meat? Do you feel that this would be ethically acceptable?

It would be an ethical improvement on the present system, because it would eliminate the suffering that these birds are feeling. That’s the huge plus to me.

What if you could engineer a chicken with no wings, so less space would be required?

I guess that’s an improvement too, assuming it doesn’t have any residual instincts, like phantom pain. If you could eliminate various other chicken instincts, like its preference for laying eggs in a nest, that would be an improvement too.

It seems to come down to a trade-off between whether the bird has wing space or whether you can fit more birds in your shed, and therefore have to pay less heating costs. How does one go about weighing these alternatives? How does the ethicist put a price on the impulse of a chicken to spread its wings?

We recognize the chicken as another conscious being. It’s different from us, but it has a life, and if something is really important for that chicken, if it would work hard to try to get it, and if we can give it without sacrificing something that’s really important to us, then we should. If it’s a big burden on us, that’s surely different, but if it’s a question of paying a few more cents for eggs, when we pay just as much if not more for a brand label we like, then we ought to be prepared to pay more for eggs so that the chicken can enjoy its life, and not be frustrated and deprived and miserable.

What constitutes a big burden? Doubtless the chicken farmer would say that building a larger shed or paying a bigger heating bill is a big burden.

It’s only a burden to him if it harms his business, and it only harms his business if he can’t sell the eggs he produces because other producers who don’t follow those standards are selling eggs more cheaply. So, there’s two ways around that: Either you have ethically motivated consumers who are prepared to pay a somewhat higher price for humanely certified eggs, or you cut out the unfair competition with regulations. Prohibiting cages, for example. And that’s been done already, in Switzerland. And the entire European Union is already saying you can’t keep hens as confined as American hens; it’s on track to require nesting boxes, and areas to scratch, by 2012. So you can do it, and it doesn’t mean that people can no longer afford to eat eggs.

In your book you discuss this in terms of the right of the chicken to express its natural behavior.

I tend not to put it in terms of rights, because philosophically I have doubts about the foundations of rights. But yes, I think these animals have natural behaviors, and generally speaking, their natural behaviors are the ones they have adapted for. And if we prevent them from performing those natural behaviors, we are likely to be frustrating them and making them miserable. So, yes, I think we ought to try to let them perform those natural behaviors.

Could you explain your position on “speciesism,” and what this has to do with your call to “expand the circle”?

The argument, in essence, is that we have, over centuries of history, expanded the circle of beings whom we regard as morally significant. If you go back in time you’ll find tribes that were essentially only concerned with their own tribal members. If you were a member of another tribe, you could be killed with impunity. When we got beyond that there were still boundaries to our moral sphere, but these were based on nationality, or race, or religious belief. Anyone outside those boundaries didn’t count. Slavery is the best example here. If you were not a member of the European race, if you were African, specifically, you could be enslaved. So we got beyond that. We have expanded the circle beyond our own race and we reject as wrongful the idea that something like race or religion or gender can be a basis for claiming another being’s interests count less than our own.

So the argument is that this is also an arbitrary stopping place; it’s also a form of discrimination, which I call “speciesism,” that has parallels with racism. I am not saying it’s identical, but in both cases you have this group that has power over the outsiders, and develops an ideology that says, Those outside our circle don’t matter, and therefore we can make use of them for our own convenience.

That is what we have done, and still do, with other species. They’re effectively things; they’re property that we can own, buy and sell. We use them as is convenient and we keep them in ways that suit us best, producing products we want at the cheapest prices. So my argument is simply that this is wrong, this is not justifiable if we want to defend the idea of human equality against those who have a narrower definition. I don’t think we can say that somehow we, as humans, are the sole repository of all moral value, and that all beings beyond our species don’t matter. I think they do matter, and we need to expand our moral consideration to take that into account.

So you are saying that expanding the circle to include other species is really no different than expanding it to include other races?

Yes, I think it’s a constant progression, a broadening of that circle.

But surely there’s a significant difference between a Jew, for instance, and a chicken. These are different orders of beings.

Well, of course, there’s no argument about that. The question is whether saying that you are not a member of my kind, and that therefore I don’t have to give consideration to your interests, is something that was said by the Nazis and the slave traders, and is also something that we are saying to other species. The question is, what is the relevant difference here? There is no doubt that there is a huge difference between human and nonhuman animals. But what we are overlooking is the fact that nonhuman animals are conscious beings, that they can suffer. And we ignore that suffering, just as the Nazis ignored the suffering of the Jews, or the slave traders ignored the suffering of the Africans. I’m not saying that it’s the same sort of suffering. I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it’s clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims.

But how do you know at what point to stop expanding the circle?

I think it gets gray when you get beyond mammals, and certainly it gets grayer still when you get beyond vertebrates. That’s something we don’t know enough about yet. We don’t understand the way the nervous systems of invertebrates work.

In your book you say that socially responsible folks in San Francisco would do better to buy their rice from Bangladesh than from local growers in California. Could you explain?

This is in reference to the local food movement, and the idea that you can save fossil fuels by not transporting food long distances. This is a widespread belief, and of course it has some basis. Other things being equal, if your food is grown locally, you will save on fossil fuels. But other things are often not equal. California rice is produced using artificial irrigation and fertilizer that involves energy use. Bangladeshi rice takes advantage of the natural flooding of the rivers and doesn’t require artificial irrigation. It also doesn’t involve as much synthetic fertilizer because the rivers wash down nutrients, so it’s significantly less energy intensive to produce. Now, it’s then shipped across the world, but shipping is an extremely fuel-efficient form of transport. You can ship something 10,000 miles for the same amount of fuel necessary to truck it 1,000 miles. So if you’re getting your rice shipped to San Francisco from Bangladesh, fewer fossil fuels were used to get it there than if you bought it in California.

In the same vein, you argue that in the interests of alleviating world poverty, it’s better to buy food from Kenya than to buy locally, even if the Kenyan farmer only gets 2 cents on the dollar.

