Every meal is a moral act. Every bite carries a cost measured in carbon, in suffering, in land and water and life. We pretend otherwise because the alternative is to sit with the math and let it change us.

On the Ethics of Killing: The Moral Math of Eating strips away the comfortable distance between the eater and the eaten. Blake Binford walks readers from the fluorescent aisles of the grocery store to the predawn stillness of a deer blind, from the industrial kill floor to the act of cleaning a wild bird. Along the way, he asks the questions most food writers avoid: What do we owe the animals we eat? What does it cost the land to feed us? And what happens when we stop pretending the answers do not matter?

Grounded in ecology, philosophy, and the plain physical reality of killing what you eat, this book is not an argument for or against any single way of eating. It is something harder. It is an honest accounting of what each choice costs and who pays the price.