Not long ago I received an interesting phone call in regards to a husband-wife bet, which had to do with my column last month about “Good Tomatoes” and the ethics of garden versus corporate tomatoes.

The fellow wanted to know if the paper had made a mistake by putting my food column on this page rather than in its usual place. His wife won the wager, not having a problem with my discussion of tomatoes here, and it set me to puzzling why there might be a disconnect for some between food and morals, religious or otherwise.

Since food is even more fundamental than sex to our survival – having the one sure facilitates the other – it should be one of the most basic subjects for ethical review.

The what and why of our access to certain types of foods reveals more about who we are than nearly anything else I can think of.

Here are three snapshots of me – technological, processed, and natural – a typically conflicted American:

Click. I’m in a motel, finished with a long day’s drive, too pooped to go out and eat. I set out a plate of Triscuits by Nabisco, topped with Tabasco hot sauce and Kraft Easy Cheez spread, in the handy pressurized can (plus beer of choice).

Hey, I’m not only mainly eating oil, I’m branded into getting my petro-food-fix from certain companies. Put another way, I’ve been sold to and propagandized by the huge, near-monolithic force of corporate dictate.

It’s my choice, of course, but how easy it is to make, utterly free of the burdens of time/work that another meal may necessitate.

Click. I sit down at the dining room table with the sports pages and wheat bread toast, with butter, honey and peanut butter. Perhaps a slightly healthier meal, but still as processed and industrial as you can get.

Click. I go to my garden and pick squash, basil, tomatoes, peppers, and a few celery stalks and rosemary sprigs. I make a simple soup for dinner, with homemade chicken stock I’d previously frozen and the fresh, organic produce just-picked from the garden.

The first two meals reveal not only the difference between eating today as opposed to in almost all of human history, but the fundamental fact that I am filthy rich, living as I do in a country awash in “welfare calories,” i.e., subsidized by falsely cheap energy.

And that the energy cost of eating that way comes at a moral cost, as well, as there really is only so much to go around, and we Americans consume far more than our share. Our food travels, on average, about 1,300 miles to get to us, at a fossil fuel cost for production, delivery, etc., of about 10 calories for every food calorie produced.

So oil provided my industrial meals, acquired with a few dollars that totally belie their real cost, in order to let me press a button for a few cheap, nutrient-less petro-calories of fake cheese.

Still, we can’t get out of the society in which we live, although some can pretend to, by virtue of wealth and privilege. I personally can’t afford to avoid living in the U.S.A. while living in the U.S.A.

Our fossil fuel wealth and abundance of open space, coupled with policy decisions not to develop viable mass transit on a national level, made the development of a “car culture” all but inevitable for us, and most Americans cannot practically live and work without an automobile.

So, too, the corporatization of our food supplies and the virtual elimination of the small farmer have made the long journey of our food a matter of necessity.

This is a slow-motion crash, of course, as it’s not sustainable in the long run. Like the national debt, the bill for ignoring the wake of destruction of the commons caused by industrial agriculture will come due, and it’s no fun realizing that I’m doing my share of the damage.

The philosopher David Stove called the attempt to deny one’s stance the “Ishmael effect,” i.e., standing where you can’t. Ishmael tells us in “Moby Dick” that he alone escaped to tell the tale, but given the sinking of the ship in the middle of the ocean, he can’t have done so.

And although we can’t continue to stand where we are, I’ll no doubt go on living a mostly technologically enabled life. But I’ll also grow good tomatoes, foster diversity in my own backyard and support policy changes that are sustainable.

It’s not a lot, but it’s something.