“When [a cow] moves into a new paddock, she doesn’t just see the color green; she doesn’t even see grass. She sees, out of the corner of her eye, this nice tuft of white clover, the emerald-green one over there with the heart-shaped leaves, or, up ahead, that grassy spray of bluish fescue tightly cinched at ground level. These . . . entities are as different in her mind as vanilla ice cream is from cauliflower, two dishes you would never conflate just because they both happen to be white.”

—Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006.