I gave my love an Italian cookbook Saturday and she cut the plastic off it and opened it and found recipes for leg of kid, eel, pork liver, braised snout, sweet-and-sour snout, and I could tell that we will be eating vegan for the foreseeable future. I was just finishing up a nice helping of short ribs and she gave me a moralistic look, the sort you might give a cannibal if there were one around. And yet—who in this household is worried about high cholesterol? Not me, the butcher boy. The Queen of Greens, that’s who. Thus once more we discover the fundamental unfairness of life. The good are punished while the wicked get off scot-free.

Something I would’ve said in June, had I been asked