I deliberately tried to draw attention to what I was about to say.

“I have been thinking about something,” I announced.

Dramatic pause.

“And, after thinking and reading about it for a long time, I’ve come to a decision,” I said. My husband perked up and seemed interested in what was about to go down.

“Yes?” he said, putting aside whatever he was doing in the kitchen.

“I want us to only bring humanely raised meat into the house,” I said. I explained that we should know the source of any meat that we buy, and that I don’t want to eat chickens that have been raised in crowded cages, or beef from factory-farmed cows. I’m pretty sure most of the meat we cook with is of higher quality than that, anyway, but we still get deli meat for school lunches, and cans of chicken noodle soup from chicken of unknown origin. It doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult to buy meat that has been ethically raised by workers who were treated fairly.

My husband seemed to lose interest in my big announcement once he realized it was about groceries, but he nodded in general agreement. That was easy, I thought. I had expected more resistance, since my husband is wary of pronouncements that increase our grocery bill.

The next day, he brought home lunch meat purchased from the local grocery store’s deli counter. I was irritated, but let it slide. Maybe there needs to be an adjustment period, I thought. Two days later, he brought home dinner from another grocery’s hot deli bar, including barbecued chicken of undetermined provenance. This time, my irritation was aggravated by hunger and my inability to eat the chicken due to my previously stated ethical boundary. So I just yelled something about my values not being respected and stomped upstairs.

Perhaps this was not the most mature approach, but hangry is a dangerous mood.

I’m pretty sure something was yelled in return about the confusion and hypocrisy of said values, since I was still willing to eat meat at nice restaurants.

Thus commenced the Cold War of 2018. Long-term couples know of what I speak. It’s when you’re too mad to rationally discuss the issue at hand, yet too tired to get into an argument, so you reduce your spoken exchanges to transactional conversations about kids and household logistics. It is an immature way to try to settle a disagreement, but these things can happen when you’ve been married for a long time.

After a few days, the Cold War fizzled out because we are too old to have the energy to sustain it. But it did give me time to think about what was at the core of my feelings about this issue. Ostensibly, it was about respect. But what was it really about?

Like I said, most of the meat purchased for the house is up to ethical standards, so why did I lose it over sandwiches and takeout? This might have something to do with it: In the past year, several close friends have been struck with life-changing diagnoses. These are healthy people living active lives, randomly hit with cancer and other serious illnesses. It’s a scary, close-to-home reminder of how much is out of our control. And our modern commercial food-manufacturing system makes it difficult to know what is truly healthy to put in our bodies and feed our children.

My newfound focus on meat “origin stories” had something to do with my anxiety about keeping everyone healthy. From my husband’s perspective, the fight was really about personal autonomy and not being forced to follow an edict without discussion about all the gray areas. Like, is it OK to bring home takeout from a restaurant we both enjoy, even if we aren’t sure of how they source the meat?

A week later, once we each had time to simmer down, we talked (at times loudly) about the contrasting research we had read on meat suppliers and standards at various grocery chains.

My friends who have been committed to clean, ethical eating for far longer advised me that the best solution was simply to eat less meat. My 12-year-old son, who witnessed all stages of the feud, finally weighed in: “This argument is so dumb.”

Yes, the initial stomping and yelling and subsequent silent treatment was dumb. But the argument was useful. It made us do more research, be more intentional about our grocery choices and talk more deeply about issues that matter to us.

I just have to figure out the best way to unveil Meatless Mondays.

Parents try to teach their children to use their words. It’s an important life skill to be able to identify emotions -- and, as we get older, to articulate complex ideas.

Here’s a chance for parents to use our own words. Two political candidates in Missouri recently handed us a perfect opportunity.

First, there’s Jeanie Ames, a Missouri woman running for the school board in a suburban St. Louis district. Screenshots of her Twitter feed, which she has since made private, were posted on a photo-sharing site and reported by the local media. She referred to Michelle Obama as “a giant rat.” She tweeted that the Black Caucus is what is wrong with America and that Puerto Rico is “one trailer park payment away from being homeless.” She also called for a ban on Islam in America and for another “crusade.”

Decent people are horrified and disgusted by her beliefs, but we can’t afford to look away from the ugliest parts of our communities. We have to expose the ugliness for what it is, especially when it’s coming from a person running for a seat on a school board. And it’s important that we show these harsh realities to our children; they should be just as aware of who wants to control their schools as we are.

Children should know exactly what it is to call for banning an entire religion. It’s called bigotry.

Supporting a “crusade” to rid America of an entire religious group? That’s what the Nazis attempted when they murdered 6 million Jews.

In her online bio, Ames calls herself a “Confederate.” The Confederates fought to preserve slavery in the South. Ames tried to describe these views as “politically conservative.”

That’s an insult to political conservatives. These tweets are racist.