My argument is that we should not necessarily buy locally, because if we do, we cut out the opportunity for the poorest countries to trade with us, and agriculture is one of the things they can do, and which can help them develop. The objection to this, which I quote from Brian Halweil, one of the leading advocates of the local movement, is that very little of the money actually gets back to the Kenyan farmer. But my calculations show that even if as little as 2 cents on the dollar gets back to the Kenyan farmer, that could make a bigger difference to the Kenyan grower than an entire dollar would to a local grower. It’s the law of diminishing marginal utility. If you are only earning $300, 2 cents can make a bigger difference to you than a dollar can make to the person earning $30,000.

I wanted to list a few factoids that jumped out at me while reading your book, and if you want to comment on them I’d love to hear your thoughts. First, each of the 36 million cattle produced in the United States has eaten 66 pounds of chicken litter?

The chicken industry produces a vast amount of litter that the chickens are living on, which of course gets filled with the chicken excrement, and is cleaned maybe once a year. And then the question is, what you do with it? Well, it’s been discovered that cattle will eat it. But the chickens get some slaughterhouse remnants in their feed, and some of that feed they may not eat, so the slaughterhouse remnants may also be in the chicken litter. So that could be a route by which mad-cow disease gets from these prohibited slaughterhouse products into the cattle, through this circuitous route.

Second factoid: 284 gallons of oil go into fattening a 1,250-pound cow for slaughter?

That’s a figure from David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist. The fossil fuel goes into the fertilizer used to fertilize these acres of grain, which are then harvested and processed and transported to the cattle for feed. We get back, at most, 10 percent of the food value of the grain that we put into the cattle. So we are just skimming this concentrated product off the top of a mountain of grain into which all this fossil fuel has gone.

So even if we all started driving Priuses we’d still have these cows to worry about.

Yes. In fact, there’s a University of Chicago study that shows that if you switch from driving an American car to driving a Prius, you’ll cut your carbon-dioxide emissions by one ton per year. But if you switch from a typical U.S. diet, about 28 percent of which comes from animal sources, to a vegan diet with the same number of calories, you’ll cut your carbon-dioxide emissions by nearly 1.5 tons per year.

Third factoid: We have more people in prison in the United States than people whose primary occupation is working on a farm?

Isn’t that amazing? Just as an example, when I wrote “Animal Liberation” 30 years ago or so, there were more than 600,000 independent pig farms in the U.S. Now there are only about 60,000. We’re still producing just as many pigs, in fact more pigs, but there has been such concentration that we are now producing more pigs with a tenth as many pig farms. The same has happened in dairy and many other areas.

And finally, it turns out that a wood chipper is not the best way to dispose of 10,000 spent hens?

Yes, this also came to mind when you asked me what most shocked me. This was in San Diego County, in California. Neighbors noticed that a local chicken farm was getting rid of hens at the end of their laying period by throwing them by the bucketload down a wood chipper. They complained to the Animal Welfare Department, which investigated, and the chicken farmer told them that this was a recommendation that had been made by their vet, a vet who happens to sit on the Animal Welfare Committee of the American Veterinary Medical Association. The American Veterinary Medical Association, I should say, does not condone throwing hens down a wood chipper, but it is apparently done. We’ve also had examples of hens being taken off the conveyor belt and simply dumped into a bin, where by piling more hens on top, the hens on the bottom were suffocated. These old hens have no value, that’s the problem, and so people have been killing them by whatever means is cheapest and most convenient.

So if you were stuck with 10,000 spent hens, what would you do with them?

I think you have a responsibility. Those hens have been producing eggs for you for a year or 18 months. You have a responsibility to make sure they are killed humanely. And you can do that. You can truck them to a place where there is stunning, or, better still, you can bring stunning equipment to the farm, and you can make sure that every hen is individually stunned with an electric shock and then killed by having its throat cut.

I thought you might suggest a retirement program.

That’s an ideal that some people would like to see, but if you have to maintain and feed hens when they are no longer laying eggs, that will significantly increase the cost of the egg, and even the organic farms don’t do that.

After reading this interview, some readers might be inspired to change their diets. If you could suggest one thing, what would it be?

Avoid factory farm products. The worst of all the things we talk about in the book is intensive animal agriculture. If you can be vegetarian or vegan that’s ideal. If you can buy organic and vegan that’s better still, and organic and fair trade and vegan, better still, but if that gets too difficult or too complicated, just ask yourself, Does this product come from intensive animal agriculture? If it does, avoid it, and then you will have achieved 80 percent of the good that you would have achieved if you followed every suggestion in the book.

Besides his book on Daniel Pearl, Lévy has also written an in-depth study of Sartre, and a book on Africa’s forgotten wars, ambitiously titled “War, Evil, and the End of History.” His untranslated works number 30, and he has written countless articles, columns and essays. He is among the most recognized and outspoken public figures in France, appearing regularly as a commentator on French television programs, and clashing frequently with other public figures, as when he traded blows in the fall of 2003 with the Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan, who had accused Lévy (along with a handful of other French Jewish intellectuals) of “communitarian politics” and a pro-Israel bias, a charge that Lévy characterized as “anti-Semitic.”

But Lévy is by no means just another pundit. He is a deep believer in action, and has visited war zones all over the world in the course of reporting, often at the behest of his government. In 1983 he helped found one of Frances premier anti-racism organizations, SOS Racisme, and he continues to speak out on racial issues in France and abroad. His iconoclasm reaches back to the early ’70s, when he led a movement of intellectuals in denouncing Marxism, the dominant ideology in France at the time.

“I am a writer,” Lévy says, and by this one is meant to understand that he is beholden to no one. It is perhaps not surprising, then, how much ire Lévy provokes in his own country, along with the adulation. He has been called a provocateur, an intellectual impostor, an egoist and a self-promoter, but what seems to elicit the fiercest reaction is his vehement anti-anti-Americanism. At a time when anti-Americanism is highly fashionable in Europe, Lévy, while no fan of George W. Bush, has consistently bucked the trend. “Anti-Americanism is a horror,” he was quoted as saying in the L.A. Times last year. “It is a magnet of the worst. In the entire world, and in France in particular, everything that is the worst in people’s heads comes together around anti-Americanism: racism, nationalism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism.”

Lévy’s interest in America falls squarely within the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the country in the early 1830s, reporting his findings in the classic “Democracy in America.” Given this, it seems natural that he undertook to update Tocquevilles observations with a series of new reports on America. The result, a series of essays on everything from Mount Rushmore to a San Francisco sex club, ran in the Atlantic in 2005, and has now been compiled into a book, “American Vertigo.”

