Bird’s Eye: If the politics of food were listed on the stock market, it would be a good buy. As global warming diminishes food stocks, the arguments about morality of what we eat get closer to the bone, or the stalk, depending on your taste. This week George Monbiot eats crow and recants on veganism, Bill Clinton switches to plants for protein, and a lunatic provocative article suggests the only moral solution is to kill all the carnivores. But Super-Salmon is coming, whether he’ll save the day or not. Read on, for a further helping of what Leonard Cohen called, “the homicidal bitchin’ / that goes down in every kitchen / to determine who will serve and who will eat. ”

* Monbiot Eats Crow The Guardian

This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong. More to the point, it has opened my eyes to some fascinating complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case.

In the Guardian in 2002 I discussed the sharp rise in the number of the world’s livestock, and the connection between their consumption of grain and human malnutrition. After reviewing the figures, I concluded that veganism “is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world’s most urgent social justice issue”. I still believe that the diversion of ever wider tracts of arable land from feeding people to feeding livestock is iniquitous and grotesque. So does the book I’m about to discuss. I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.

* I Went On Essentially A Plant-Based Diet. Bill Clinton

I went on essentially a plant-based diet. I live on beans, legumes, vegetables, fruit. I drink a protein supplement every morning—no dairy—I drink almond milk mixed in with fruit and a protein powder so I get the protein for the day when I start the day up. And it changed my whole metabolism and I lost 24 pounds and I got back to basically what I weighed in high school.

* Should We Kill Off the Carnivores? The Atlantic Wire

Even hard-core vegans might balk at McMahan’s argument that not only should humans stop eating animals, but we should do what we can to keep carnivorous animals from eating animals. Even, he says, if that means “arrang[ing] the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones.”

* GM Food Battle Moves To Fish As Super-Salmon Nears US Approval The Observer

So what is to be done to satisfy the world’s seemingly insatiable appetite for fish? An appetite that will see the consumption of farmed fish outpace global beef consumption by nearly 10% within five years, according to the UN? AquaBounty, whose shares are sold on London’s Alternative Investment Market, thinks it has the answer. And if, as looks increasingly likely, the US government agrees, the implications for global food production will be enormous. Welcome to the new world heralded by the “GM salmon”. The company’s dream of selling genetically modified salmon eggs that allow the fish to grow to maturity in half the normal time received a giant fillip last week when it announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was close to granting approval.