A teenager engages with the demonstrators. “Is the only reason we’re not eating them because they’re pets?” he asks. “What about the fact that they’re overpopulated in Australia? Shouldn’t we eat those?” He has an argumentative, smirk-like smile.

“The hypocrisy of Whole Foods,” one of the day’s organizers, Tim Neithercott, begins to say, but the teen walks away before he can finish his sentence.

Virtually everyone involved in the debate over rabbit meat is outspoken, frequently turning to social media to accuse and insult. Meanwhile, Whole Foods has been rather mum on the topic. Its representatives have occasionally told media outlets and activists that the company is committed to creating and following humane standards, and that it hopes to become an industry leader in rabbit meat should the pilot program be successful.

Miriam Wasser

This may seem like a trivial fight involving a disproportionate amount of vitriol, but at its core it’s a debate that sheds light on the sometimes arbitrary categories we construct to make sense of the world.

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Among the 873 acres of gently sloping hills and fields of Devil’s Gulch Ranch in Marin County, California, owners Mark Pasternak and Myriam Kaplan-Pasternak grow a lot of grapes and raise a lot of rabbits. But not just any rabbits: Devil’s Gulch is one of the largest rabbit-meat producers in the state and sells to high-end restaurants like Chez Panisse, The French Laundry, and over a hundred others. At the height of their operation, the husband-and-wife pair had 12,000 rabbits, but these days, they keep about 2,000 and process 100 to 300 a week. They average, Mark estimates, about 10,000 a year. They are known for their high-quality meat, and given that Myriam specializes in rabbit veterinary care and nutrition, it’s safe to say they know how to raise bunnies.

The Pasternaks have their hands full with restaurant orders, so they won’t be supplying to Whole Foods—those rabbits come from two large, USDA-certified plants: De Bruin Brothers in Iowa, and another undisclosed processor in Missouri—but they applaud the company’s decision to start selling it.

“I don’t think it would be a bad thing if it did normalize or get the American public to eat it more,” Mark says. Rabbit may not be very popular in this country, but if you’re going to eat meat, he points out, it’s one of the better options out there, nutritionally and environmentally speaking.

Rabbits are easy to raise and butcher in your backyard, they’re light on the environment—producing six pounds of rabbit meat requires the same amount of food and water as it takes to produce one pound of cow meat—and their meat is lean and low in cholesterol. The biggest drawback of rabbit meat has traditionally been the struggle to find it in stores, a point Modern Farmer writer Karen Pinchin makes in an article that ponders whether rabbit is the new "super meat." With Whole Foods taking on the role of supplier, this might not be a problem anymore.