Salon met with Lévy in the plush dining room of the Carlyle Hotel, on New Yorks Upper East Side. In appearance Lévy bears a remarkable resemblance to Robert DeNiro — the same small, canny eyes, thin lips and sharp nose — but, being French, the style of his swagger is roughly diametrical to that which one associates with the actor. He wore a dark jacket (required attire) and, somewhat unnervingly, a white shirt open to the fifth button, exposing his bare chest. Lunch began with split pea soup, fettuccine with white truffles (no garlic, please), and a Diet Coke.

Where did the idea for this project come from?

It was actually not my idea. It was the Atlantics. And, to be honest, I said no at first. It seemed too big for me, too difficult. How could I pretend, first of all, that I could get a grasp on a country as huge as this, even if I took a whole year? Second, as I said to Cullen Murphy, the editor of the Atlantic at the time, of course I like going into the field, but generally I prefer the battlefield. Ive done a book on forgotten African wars, another on Daniel Pearl. America, I said, this is not my thing. I like to smell the perfume of war — how do you say?

Gunpowder.

Well, tragedy, anyway. But Cullen Murphy said, America is a battlefield, too, you know, so you should feel comfortable. What made me accept in the end was the feeling that right now this country is in the middle of an identity crisis. So, I stopped everything. For one year I didnt do anything else. I devoted myself completely to this.

The journey across America is something that most U.S. citizens make at some point, either when theyre young and footloose or when theyre old and behind the wheel of an R.V. Its like a rite of passage. And you went through that rite of passage. Do you feel changed in any way?

Maybe a little more American. I was very fond of this country before, and I am even more so now. The experience of traveling across this country gives you a new relationship to space, time, territory, and to yourself. It gave me a different sense of what it means to have roots, and to be uprooted. It changes the way you think about things on a fundamental level. Its the only experience of this sort I know, and Ive traveled a lot. Ive crossed Africa, Ive crossed Asia, and many countries in Europe, but crossing America is like nothing I know. Its a metaphysical experience.

What was it like traveling across a country in which France has been so vilified? Did you encounter any antagonism?

This vilification was something created by the far right, right before the war in Iraq, when there was such vitriol between France and America. But when I left DC and went deep into the country, meeting average American people — coal miners, Native Americans, homeless people, workers, farmers, whatever — I never met a single man or woman in whom I saw the slightest evidence of a hatred of France, or of me because of being French. To the contrary.

Do you feel that it’s a misperception that you have to correct? Do you consider yourself an emissary for your country?

I am an emissary of nobody. No country, no group, nothing. I am on my own. I’m not answerable to anybody. The great Irish writer James Joyce said that he did not write in English, he wrote in Unglish. I’m UnFrench.

What surprised you the most in your journey?

I was surprised every step. This country has the genius to contradict its own clichi. Maybe because the pace here is so quick, and everything is constantly changing.

But did anything in particular stand out?

Many things. For example, the extent to which creationism is again spreading. This shocked me. The way in which a large part of America and most of the political class accepts or at least does not dare protest the death penalty. For me, the death penalty is a crucial issue. And when I see that death penalty problem is “improving” because this year only 475 were executed, instead of 572, I’m shocked. You should have no executions, not 10 percent less.

Why is this such a crucial issue?

No one has the right to take the life of another. No crime, no feeling of revenge, justifies that. Society has a right and a duty to isolate men and women who have caused harm, and may cause harm again, but to take their lives is unnecessary, unuseful and blasphemous. If you believe in God, life belongs to God. If you don’t believe in God, life belongs to oneself. It does not belong to the state. I visited death rows at a number of jails. There was a cruelty there, a cold violence which sets a terrible example for the rest of society. When the state leads with this example, then the citizen follows.

What are French prisons like?

Also bad. But there’s no death penalty, and that changes everything. And there are less people in prison for minor crimes. In America most of the people in prison are poor minorities, guilty of relatively minor crimes. Sometimes you get the feeling that jails are one of the ways this country deals with social pressures. This exists in France too, but to a lesser extent.

In your book you say that Guantánamo is a fundamental part of the prison system — not an exception to it. What do you mean by that?

All the prisons I saw seemed to have something terrible in common with Guantánamo. An institutionalization of humiliation. It is possible to isolate prisoners without humiliating them, but for some reason in America the prisoners must be humiliated.

Are you surprised at the lack of outrage about Guantánamo?

There are two topics on which the left in America has not fulfilled its duty: torture and Guantánamo. There was even a recent discussion in Dissent magazine, which is a magazine I feel close to, about circumstances in which torture might be used. I find this hard to accept. It must be a moral and political principle: There is no circumstance in which torture can be allowed. It took forever for this scandal at Guantánamo to come to light. And it was politicians like Jimmy Carter who were the first to demand that the facility be closed. It should have been the intellectuals, even intellectuals in favor of the war. This sort of thing is not a question of right or left, conservative or Democrat. It should have been a bipartisan issue. I would have liked to see [Francis] Fukuyama alongside Lewis Lapham, Christopher Hitchens alongside Bob Silvers, demanding the closing of Guantánamo. It’s a scandal. Like the death penalty, it’s a virus in the program of democracy.

Seeing it with my own eyes, Guantánamo was unbearable. It goes far beyond what’s necessary to ensure security. I understand that some terrorists may need to be jailed, of course — but not humiliated, not deprived of their rights. Every criminal has a right to a defense. This is a basic tenet of democracy, and when you begin to play with these elementary rules, it’s like you’ve got a worm in the apple. I was deeply surprised not to see a bigger protest from intellectuals in America.

What do you think has been holding American intellectuals back?

Intimidation. In the two years after Sept. 11 and in the months following the defeat of Kerry, it was as if the American left and America in general had been hit on the head. They’ve been much too influenced by the propaganda of the other camp. Very few dared to say that they were against the war, for example. I was in America at that time, and I was surprised to see what a big event it was when Senator Kennedy said for the first time that the war was a bad idea. People said, What courage! But it should have been said immediately! I attended the Democratic convention for the Kerry nomination. There were big people there, like Barack Obama, who is a great guy. Hillary Clinton spoke, Bill Clinton spoke. But no one, not one of them, expressed anything radically different about the war, or the slightest word about Guantánamo.

