Jane Goodall's Harvest for Hope

In her 2005 book subtitled "A Guide for Mindful Eating", Jane Goodall proves she is more than just the chimp lady.

Goodall's lifelong study of chimpanzee behavior naturally led to her concern about their habitat and their dwindling population. The logging trade and the raising of cattle are causing the disappearance of the chimp's forest habitat. The bushmeat trade is causing the chimp's potential extinction. Chimpanzee meat is a delicacy in parts of the world. Imagine browsing in an African market and pawing through severed chimpanzee hands to find your dinner.

Gentle Jane's early chapters start with easy talk about animal diets and differences in human diets around the world. The reader is lulled by a seemingly basic primer on animals and diet. Chapter 2, "A Celebration of Cultures," is a happy chapter indeed.

Then Jane packs her punch.

Our happy, indulgent cultures encourage businesses to pesticide-proof crops with chemicals. As added bonus, we eat the chemicals too. Plus, we get bigger, stronger crop-eating pests. So now, companies like Monsanto, are modifying the DNA of the crops themselves.

Our lifestyles have also brought about the horrors of factory farms, the modern-day replacement of family farms. You don't need to accept that animals have souls, just that they suffer, to recoil at the treatment of the cows, pigs and chickens in these assembly-line hell-houses.

Chickens are crammed together so they can't stretch their wings, starved and denied water when egg production is down. Cows are branded, castrated, wallow in feces. Tailless pigs are shot up with growth hormones and weakened by lack of exercise. Sometimes their tiny legs break trying to carry their own weight off to slaughter.

If you are callous enough to not care about the animals' suffering, you might care that you and your family eat all the hormones and antibiotics the animals are injected with. (We've learned the consequences of too much antibiotics: super-bugs.)

Jane recalls the farms she knew as a child, where animals were loved and roamed free. Crops were rotated so that the soil remains fertile. These farms were compact ecosystems that worked without wearing out the land.

Jane's message: if you are going to eat meat, eat small-farm, local and organic. Better yet, don't eat meat and let people eat the grain that feeds the livestock.

Can you handle that? If not, then you won't know what hit you when the water crisis lurking around the corner appears.