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Good Morning, I love the Scottish hill country. It was there that I had my encounter with a highland cow. She simply stood there with her great horns, staring not at, but through, me. I stopped, stock still, not afraid, but ashamed. ‘Yes,’ her gaze forced me to admit, ‘I do belong to that species which eats yours.’ Actually, I’m a vegetarian, with veganism as my ideal. But that doesn’t exempt me from the issue of what’s on my plate and how it got there. Food is a central concern in Judaism, and not just because we love our bagels. It’s about far more than what’s ritually kosher. There’s the requirement to pay farmers and workers justly. There’s the biblical commandment to leave the corners of fields for the poor, translatable today as the obligation to make affordable food accessible to all. There’s the concern for animal suffering, not just with the way they die but how they live. Animals feel deeply, taught Maimonides in the twelfth century. Above all, there’s the obligation to respect and protect God’s earth in all its biodiversity. It was precisely these issues which the journalist Dom Phillips was pursuing in the Brazilian Amazon together with Bruno Pereira, an expert on indigenous peoples. They were on the trail of a transnational illegal fishing gang when they were murdered, a year ago last Monday. More charges were brought yesterday. Previously Phillips had reported on the true cost of the beef trade, the vast areas of rainforest destroyed, the cattle raised unlawfully in protected zones, the big money made while local people were left in destitution, bereft of ancestral lands. That meat still reaches the UK, making us potentially complicit. Phillips stands in the footsteps of the Biblical prophets, fearlessly telling not just inconvenient, but dangerous, truths to power and money. The prophets, too, sometimes paid with their lives. Their heirs today are often, like Phillips, investigative journalists. The organisation Forbidden Stories, with its slogan ‘Killing the journalist won’t kill the story,’ insists that Phillips’s and Pereira’s work must continue. The men are deeply mourned and their cause has been taken up worldwide. Back in Scotland, on another walk my dear mother-in-law once shoed away a cow that came too close with the inimitable sentence, ‘I ate your mother for breakfast.’ She hadn’t. But her words put squarely the issue we have to face: who are we having for breakfast; what lives and livelihoods, human and animal, lie beneath our knives and forks.