On non-factory-farmed meat:

Buying beef from a farm where the cattle have names and the person behind the counter knew them personally hasn't made me reluctant to eat meat, but it's made me very, very careful not to waste any of it.

An observation on how fruit easily available in the United States has changed during my lifetime

I'm too young to have ever had a Gros Michel banana (similar cultivars still exist here and there around the world, but aren't widely grown, and aren't imported here), so I've pretty much only ever had Cavendishes. So bananas, in general, aren't any better than they were when I was a kid. But it's easier to get other varieties of plantain, for instance, and you can now get Lady Finger bananas pretty often. So, bananas haven't had a huge improvement over the past thirty years or so, but there's slightly more variety.

Citrus, though -- I think oranges have made some improvements in the past several decades. And grapefruit are orders of magnitude better. I buy a bag of 'em at Costco every couple of weeks, and just peel them and eat them -- that's something that wouldn't have been worth doing when I was a kid. People used to put sugar on grapefruit before eating it -- they're just SO much better now.

And then there's apples. The resurgence in actual GOOD apples available throughout the United States since I was a kid? Unbelievable. Just... the worst apple you can find in a supermarket today is better than the best you could have found when I was a kid.