Should American intellectuals be held accountable for their failure to speak out? Do they have a duty?

They have a duty.

And they are not fulfilling it?

Sometimes they do. When Sontag went to Sarajevo, when Fukuyama and [Washington Post columnist] Charles Krauthammer discuss the war on terror, they do their duty, obviously. When Christopher Hitchens writes what he thinks, he does his duty. You cannot generalize. I think on Guantánamo there was not enough disgust expressed by intellectuals. I think they will now, though. In France, during the Algerian War, it took time for the French intellectuals to protest against torture. It is not so easy to go against what is presented as “the best interest of the country.” It is not so easy for an intellectual to risk looking like a traitor. This is the kind of blackmail that the state always engages in. If you speak about torture in Algeria you are a traitor. You put your own nation in danger. If you say that you are against the war in Vietnam, you are a traitor, you are with the Viet Cong, and so on.

I saw Jane Fonda in Paris recently, on a TV program. She said that the only thing she’s ashamed of is that famous photo of her with a group of Viet Cong. I don’t understand why. Why should this photo stand out as a special crime? She was not completely wrong. She was wrong not to also attack the Communist regime, but she was right to condemn the American intervention in Vietnam. So why should she, 40 years after, beat her breast? I can’t think of an example of an intellectual figure in France saying something like this. If she thinks it was right to be militant against the war, and thinks so still, this photo is no crime. On the contrary, it’s great. It means that she went to the end of her ideas. She was taking a risk, a physical risk, and this is the best an intellectual can do, in the interest of expressing something.

Here’s what surprises me about the American intelligentsia. I can imagine that an intellectual may decide to support the foreign policy of his president if he thinks he’s right. When Chirac decided to bomb Serbian positions in Sarajevo, I said bravo, Chirac. Bravo. But I said bravo to this and to this only. I did not feel obliged, having taken tea with him, so to speak, to take everything else on the menu, as well. The thing about American intellectuals that so surprises me is the way they always take the entire menu. They endorse the foreign policy so they feel obliged to endorse the attacks against the private life of Bill Clinton, the defense of the death penalty, the sale of firearms, and so on.

I had this conversation with Bill Kristol [the editor of the Weekly Standard]. When I met him I saw the most recent issue of the Weekly Standard in the waiting room and there was a truly disgusting article in there about Clinton and his girlfriends. And I asked Kristol why, of course. Bill Kristol doesn’t care about the sexual life of Bill Clinton. But my sense was that he felt that his endorsement of the war in Iraq also obliged him to endorse the attacks on Clinton. This I don’t understand. And maybe I’m wrong, maybe Kristol really, deeply thinks that Clinton is a bastard, and that a blow job is a crime. Maybe. But I don’t think so. There’s this idea that the world is black and white, and if you go with black then everything has to be black — very strange, in a country that is supposed to be so pragmatic. In France we are supposed to be the country of ideologies, and you’re supposed to be the country of pragmatism. And the reverse seems to be true. American intellectuals have this strange need to ally themselves with a single side. I believe that it is the duty of intellectuals to allow and make room for complexity, to ally with no one, and to move freely across all borders, political or otherwise.

That’s part of what makes Hitchens such a fascinating character.

Hitchens is one of those I respect in this country, one of the intellectuals who are closest to my idea of what an intellectual should be. I have a lot of friends who came out in favor of the war. I understand why. I myself hesitated to decide. Finally I was against. My line was that the war in Iraq was morally right and politically wrong. I said this six months before the war started, and I did not change my mind. Morally right, because it’s always right to overthrow a dictator, one of the bloodiest regimes in the world, but politically wrong because I knew it would produce more chaos, more terrorism. It would make the world even less safe than it was.

Still, I understood those who took the opposite view. What I don’t understand is why you cannot at the same time denounce economic disparity, the anti-abortion movement, religious fundamentalism, the widespread domestic availability of firearms, and so on. An intellectual is someone who is able to count past two. And even three, sometimes. The intellectuals we’re talking about seem only to be able to able to count to one. One — finished. No, please! I want to say. Let’s count to two! I am in favor of the war in Iraq, but I am against economic disparity. I am in favor of prisons to protect the general population, but I am against the death penalty.

Your regard for Hitchens aside, in your book you’re pretty rough on the neocons. You describe them as “murderers, despots, enemies of the human race, slaughterers of the children of civil, doctor strangeloves…” Or is this sarcasm?

Yes, I’m just making fun of the way the French press describes them. They are demonized, which they don’t deserve. I far prefer the neoconservatives, like Kristol, to someone like Pat Buchanan, who is fascist. I far prefer the neoconservative idea of spreading democracy all over the world, to Buchanan, who says that people in the rest of the world don’t deserve democracy.

You like them because they’re thoughtful.

Because they are democrats. Because they believe in democracy. They believe in a naive way. They believe sometimes in an absurd way. But I much prefer a neoconservative who believes in democracy to an isolationist who believes in America only. I was very shocked when I saw the Michael Moore film “Fahrenheit 9/11.” I agreed with him on one point, that the war was a bad idea. But I was shocked by the way he expressed it. The core of his argument was that we have no reason to be interfering in this area of the world. As James Baker said, We don’t have a dog in this fight. I think that we do have a dog in this fight. We have something to lose in Iraq. I feel brotherhood, as I have felt all my life, for the Afghan, the Bosnian, and for the Iraqi. But in his movie Moore simply suggests that it is not our affair.

How much of this isolationist attitude, do you think, can be traced to the fact that we’ve never experienced totalitarianism on our own soil?

It definitely has something to do with it. In Europe we have had the horrible privilege of knowing the two totalitarianisms of the 20th century. We know them from inside. We went to the end of the darkness. And so in our minds all the little lights start going off when the beast comes around again.

So it should be the job of intellectuals to keep this darkness in mind?

I think so, to keep the darkness in mind, yes. [Philip] Gourevitch did that, for example, in his book on Rwanda.

