Here’s an interesting question to ponder: what aspects of normal life today will future generations look back upon as moral failures on our part, much as we look back upon things like slavery in the past?

The list is, sadly, probably quite long, as we don’t seem to learn the lessons of history particularly well. As a young Jew attending Hebrew school, I was shown more Holocaust films than I can count, yet I’ve taken essentially zero action to help prevent the wholesale slaughter of nearly a half million people in Syria in the past few years.

Recently, I’ve been studying up on the effective altruism movement, and thinking about things I can do – small and large – that would positively impact the world. And while I have a number of other ideas brewing, I wanted to share at least two small things I’m going to try to do differently in 2017:

First, I’m going to eat only humanely-raised animals (and only eggs from humane egg farms).

Second, I’m going to eat less chicken, and more beef instead.

For over a decade, I’ve followed – albeit rather loosely at times – a Paleo / ancestral approach to diet. Meat plays a part in that diet (though, often, a smaller one than a caricature of the approach might imply). So inherent in my diet is killing animals.

While I’ve considered becoming a vegetarian for ethical reasons, I don’t believe that diet is optimally healthy. Nor do I believe, for most people, that it’s sustainable. After 18 months, about 85% of vegetarians and vegans return to eating meat, which is why the percentage of vegetarians in the US has held steady at about 5% for the past thirty years.

But I do think that, if I’m going to eat meat, I should do it in a way that kills as few animals as possible, and that leads to those animals being raised in the kindest way possible.

While most packaged food descriptions are so loosely regulated and third-party verified that they’re essentially meaningless (e.g., ‘natural,’ ‘free range,’ or ‘humanely raised’), a number of independent organizations now exist to ensure that animals raised in farms that achieve their designations live much better lives. In particular, the Animal Welfare Approved, Certified Humane, and Global Animal Partnership (especially with ratings of 4, 5, or 5+) are now fairly widely available, and hold farms to very high standards. Yes, these animals are also killed, but, as rancher / activist Joel Salatin puts it, they get to live good, healthy lives in accordance with their animal nature, and then have one very bad day.

Or consider eggs. In factory farms, chickens are painfully de-beaked, then confined in cages and filthy, overcrowded barns. Conversely, a producer like Nellie’s Free Range Eggs (which earns a Certified Humane rating) has no cages anywhere, ample space in clean, well-ventilated barns, high quality feed without hormones or antibiotics, gentle handling, and much greater full-time access to the outdoors and grass. A dozen Nellie’s eggs at my local grocery store costs about a dollar twenty more than factory-farmed eggs. And, in short, I’d rather eat a few eggs less each week from a producer like Nellies than use my dollars to support animal cruelty for a few more.

Secondly, as I said above, I’m going to try to eat less chicken, and more (humanely-raised) beef. The reason is simple: you have to kill many, many more chickens to get the same amount of meat as you get from a single cow. In fact, the beef from a single steer is equal to about 200-250 chickens. Which means that, simply by switching from chicken to beef, in a year of my standard meat consumption, I can be responsible for a single death, rather than several hundred.

Additionally, by choosing grass-fed beef, I can get healthier food (the high omega-3’s of grass-fed beef fat are far healthier than the omega-6 laden fat in chickens or grain-fed beef), and help the environment (as, due to carbon sequestration by the grass in areas they fertilize as they graze, grass-fed cows are carbon-neutral, whereas methane emission from factory-farmed animals account for some 10-15% of all carbon increases annually).

Here, too, grass fed beef costs more. But, again, I’d rather eat less of something I can feel good about, rather than simply default to supporting something terrible with my dollars and then trying not to think about it too much.

Sure, it’s not helping slaves escape by the underground railroad, or hiding Jews during the Holocaust. But it’s something small I can do, day in and day out, that helps make the kind of change I want to see in today’s world, and that I think future generations will look back on with respect.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon. I had nearly all of the action figures, as well as a plastic Castle Grayskull. My best friend Phillip, conversely, had Skeletor's Lair, and our parents would often kindly help us drag those back and forth whenever we went to each other's houses to play.

At that point in the early 1980's, He-Man figures were about as stereotypically 'boy' as toys got – enough so that He-Man creator Filmation subsequently spun out the parallel She-Ra: Princess of Power to drive similar sales of toys to little girls.

Some of my other toy choices – from GI Joes to Tonka trucks and Matchbox cars – were similarly gendered. Yet I also often carried them around the house in my mother's old patent-leather purse, perhaps a bit less of a gender-normative choice. As my parents were good Baby Boomer Bay Area liberals, they did everything they could to avoid reinforcing sexist or gendered ideas about toys, or careers, or anything else.

