Two Saturday nights ago, I did something I haven't done since I was a teenager: I ate a big plate of meat.

The summer I was 16, I worked in a small swanky café in the affluent suburb where I grew up. One of my jobs was to make industrial-size batches of the café's popular fancy chicken salad. My "aha" moment happened one afternoon when I pulled a bowl of tannish-pink boiled chicken from the cooler, preparing to chop it into bite-size bits.

Something made me look at the meat differently that day, though, and suddenly all I could think was, "Those used to be chickens! With feet and feathers and beaks and stuff." I just couldn't stomach the idea of eating something when I could envision the ingredients strutting around the barnyard. By that fall, I'd switched to a completely meat-free diet, and by the time I was 20, I'd gone vegan.

The occasion that inspired my first seriously meat-centric outing since the '80s was a tasting of heritage meats sponsored by Slow Food Santa Fe. Chefs Joel Coleman, Charles Dale, Tom Kerpon, Kim Müller and Andrew Nichols prepared a variety of dishes using beef, pork and lamb from local suppliers Pecos Valley Grassfed Beef and Talus Wind Ranch, as well as Heritage Meats USA, a national organization dedicated to promoting "genetic diversity, small family farms, and a fully traceable food supply" and "to making ... sustainably produced heritage foods available to all Americans."

Heritage Foods' philosophy has an appealing ring. "The farms and foods that once sustained our forefathers ... are now endangered," declares the organization's Web site. "Farms are going belly up every day and the foods small farms raise are being lost forever because they are ignored by industrial agriculture." In an article in Miller-McCune magazine, Emily Badger adds fuel to the fire: "If we would just eat endangered crops and livestock now, restoring their role in the food supply, we could save them from extinction."

Though the "eat it to save it" argument is intriguing, it's hard to dispute that people and the planet would be better off if we ate less meat. Practically speaking, though, no one can declare, "Vegetarianism for everyone!" and leave it at that. Americans love their meat. As Tara Austen-Weaver says in her book, The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman's Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis, "No one wants to be told that the American dream is over and we're all going to have to eat lentils now."

Some of us find it easy to pass on the critter. Some people wag their fingers while they munch righteously on brown rice and tofu, ignoring how meat ends up on their neighbors' plates. Don't we have a larger responsibility, though?

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, author of The River Cottage Meat Book, thinks all of us have ethical accountability as the stewards of domesticated farm animals. "We control almost every aspect of their lives," he insists. "Their suffering or lack of it, their animal happiness, or animal misery, are down to us. This dependency would not be suspended if we all became vegetarians ... We would remain their custodians, with full moral responsibility for their welfare." He continues, "The vast majority of our food animals are now raised under methods that are systematically abusive ... This isn't husbandry. It's persecution ... In the face of such abuse, the moral defense of meat eating is left in tatters."

That's why, whether we choose to eat meat or not, we need to ensure that animals are raised and treated ethically and humanely. The best way to have an impact is to choose sustainable meat purchased from small — if possible, local — farmers and to support the stores and restaurants that sell their products rather than those of factory farms.

Chef and caterer Louisa Shafia, who did a stint at San Francisco's well-known vegan restaurant Millennium, has done much to promote vegetarian diets, but you'll still find recipes for meat-based dishes in her new cookbook, Lucid Food. "Many of my favorite vendors at the farmers' market are suppliers of eggs, chicken, fish, cheese, and meat," she admits. "It is vital to support small, ethical suppliers of animal products so that there remains a viable alternative to factory farms."

To eat or not to eat meat is a personal decision. For several of my friends, eating "nose to tail" is a way of respecting an animal by not wasting a single part of it; but it could be a long, long time before I'm ready to sit down with a plate of offal from a locally raised pig. Still, I'd rather do that than purchase unrecognizable meat Cling-Wrapped to a Styrofoam tray.

"Are you among the millions of consumers putting pressure on farmers to produce mountains of cheap meat of dubious quality, by dubious means?" asks Fearnley-Whittingstall. "Ultimately, the only person who is going to make any significant difference in the way meat is produced, sold, and cooked is you."

Contact Laurel Gladden at the.ethical.epicure@gmail.com