Your remarks on isolationism remind me of what you say in your book about so-called American imperialism. You seem doubtful that there is such a thing.

Look at your army in Iraq. Look at your army in Vietnam, 40 years ago. Is this an imperialist army? This is the myth, the myth of American empire. Where are your positions? Where are your conquests? Where are your successes abroad? Even in Latin America you went from failure to failure for 40 years. Each time you tried to act as an imperialist you failed. No, European countries are colonialist. We know how to do it. England, France, even Germany. America, no.

So you think that the American left gets distracted by the idea that we’re this terrible, imperialist power?

Of course, yes. They should be a little less obsessed with your so-called imperialism and little more obsessed with the death penalty, with the sale of handguns, with creationism. To me, this sort of thing is much more important than worrying about so-called imperialism.

You mentioned you had the pleasure of meeting Obama and Hillary Clinton at the Democratic convention. What is your sense of them? Do you think they are strong enough to get the left back on its feet?

No, they are not strong enough. But no political figure is ever strong enough. Political leaders are what they are. Obama and Hillary Clinton are brilliant, charismatic, but they will be exactly what the left will make them be. As long as the Democrats speak money, instead of ideas, as long as they are afraid of their own shadows, they will lose. And as brilliant a leader as Obama or Hillary is, they cannot win with such a party behind them.

It was a shame to see people on the left, in the last days of the election, trying to adopt the platform of the National Rifle Association. They should have said, No — vote against us if you want but we are against the sale of firearms. Instead of, Me too, I’m a hunter! I like weapons! The right expresses itself in America. The left does not. It is a pity.

What does the United States mean to you, and to France? Why is it important?

The reality of the United States means the possibility of Europe. The fact that America exists means that Europe, the European Union, which I strongly support, is not a dream. It’s possible. You are the proof of Europe. The existence of America proves that Europe is possible.

How so?

The existence of America proves that people coming from different origins can come together to form a political entity. And this is our dream in Europe today. From Stockholm to Napoli to Paris or London. Some of us in Europe are seized by despair. We fear we are too different to form a unique political body. And what prevents me from despairing is the very reality of America. If it is possible to form a union from Seattle to Savannah, from Miami to Detroit, for Europeans all hopes are justified.

What’s next for you, now that your tour of America is done?

A big book tour.

Across America? You just got back.

I’m going around again. It’s like the American fixation with nostalgia, where something barely ends before it’s being longed for. So, yes, another trip across America, with a short delay for nostalgia. I will go back to Savannah, back to Chicago, with nostalgia.

After his conviction, Stratton got his chance. His eight-year stint in prison afforded him plenty of time to write “Smack Goddess,” a novel based on the life of notorious drug dealer Frin Mullin, which was published upon his release in 1990. Since then, Stratton has worked as a consultant for the TV show “Oz,” co-written and produced the award-winning feature film “Slam,” and the Emmy Award-winning “Thug Life in D.C.,” and created the Showtime series “Street Time.” His first job after prison was working for Barbara Kopple, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, who hired him to write a treatment for a film about Mike Tyson. Kopple kept him on as a field producer once the project got underway. “I remember running around from phone booth to phone booth,” Stratton says, “setting up interviews, coordinating camera crews, organizing transportation logistics, and thinking, I can do this; this isn’t so different from running a smuggling operation.”

Late last year, a selection of Stratton’s best nonfiction work, which originally appeared in such magazines as GQ, Esquire and Details, was collected in an anthology called “Altered States of America.” The subjects covered range from in-depth profiles of Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson to exposis of the CIA’s covert LSD experiments, and the FBI’s complicity in a series of New York Mafia hits in the 1980s.

Salon caught up with Stratton, now 60, at his studio apartment in Chelsea, where he stays when he has business in New York. The apartment is windowless except for a skylight, high over Stratton’s desk. The bookshelves are lined with tomes about cannabis and crime. On the walls hang various movie posters from projects Stratton has worked on. Stratton himself, wearing black nylon jogging pants and a black tee, sits at his desk in a wooden swivel chair, sipping Earl Grey. He has the elegant, brushed-back hair of a TV preacher and the solid build of a wrestler.

The first and most obvious question is, how does an upper-middle-class white kid from Wellesley, Mass., become an international drug smuggler?

Well, that’s a good question. I had flirted around with pot when I was in high school. But when I got to Arizona — I went to ASU on a wrestling scholarship — I started going down to Mexico with my roommate, and that’s when I made my first buy. It was $100 a kilo. I had 300 bucks on me so I bought three kilos, hid them in the car, and then brought it back to Boston and sold it to the cousin of this friend of mine. I made $2,000, which was a lot of money in those days, especially for a 19-year-old kid. I never really thought of it as “smuggling.” After that I dropped out of school, became a hippie, and went on the backpack hippie tour of the world for two or three years. I started doing these little scams where we’d build these false-bottom suitcases and we’d hide hash in there, and then friends would carry it back to the States.

What was your parents’ reaction to this activity?

My parents never really knew what I was up to. Well, my father had some suspicion because I had all this money. But I had been such a rebellious kid. I had been in reform school and arrested so many times that they really didn’t want to know. My mother was very different; she was supportive no matter what I did. She was one of these overweening mothers that you could’ve gone to and said, Your son just killed three people down the street and ate them, and she’d go, Well, they must have been really bad people, otherwise he would never have done something like that.

So how did an irredeemable delinquent like yourself end up a writer?

I went to a prep school in western Massachusetts, because they had a great wrestling coach. My English teacher there was a guy named Dudley Cloud, who had been an editor at the Atlantic Monthly. And he took an interest in me, based on essays I’d written. He said, You really have a knack for this. You should pursue it. So when I came back from Europe I enrolled in a summer writing program at Harvard. After that I applied to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and got a writing fellowship. That’s when I met Norman Mailer. He was living two houses down, across the street. There was a woman who worked for him, his cook, who lived in the apartment below mine. She said, Oh you gotta meet Norman, you guys will love each other. And one day he called and invited me over to watch a football game. We stayed up the whole night, drinking and talking. At that point he was offering to help me any way he could. I was 22.

And did he help you?