Remember, even David Duke doesn’t call himself a racist. Nowadays, white supremacists want to be called “alt-right” or “white nationalists.” Instead, we need to call these beliefs what they are.

This may lead to another discussion of why some people feel comfortable sharing hate-filled views on social media. It’s likely because they have created a supportive audience of like-minded people, and those who disagree don’t want anything to do with them. When the rest of us are silently disgusted, these views become normalized. If our children don’t hear us loudly condemning bigotry, they’ll think it’s a common way to think. If they don’t hear us calling such remarks what they are, they’ll have a distorted view of what “politically conservative” means.

But let’s not stop there. We’ve also got Courtland Sykes, a Missouri Republican running for U.S. Senate. Sykes is making national headlines for reposting his position on women’s rights, as reinforced to his fiancee: “I want to come home to a home-cooked dinner at 6 every night, one that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives.”

He also states his goals for his future daughters: “I don’t want them to grow up into career-obsessed banshees who forgo home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting, manophobic, hell-bent feminist she-devils who shriek from the tops of a thousand tall buildings they are (sic) think they could have leaped over in a single bound -- had men not ‘suppressing them’ (sic).“

The best advice to give our daughters is: If they encounter a man with views like this, run in the opposite direction. These are outdated, misogynistic ideas of what women should or should not be. Women are just as worthy of having a career and a family as men are.

Here’s a chance to explain the power and abuse of social media. Parents should say Ames’ tweets were racist and Sykes’ post is sexist, and be able to explain why to their children.

Let’s make a social media example out of these two.

And, for those in other parts of the country sneering at the ignorant, backwards candidates we’ve got running in our state -- don’t think for a minute these people aren’t in your communities, too. The last election proved that millions of Americans are willing to overlook candidates’ comments that vilify and denigrate racial and ethnic minorities and insult women.

So talk about these social media posts with your children. Call them what they are, and ask your kids to do better than we have been.

Use your words.

My teenage daughter startled me with a Big Question out of the blue while I was working in the kitchen.

“What do you think causes racism in society?” she asked while warming up leftovers in the microwave. We hadn’t been discussing any related topic, and rarely has my opinion been sought so directly from her. So I tried to answer as quickly as I could, unsure how long I would have her attention before someone more interesting texted her.

“Fear, competition for resources, power structures that exploit difference,” I said. A bit later, I texted her that the way people are raised also causes racism to persist.

I’ve spent the past week thinking about her question. I posted the question on Facebook and received nearly a hundred replies from thoughtful friends. Their most popular response was that ignorance or isolation from people of different backgrounds were the root causes. But I’m skeptical about this. If education and personal relationships could end racism, why does it still persist among people with plenty of knowledge and exposure?  

I turned to the work of scholars who study these issues.

Ibram Kendi is a historian and author of “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. He is also the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. He makes the strong case that we cannot educate and love our way out of a racist society. The root cause of racist thoughts and policies is self-interest, he argues. The group that benefits from the way society is set up resists making it more just, so racist thought is used to justify racist behavior and policies. He shares many historical examples that bear this out: Slave owners needed to justify their economic interest in subjugating other humans, so they claimed Africans were less than human, less civilized. Racist practice supported by racist thinking.

Kendi defines a racist as a person who expresses a racist idea or supports a racist policy. A racist idea suggests that one racial group is superior or inferior to another racial group. A racist policy is one that leads to unequal outcomes, he explained recently on the podcast “To the Point.”

When you look at modern America, you can see evidence of unequal outcomes in wealth, employment, housing, education, health, policing and the criminal justice system among racial groups. Do you believe it’s something innate in blackness that leads to these worse outcomes? By definition, that’s racist.

The nonracist explanation would be to look at which policies lead to those outcomes and work to dismantle those to create a more fair society. In order to do this, we have to be able to hold two competing views in our heads at once. A person can believe in equality and still have some racist beliefs. A country can make racial progress and still have racist policies.

Anti-racist progress in this country has always been met by racist progress, Kendi says. Even those of us who say we believe in equality and are disgusted by those who march in white hoods or with Tiki torches can have unexamined racist views or support policies that uphold racist outcomes. Even the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, who abhorred slavery, for years held the view that blacks should be freed to leave America and set up colonies elsewhere. His thinking about racial equality changed over time, as evidenced by his speeches.

This is where hope lives.

“A racist is not who a person is. A racist is what a person is, what a person is saying, what a person is doing,” Kendi wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. Once we recognize our self-interest at stake, confront our own biases and counter that thinking, that’s when we move toward a more fair and just society.

I shouldn’t have been so surprised about my daughter’s question. After all, we have recently heard the statement, “I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed” from the highest officeholder in the land, in response to multiple claims that he referred to African nations as “sh-tholes.”

It’s a good time to help our children sort out what these sorts of contradictions really mean.

It will take more than education and love to challenge deeply embedded racist thinking and actions.

It takes honesty.