SCOLDS ARE PEOPLE , too, apparently: a reader recently wrote to thank me for harping on the point that it matters what and how we choose to eat, not just for our own health and well-being but for that of the planet generally. So the tiny jeremiads that have been appearing now and then in this space have not, as of yet, offended or bored the entirety of whatever readership there might be.

I have rarely been accused of optimism, but for a moment I will (perhaps optimistically, or even overoptimistically) pursue this line. The central principle of food ethics – that we have and make choices, and those choices have consequences – sounds widely in the culture at large. We have, for instance, just spiked a duly reelected governor and replaced him with a celebrity bodybuilder whose campaign consisted mostly of television ads reassuring us that he knows what to do and how to do it. The bodybuilder has no known qualifications for holding public office, although he does have a private jet. Is it just me, or does the electorate seem like a bratty child who, having flung dinner to the floor, expects another and better dinner – perhaps a fancier kind of pureed peas – to be promptly served?

A year ago we were solemnly assured by various flacks of the honorable Bush administration that Saddam Hussein might nuke us. An invasion was the only answer. Media and Congress meekly played along, accepting without question the administration's assurances that grateful Iraqis would be strewing roses before our tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, while Iraqi oil revenue would somehow pay for the whole thing. It would be, in other words, an easy war, a war without consequences – not, certainly, a quagmire, the unprovoked stirring of a hornet's nest. Comes now John Kerry, who voted for the war resolution but as part of a stillborn presidential campaign tells us he was misinformed or misled when he voted yes – not that he was craven or cowed or that, like the rest of the country, he just closed his eyes and accepted this shrink-wrapped war and hoped it would somehow turn out, because this is America, and for too long something for nothing has been the American way.

Sad fact: sooner or later the bill does arrive. The tasty fish we like so much becomes extinct from overfishing. Stars of crash-bang action movies don't necessarily have a clue. People whose country has been invaded and occupied turn out not to love the occupier. None of this is, as they say, rocket science; it's just a matter of looking.

Paul Reidinger