I interviewed him for Rolling Stone. Then they hired me to write a piece about Rochdale College, in Toronto, which was one of these experimental colleges that sprang up in the early ’70s. But it had turned into one of the centers of soft drug distribution in North America, largely because of Robert Rowbotham, who was like the hippie godfather. When I went up there and started interviewing people they all said, Oh you have to talk to Rosie. He’s the flower. That was his other nickname. He was probably in his early 20s and already had maybe $5 million or $6 million in cash stashed away. The guy was a master organized crime figure in the marijuana underworld. People would come up from all over North America and buy hash from this guy, and then smuggle it back into the United States.

So I hung out at his farm for three or four days, and we started talking about some of the smuggles I’d done. He was not an importer, he was a dealer. He was connected to these Lebanese people who would bring tons of Lebanese hash into Canada. And then Rosie would sell it to people from all over North America. So I wrote the piece, but in the meantime he fronted me like 100 or 150 kilos. We smuggled it back into the United States and I sold it to friends of mine who I had been doing business with prior to that. So then with Rosie’s money and connections I went back to Europe and started sending loads of hash back to the United States.

Why did he let you get close to him if he knew you were a reporter?

I don’t know. It was just one of those things. He’s still probably one of the closest people in my life. The guy did like 17 years in prison in Canada, just because he refused to give up the people he was associated with, and he was very political about it. He really saw himself as some kind of Johnny Marijuana Seed. He had the best reputation of anybody I’ve ever met in the business. You could leave $3 million or $4 million worth of hash with him and come back in three weeks and Rosie would have all your money. An unbelievably meticulous businessman, and nonviolent, too. No guns, no hard drugs. He was very strict about that.

Is that a code you adopted for yourself? Or was that just a part of the hippie gestalt?

It was part of the hippie gestalt, but I think no one quite articulated it as fully as Rosie did. There’s a political aspect to it. It’s not just about greed. Jesse James and his brother, they were confederate soldiers, and what happened to them made them become outlaws. The outlaws of the hippie generation were reacting to laws, which we thought were totally ridiculous. The outlaw marijuana growers still see themselves as political, as doing something innately American, by challenging laws that they feel are wrong. The problem is that in the United States it all becomes co-opted by big business. Which happened to the marijuana industry too: Huge amounts of low-grade Mexican pot started coming into the country. Rosie wouldn’t touch the stuff. There was a morality to it. These guys wouldn’t deal in cocaine. When cocaine came along, it corrupted everything. People started getting strung out, the Colombians got involved, the weapons. It all turned ugly.

So how exactly did the partnership between you and Rowbotham work?

Well, Rosie would say, What we really need is Thai sticks. So I’d go to Thailand and get them. He was the dealer, I was the smuggler.

This may be a naive question, but what are Thai sticks?

Thai sticks were these pieces of bamboo about 9 inches long. They would take the buds and tie them to the stick with a piece of hemp. In those days when you got a big load of pot there would be a lot of seeds and shake. But not with Thai sticks, cannabis indica. In those days everything was sativa. Sativa is usually from Colombia, Mexico, that part of the world. You never saw indica. There’s three basic strains: sativa, indica and ruberalis. Ruberalis you get mostly in places like Lebanon. So indica was virtually unknown in this country. There were these sticks called Buddha sticks, which were supposedly the best. The buds are really fat and juicy and stinky.

So you would travel to these places.

If there’s anything that I miss about those years it’s the adventure of going way up into the mountains and meeting these people, the farmers. There were always these shady middlemen you had to go through, but I would always insist that I wanted to go to the fields and buy it still on the plant. You could never trust these guys, the middlemen. They’d show you a bale of really good pot and say, Yeah, it’s all gonna be just like that. And then you go to all this trouble to smuggle it back to the States and maybe a third of it would be like that and the rest would have something else thrown in. So quality control was hugely important. You had to go there and oversee every step of the operation. My thing was to go there and stay with these people. For me it was material to write about.

What smuggle are you most proud of?

The one that comes to mind is this huge one we did from the Middle East, where we almost got caught. In fact there was tremendous pressure being put on me by my guys in New York to give it up, to just walk away, because they thought it was hot. This was during the war between Iran and Iraq, when you couldn’t get chopped dates in this country. Iraq was basically closed down. So I would go to Iraq and buy these dates. Millions of pounds.

[The phone rings. Stratton talks for a few minutes with his business manager about money that he's owed by a Hollywood studio for a draft of a script he completed.]

It’s harder to get paid by these people in Hollywood than it is to get paid by dope dealers, I’ll tell you that right now.

So start at the beginning. Before you go to Iraq.

We had set up our own trucking company in New Jersey. And we had a bonded warehouse over there. The trucking company was owned by the father of one of the guys that I was involved with in New York. He was one of the biggest dealers of soft drugs in the world at that point. He knew that I had been smuggling hash out of Lebanon for years, so he came to me and said, Look, Bordeau Foods is having a hard time getting dates. They need as much as they can get, for cake mix and all this other stuff. Can you do that?

The thing is, before you even go you have to have a lot of stuff in order. You have to have a letter of credit from Bordeau Foods, for one thing, so you don’t look like a dope dealer. So I had to read up, so I’d know a little bit about what I was talking about. Then I met the Bordeau people here in New York and went out to dinner with them, so they’d think I was a legitimate importer/exporter. I had business cards made up and the whole deal. One of the things about dates you have to know about are the acceptable levels of infestation, because there’s always a certain level of bugs in these things, and if there’s too many they won’t pass muster with the USDA. So I went to Iraq, and I bought these dates, but then because of the war I could say, Well, we can’t ship them out of Iraq, we’ll have to send them to Lebanon and then ship them from there back to the United States.

Who does one talk to in Iraq about buying a million pounds of dates?

Bordeau had some leads, but when you get there you just start asking around. You go to these whole food distributors and say, I want to buy dates. It’s not that hard. The big problem is, again, quality control. You check the infestation rate and they look pretty good, but then the rest of them … Well, that’s part of the story. So I bought all these dates, I have them shipped overland by truck to Beirut. There, my contacts take the dates, put them in cartons, and then put these sealed metal boxes of hash inside the cartons and pack the dates all around them. That’s what they were supposed to do.

How much hash?

