Joel Salatin, the author of seven books, is the owner, with his family, of Polyface Farm in Virginia.

When the government treated farmers like me to free dinners for 30 years to teach us scientific cattle feeding, which entailed grinding up dead cows and feeding them back to cows, it showed a blatant disregard for the cow as herbivore and not carnivore. Eventually this science developed into mad cow disease.

As long as Americans demand food as cheap as ecological, emotional and economic abuse delivers, the corporate-government food fraternity will thrive.

Therefore, to put the government, which arguably created mad cow disease, in charge of animal respect is the height of folly.

The government, including the current administration, continues to press on aggressively with this conquistador mentality regarding transgenic modification and food laws that require "science-based" protocols. And when Michael Taylor, the deputy commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration -- and the former Monsanto attorney who gifted transgenic modification to the world -- is the interpreter of this science, you can be certain whose science the government will promote. It won't be pasture-based livestock, compost and symbiosis through multispeciation. It will be further animal abuse, chemicals and pathogen-friendly protocols.

Official government policy for nearly a century has been to grow everything faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, without regard to higher moral or ethical considerations. As long as Americans demand food as cheap as ecological, emotional and economic abuse delivers, the corporate-government food fraternity will thrive.

Every day we can vote with our food dollars to patronize abusive systems or respectful systems. Today is a good time to start patronizing the respectful system.