In addressing what the political-economic vernacular calls sustainability, it takes in the banking system, energy generation, the global air-travel business, meat-eating and more – along with such tangential reference points as the psychedelic rock band Hawkwind, Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos and Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor.
His family's business is meat, not oil.
The family gets by on about $125 a month, from his pension and what little Ms. Tariq earns from a small business making meat pastries for her neighbors.
That cheap corn is then bought by large farms, which feed it to animals, leading to profitable business for meat packers.
If I couldn't bear to watch the killing, then I have no business eating meat.
The Washington Square of Brooklyn turned out to be a cobblestoned and somewhat messy lane called Fort Greene Place, where Meyer Kornblum did a wholesale business in meats.
In all, more than three dozen businesses — including meat wholesale companies, auto body shops and restaurants — have sold their property to Columbia and have either left or have agreed to leave once construction begins.
Mr. He grew up in a farming village in the hills surrounding the Yangtze but left in 1991 to take a job in the wholesale meat business.
His father, a Czech immigrant, was a versatile entrepreneur: "He was in the meat business, the fur collar business, he sold 20,000 tons of barbed wire to places in Mexico, he had a coffeeshop in the Catskill Mountains.
Esposito's has been in the meat business since 1911 and Termini Brothers in the pastry business since 1921.
"We're all in the meat business, but we're the ones who opted out of the commodity, feedlot, big ag-business thing," Mr. Dickson said.
