Pointy teeth or tasty dinners are noteworthy, but they aren’t arguments about ethics. And lions or sharks can’t be unethical because they can’t reason that an action might be more or less ethical. (Same goes for plants.) But we can.

Some critics insisted that even contemplating a life without meat was an indulgent luxury, a silly game for a wealthy first-worlder. I found this puzzling — as if the poor feast nightly on roast suckling pig and only the 1 percent eat boiled tubers. Over all, rich nations eat much more meat than poor ones, and raising animals for food takes more agricultural resources than raising crops. In any case, a vast number of the world’s ethical vegetarians live in India. Caviar is a luxury. Ethical discussion is not.

The judges considered 29 semifinalists, and though their votes barely overlapped, they were unanimous in seeing the contest as a cultural indicator.

Several noted the widespread agreement that factory farming, which accounts for 99 percent of the meat eaten in America, is not ethical. “Lurking beneath these submissions,” Jonathan Safran Foer said, “is a shared dissatisfaction with our current system of meat production, a shared anger.”

Peter Singer placed that anger in the context of “a seismic shift of opinion about meat in the past decade.” He added, “The tragedy is that factory farming survives despite the widespread agreement that whether we are primarily concerned about animal welfare, our environment or our health, it