Thirty-some years later, it seems that concern has spread well beyond the Palo Alto "quiche & Volvo" set. I see most of my parent friends around the country – and, indeed, even my own brother a few blocks away from me with his 18-month-old son Dylan – similarly trying to be thoughtful about the potentially sexist messages they send to their children. (You can spot a similar national-level concern in the plot of the last half-dozen Disney films: “the princess doesn't need to wait for a prince to rescue her; she can rescue herself!”) Yet, unavoidably, nearly all of those kids seem to eventually begin to steer themselves towards certain stereotypical toy-sets nonetheless.

Obviously, there's a large role for culture here – and even for the messages parents unconsciously send to their children. But there is, at the same time, a reasonable 'nature plus nurture' question: are there ways in which some aspects of things like gendered toy-choice might be more deeply biologically engrained?

I was thinking about that recently, in the holiday toy-buying run-up, and was therefore glad to discover two great studies in the world of our close primate relatives.

First, in 2009, a research team led by Janice Hassett of the Yerkes National Primate Center at Emory reported on experiments in which they followed toy preferences in a group of 34 juvenile rhesus monkeys. One by one, they let the monkeys go into an outdoor play area that had both a “masculine” toy (eg., a truck, a car, a construction vehicle) and a “feminine” toy (eg., a Raggedy-Ann doll, a koala bear hand puppet, a teddy bear), and camera-tracked the behaviors exhibited.

Long story short, the monkeys closely paralleled human children, with male rhesus monkeys clearly preferring wheeled toys over plush toys (using them more frequently, and for longer duration), and with female rhesus monkeys spending more time with the plush toys (though also, like human girls, spending substantial time with the wheeled ones; research has long shown girls are more open to ‘cross-gender’ toys than boys are).

Hassett’s team concludes there appear to be “hormonally organized preferences for specific activities that shape preference for toys.”

That lines up well with a parallel paper from Sonya Kahlenberg of Bates and Richard Wrangham of Harvard, which followed the Kanyawara chimpanzee community in Uganda for 14 years, cataloguing how they interacted with play objects. They observed that juvenile female chimps would carry around small sticks for hours at a time while they engaged in other daily activities (like eating, sleeping, and walking) in a manager suggestive of rudimentary doll play. While the same chimps used sticks as tools for specific purposes, the researchers were unable to discern any practical reason for the doll-stick carrying.

Ultimately, and after observing a bunch of related behavioral changes (i.e., females stopped stick-carrying when they had real babies), they concluded that “sex differences in stick-carrying are related to a greater female interest in infant care, with stick-carrying being a form of play-mothering (i.e. carrying sticks like mother chimpanzees carrying infants).”

So, there you go. As with any other topic involving gender, genetic disposition, etc., this one’s fraught with caveats, dangers in over-generalization, etc.

But, if nothing else, I do feel a little less guilty about buying Dylan an awesome Chanukah-gift truck set.

(Though, if they can find it somewhere in a box in their garage, I’d also suggest my parents dig out that old purse. It would be totally perfect for carrying around those trucks.)

A decade or so back, I spent the better part of a year bouncing between New York and Israel, helping to produce a soccer documentary as a side project to my regular, fiction-focused movie work at Cyan.

The experience taught me more than I can possibly express, whether about the realities of Israeli life, the socio-political complexities of Arab-Israeli relations, or even just the beauty of a well-played soccer match.

Also, it taught me the correct way to pronounce “Adidas.”

Before the trip, like most Americans (or, at least, most Americans who grew up on Run DMC’s “My Adidas”), I thought the name was pronounce uh-DEE-da.

At a slew of Adidas-sponsored soccer matches, however, I quickly discovered that the brand is actually short for the name of its German founder, Adi Dassler, and is therefore pronounced AH-dee-dass.

Back here in the US, that information is actually a step below worthless, down somewhere near psychologically damaging. Because, now, stripped of my ignorantly mispronouncing bliss, I’m subjected to a moment of internal battle every time I say the word. Do I pronounce “Adidas” right, but sound wrong (and possibly stupid) to American ears, or do I pronounce it wrong, but sound right (yet know that I’m actually both wrong and pandering)?

Indeed, it turns out international travel and language-learning is a nearly endless font for this kind of danger. Sure, your Italian bread-top appetizer is ‘broo-ske-ta,’ but you sound like a pedantic asshole if you call it as much. And what about ‘forte’? Though almost all Americans pat themselves on the back for pronouncing it with the Italian ‘e’ at the end, when used to mean ‘strength or talent,’ it’s actually a French import-word, and therefore rightfully (though wrong-soundingly) pronounced ‘fort.’

Fortunately, Google seems to be intent on destroying the Zagat brand, which takes at least one painful pronounciation choice off the table. But for countless others, I just have to muddle through, choosing whatever seems like the lesser of two evils at any given moment.

And now – at least for Adidas (and bruschetta and forte) – you do, too.