The ethics of meat-eating, and vegetarianism in particular, have gained traction as memes in the press lately, showing that a shift is occurring in our cultural ideas around food. Heritage breed turkeys have been selling like mad for today’s feast, and last week, Martha Stewart was standing behind the stove on her set discussing the book Eating Animals with its author, Jonathan Safran Foer, while preparing a vegetarian casserole. The dish was part of a collection of recipes for her show on preparing a vegetarian Thanksgiving (watch it at that link), and she stated on air that her daughter’s Thanksgiving was going to be a vegetarian one. (She also interviewed Robert Kenner on the program, gushing about his film Food, Inc., and Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, who spoke about the state of farming in America with his usual wordsmithery). Foer had this to say to Martha’s audience:

There are things we’ve been doing for almost all of human history almost everywhere that we don’t want to do now…we kept other humans as slaves and we treated women as second class citizens, and we don’t do it anymore. We overcame it, and when we look back at those things that we did, we look back with shame… and I think the farming system we have now… the dominant kind of farming system, the kind that produces 99% of the animals we eat, is something that we are going to look back on with shame.

He got some other factoids out to the masses, too, like that 50 billion animals are being raised for meat in the world every year, and that as China increases its meat-eating, that number could double. He added that 99% of these animals are raised in factory-farmed conditions. Though Foer is a vegetarian, he said he didn’t think that absolutes were a productive way to produce change.

Foer’s book has been the focus of a lot of media attention for his in depth research and for the ethical questions it raises about the way we treat the animals we raise for meat. Two weeks ago he was on the television program Ellen (Ellen DeGeneres is also a famous vegetarian), and ended up starting a debate on the New York Times Green Inc. blog after he linked H1N1 to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) — the possibility of which the mainstream media has for the most part ignored.

Vegetarianism has even made a foray onto the op-ed pages of the New York Times of late. A couple weeks back, Nicolette Hahn Niman, a vegetarian, environmental lawyer, and rancher, penned an op-ed warning the food movement that condemning meat-eating could be overly simplistic, taking the view that asking people to decrease meat consumption would not be as effective as asking them to buy ethically raised meat. She promptly drew criticism at Treehugger and The Atlantic (to which she responded with a rebuttal). Another op-ed contributor this past Sunday in the Times focused in specifically on the politics of veganism. It seems this discussion, taken into such public forums, shows that the conversation around plant-based diets, and the ethics of eating meat — in an era when great trespasses in animal welfare are occuring — is coming into its own.