Fifteen tons. Probably the biggest single smuggle of hashish. We used to do much bigger loads of pot. They’d come up in these mother ships from Colombia. But the Lebanese, see this is the thing, they never follow instructions. I get back to Beirut, and we’re right down at the docks with the containers. I start opening up a couple of the boxes, and I see a metal box with hash sitting right inside these cartons. I said, Man, what the fuck are you guys doing? See, over there everybody is paid off all the way down the line. So they assume that it’s the same way back here, like we’re gonna pay customs off. But we weren’t paying customs. We were gonna get it through customs without them knowing. Because to pay customs off over here is not so easy for a load that big.

It took them weeks but they did it right. Out of the seven containers, there might have been four that had hash. So I get back to the States before the shipment gets there, and I go to my people in New Jersey that have the trucking company and I say, When they [inspectors] come in pick up these containers first, the ones that have the hash. Because typically what happens is they’ll look at the first couple, but they’re not going to bother with all seven, because it’s a big, well-known company.

The one problem was it was coming out of Beirut, which is flagged as a drug source country. So when the containers get here, my friends come to me and say, We’ve got a problem. Customs called the trucking company and said that they want to accompany the containers from the dock to the warehouse, open them at the warehouse, and visually inspect the cartons. So what are we gonna do? They were ready to walk away. I go, Look, if you walk away they’re going to know that something is in there. That’s going to expose the trucking company, it’s gonna expose everybody. So I said, What you do is you pick up the ones that just have the dates. You go on a Friday afternoon, late in the day, so that you can only get two or three. Bring them back and just let them look at those, and hopefully that will satisfy them.

So this gets communicated to my friend whose father owns the trucking company, who then communicates it to the truck drivers, who don’t even know that there’s hash in there. The communications get fucked up along the way and they pick up a couple of the containers that have hash in them, and the customs people accompany them back to the warehouse. You know how these cartons have those plastic straps that go around them? What I had done was put red straps, as opposed to green or yellow or blue, on the cartons with the hash, so I would know at a glance. So I get to the warehouse that night, right after the customs guys. They brought dogs with them too. They bring the boxes out and they put them on these big tables and they start opening them up and looking at them. And they opened up some of the ones with the red straps on them, too. If those guys hadn’t repackaged them in Beirut we all would’ve been busted.

So you were standing there when they opened them?

No, I wasn’t standing there. I was at the Chelsea Hotel, sweating. But the brother of my friend whose father owned the trucking company was there. He saw them unloading the red ones and he knew.

But there were still two other containers that hadn’t even been opened, and both had hash in them, sitting in the fenced area of the warehouse, waiting for the customs guys to come back on Monday morning to inspect them. They put these special seals on them, and if you break the seal they know that you’ve been in there. So one of the guys we were working with was a welder. He came over and he cut the actual hinges of the doors off the back of the containers. We had to get a tow truck with a big hook on it to lift the door off the back.

How big are these containers?

Well, you’ve seen them. You see millions of them over in Jersey. They’re huge. They’re not as big as this apartment but they’re —

Like a railroad car?

Yeah. So we cut the doors off with a welder, and took out all the boxes with the hash. It took us all weekend, working 24 hours a day, 16 guys. But now we’re worried that they’re going to look in the boxes on Monday and wonder why there’s 40 cartons missing. But we figured, fuck it, at least we’ll have the hash. So we put the doors back on, reweld them, and then had to go out and buy paint to match the paint on the containers. But we still had two containers at the docks. Then, after all that, at like 9:30, Monday morning, the customs guy calls and says, We’re satisfied, just come get the rest of them. We’ll send someone ever there to break the seal. So in the end we got everything. Except the dates.

The dates?

The USDA rejected the dates. The infestation rate was too high.

How much more money would you have made if you were smuggling heroin?

Ten times maybe. But there’s a lot of other problems. For one thing, I wouldn’t know where to sell it. That wasn’t my field. I probably could’ve found those people if I needed to. But then there’s organized crime. You’re dealing with people who are really not good people at all. Not that everybody in the soft drug business was a good person. But it’s just a whole different world. You’re dealing with people who will kill you for whatever reason. And the other thing is, you know, the drug gets cut, and people shoot up and die. In those days that was considered bad karma. Even cocaine was considered bad karma. In other words, if you dealt with bad shit, bad shit was gonna happen to you, and invariably it did.

What about air smuggles? How does that work?

Well, you need a catch. The catch is usually with the people who work in air freight. For a certain amount of money, they’ll take your shipment and it won’t even go through customs. They’ll take it off the plane, put it in your truck, and you get it out of there. That’s a catch. They’ll get rid of the bill of lading so customs doesn’t even know the load came in. There’s a lot of baggage handlers who do that. And customs people. I’m sure right now if you went out to Kennedy, there’s stuff going on. We had one in Logan, we had one in Kennedy, and we had one at LAX for a while.

How do you set them up?

Usually somebody comes to me, knowing that I have the overseas connections, and they’ll say, I know these guys at the airport and they want to make some money. They’ve done it before. They know how to do it. Are you interested? Usually we’d send a trial, 35 or 45 kilos, and make sure it went through.

How much do you pay these guys?

That’s negotiable. There’s always a problem, though, once they start making money. I was paying these guys at Logan $30,000 every time we brought a load in. Which was reasonable. There were three of them and they each got 10 grand, for one weekend of work. So I’m paying them 30 grand I’m giving my Lebanese connection a third, and the next thing I know it starts to come in, every three weeks. But then these guys started talking to the Mafia, and next thing I know I’m being called in to have a sit-down with the Mafia guys. And they’re like, What are you doing? They were looking to kill me at one point. Because I refused to knuckle under. I said I can’t do that. I had this Lebanese guy that I was working with at the time in Boston, who knew organized crime people really well. So I went to him and explained the situation, that if I knuckle under I’m not going to make any money. So he calls Raymond Patriarca, the boss of the whole New England family at the time. And word came back from Patriarca that I had to do whatever the Mafia guys said. And I was like, fuck that, you know? I had a load at the airport at the time and I got it out of there. I just took it. And two days later they called me up and said, What the fuck are you doing? We’re going to put a contract out on you. It was hairy. That was the first time I started carrying a gun.

