Today's Food: Our Progeny Will Call Us Barbarians

The Founding Fathers, those beacons of liberty, were slaveholders. How could they have been blind to such hypocrisy? Before we get too caught up in pious condemnation, Charles Krauthammer thinks we should ponder what modern habits of our own will be seen in a similar light by future generations. "I’ve long thought it will be our treatment of animals," the conservative columnist writes at the Washington Post. "I’m convinced that our great-grandchildren will find it difficult to believe that we actually raised, herded, and slaughtered them on an industrial scale—for the eating."

Krauthammer isn't a vegetarian and thus cops to his own "Jeffersonian hypocrisy." And while he picks his battles where he can, he's not planning on joining PETA, and thinks man reigns supreme over the animal kingdom. But he also predicts that science will someday introduce a meat substitute that will render our mass slaughter moot, and he hopes that future generations will go easy on us when that day comes. "They will, by then, have invented abominations of their very own. Humans always do." Click for his full column. (More animal cruelty stories.)