Excellently written article. I'm a passionate fan of what Kevin has launched with his team. We're able to buy a few things there every week (often from the cheaper cuts) -- we've used the added expense as a reason to cut back on the overall amount of meat we eat. We have profoundly reoriented our relationship to meat from quantity to quality, and feel healthier and more responsible for it. We wish Kevin and his friendly team the very best.

As a 30 year vegetarian, I enjoyed this article. Fairly well balanced, even if it missed a few points. Like this one: Even humane, ethically sourced meat (which is an oxymoron for some) costs the planet a lot more resources than the equivalent weight of fresh produce. Consider a box of corn vs. box of meat that took 10 boxes of corn to produce. Industrial meat production has a lot of externalities that family farms build into the price, but the laws of thermodynamics are immutable. Reducing your cruelty footprint is laudable, but reducing your carbon footprint is essential for our continued existence, and unless you're eating way less meat (which may be the case given its price) then you're not doing as much good as you think by buying boutique meat.

@2 -- Yep. Whether it was the intent or not, this article suggests it is OK to eat meat. Or at the very least, not much worse than avoiding meat. This is bullshit. Meat is bad for the environment. Some meat is really bad, while other meat is just bad.

Beef is especially bad, as the methane from cows is a major contributor to global warming. Whether the cows are suffering before they are slaughtered, or feeling good doesn't matter. All that cud chewing increases the amount of methane in the air. That is before you count the cost in fuel mentioned by @2. Sorry, there is no getting around it. Meat is bad for the environment.

Nobody else has addressed this yet, so I'm gonna ask: what the hell is in the GREEN sausage?

This is clearly by far the best written article in The Stranger, ever.

@2 & 3: happily, guiltlessly filling my freezer with venison every fall, feed my kids with it year-round, and take some pressure off the local flora too - which is really pressed by all the forest-fringe we've created for an exploding deer population. Some meat is not at all bad.

Granted, purchasing your moral absolution is the easier route, but that just doesn't settle right for some...