Did you even know how to shoot it?

I’d done some target shooting. But it leads to another story. I was going through Logan on my way back to New York with like $250,000 in cash in a suitcase. So I put my briefcase on the conveyor belt that goes through the X-ray machine. And just as it started to go in I thought, Oh shit. I left the gun in there. Now Massachusetts had this really strict gun law. If you got caught with a gun it’s a mandatory year in jail. So I see the thing go through the metal detector, and I go to grab the briefcase. So of course they see the gun and call the state cops and they arrest me on the spot. They put me in a holding cell in Logan airport. My suitcase with the money had already gone, I had checked it. It’s gone to New York. So I called this friend of mine, a lawyer, and explained the situation. And at the time I was carrying this false I.D., from Texas. So he comes in, we go to court that very afternoon, and he gets up in front of the judge and says, This man’s from Texas. In Texas they carry guns, and so on. And ultimately the judge fined me, and they kept the gun and they let me go. So, I get on a plane. I fly to New York. I get to LaGuardia, and here is my suitcase, six or seven hours later, still going around on the baggage claim.

He’s from Texas. They carry guns in Texas. They bought that.

And that’s how I stopped carrying a gun.

What do you do with all the money?

It comes to you over a period of time. You never get it all at once. You have to wait till these guys sell it, and a big load could take six months to sell. People are going to get busted. The DEA and the local narcotics cops know a big load of hash came in. So they start watching individuals that they know are involved. Then they start arresting. And we hear about it, we lost a thousand pounds here or we lost 500 pounds there. So this shit happens. But what I did with it was spend it. I bought a ranch in Texas. I bought boats, I bought airplanes. I reinvested a lot of it into the business. But I was so addicted to the adrenaline rush that I just kept going and going and going. I would have five or six different things going on at any given moment. And maybe two or three of them would make it. I managed to save some of the money. I bought my parents a house. I bought land in Maine. I bought property in the Bahamas. I was big on real estate. I started doing all kinds of crazy things. I started a magazine. We put money in High Times magazine.

You helped start High Times?

Tom Forcade was the founder. But I was part of the original brain trust.

So you didn’t have any of those overseas bank accounts?

I did. I had money in the Bahamas, I had money in the Cayman Islands. I had money all over Europe for a while there.

And did any of that survive the prison years?

Some of it.

Enough?

One person that I trusted dearly had saved some money and had set some properties aside. I had a house in Hawaii that they never found. But the government found a lot of it. The IRS began what they call a net worth study. They spent years tracking all my assets, going around to every place that I did business. They don’t care how long it takes. And then when the DEA finally arrested me they seized everything. They got the ranch in Texas; they got the property in Maine. They got vehicles. They got airplanes. They got bank accounts.

And that’s just gone.

Yeah. It’s gone.

So what happened when they finally caught you? What was your defense?

In the Maine case, my defense was that I was doing it to write about it. At that time there were all these unusual defenses going on. Vietnam vets had the post-traumatic stress syndrome defense. They came back from Vietnam such action junkies that the only thing they could find that would fill that need was smuggling pot. The other group on trial up there was the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church, a bunch of white Rastas from Florida. Their defense was they were bringing it back as sacrament for the church. And this all in front of this same federal judge up in Maine, who was a very good judge actually. Judge Edward T. Ginoux. And that was my defense. I was a writer and I was just doing this to gather material.

You imported tons of illegal drugs into the United States in order to gain material to be a writer.

Yeah.

These days most people settle for an MFA.

There was actually a lot of publicity about it at the time because people found the defense amusing.

And then later they charged you again, in New York.

They said, Well, we’re going to bring more charges, unless you’re willing to cooperate with the government. Because in the Maine case they didn’t have the big hashish trip that we did. They didn’t really have that much. So they brought the New York case and that’s when they charged me with Continuing Criminal Enterprise, and charged me under the kingpin statute. That’s when I started really getting into the law, because I was like, Wait a minute — how can they try me twice? So my defense there was, Yes, I did it, but I’ve already been tried and convicted, and this whole case has been concocted just to get me to rat out my friends, Norman Mailer particularly.

What was prison like? You’ve described it elsewhere as like living in the men’s room at Penn Station.

The interesting part of it is the inner trip. How it tests your character.

Did you finally find the time to do some writing when you were in there?

Yeah, I wrote “Smack Goddess.” I wrote a whole bunch of short stories. But they don’t make it easy for you. I would write longhand on legal pads and then go to the law library and say that I was writing briefs. A lot of time I was actually doing legal work but in between I would be typing up a short story, or whatever else I was working on. You’re not allowed to run a business from prison. So you can’t get paid for being published. But in my case I never did get paid for anything until after I got out.

You mentioned somewhere in your book that you have a few regrets but ratting isn’t one of them. But what regrets do you have?

What I regret more than anything are the days and weeks and months and years that I spent sitting in hotels, waiting for people, partying, living this high life that was really pretty empty when you get right down to it. I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t doing anything creative, I was living for this adrenaline rush. I used to go through these periods where I would put everything aside and just try to focus on my writing. But when a deal comes along, it’s too good to pass up.

And I regret the people that as a result of my activity got sucked in, the people who ended up in prison or dead. It’s a dark, ugly world and the criminality of it seeps out, and infects everybody. So I regret that. And I also regret that I didn’t take 10 million and put it aside somewhere where they could never find it, so that I could make movies with it now. Laundering it is a huge problem.

So do you feel that the dictum you inherited from writers like Hemingway, that you should have wild experiences so that you can write about them, has served you well?

Overall I’d say it has served me well. I certainly have a wealth of material that I can tap into. But it comes at a price. Hemingway paid for it. He had to keep tempting death, and ended up killing himself as a result. I think what I was able to do with the prison experience saved me. Because it forced me to examine my character and say, Wait a minute, what are you doing with your life? I use it as a touchstone now. To try to keep me grounded. I think of my apartment as my high-tech prison cell. If they told me you’re going to have to spend the rest of your life in prison but you’ll be able to design your own cell I would design something like this. So when I saw this place I was like, Oh yeah, this is my ADX, my maximum-security prison cell. Fortunately, though, I can still go out and buy the paper.