With food, there are things we’d rather not know. And here’s the rub: we know we’d rather not know. Scientists have found that our brains will shut down information that doesn’t make us feel good, or that causes us stress, which is one reason why we tune out suffering. But as Margaret Heffernan writes in her book Willful Blindness, “Not knowing, that’s fine. Ignorance is easy. Knowing can be hard but at least it is real, it is the truth. The worst is when you don’t want to know because then it must be something very bad. Otherwise you wouldn’t have so much difficulty knowing.”