In a couple of months, I rediscovered my love for meat. Sausages, steak, buffalo wings, crab legs, brisket, pork dumplings, those chicken legs served at Dim Sum. Others craved chocolate or cheesecake; I had a "meat tooth."

"Dominion" is a horrible, wonderful, important book. It is horrible in its subject, a half-reportorial, half-philosophical examination of some of the most repugnant things that human beings do to animals, notably keeping them in the factory farms that have taken over the business of supplying America's insatiable meat tooth.

Seafood is hardly the only food product whose demographic profile skews toward the feminine—as Candler points out, women also eat more fruit and more mint-chocolate-chip ice cream than men do. But unlike these other foods, seafood may offer a unique way of connecting with men, and Tim Ryan, senior vice president of the Culinary Institute of America, thinks he knows what it is: appeal to their meat tooth.

"Men are attracted to different terminology than women are," says Ryan. "That's not a new marketing breakthrough, but we can apply it to seafood—we've found that men are attracted to names and descriptors that are more meat-like. A 'salmon steak' just sounds more manly than 'filet of salmon.'"