This year, as so many years before, Faith Maloney won't cook a turkey for Thanksgiving. It would be like eating a beloved companion.

"This is a very sad time for us," says Maloney, co-founder of Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab. "I feel so bad. I have taken care of the chickens and turkeys who can be as individual as your dog or cat. They deserve to live as much as the rest of us." It strikes Maloney as "discordant," she says, to be thanking God while crouching over "the carcass of a fellow creature in the journey."

Becoming vegan "was a pretty easy decision for me," says Maloney, who was raised in an Irish Catholic home where meat and potatoes were the norm. "I was working on rescuing animals on the one hand, then eating others of them. There was an inconsistency in my practices."

Maloney is not alone in her desire to connect beliefs and practices. More Americans from every religion, philosophy and political persuasion are joining a movement to eat ethically. Some have become vegetarians or vegans, while others emphasize the treatment of animals before they are killed, the need to protect the planet by eating locally and organically, or growing their own food.

Last month, The Humane Society of the United States launched a nationwide drive called "All Creature Great and Small" to raise awareness of "our inherent responsibility as stewards of God's creations," according to its promotional materials, "and how that stewardship impacts the lives of animals."

Of course, religions have been preaching about the connection between God, humans, food and animals for centuries. Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and various forms of Christianity all spell out what they consider the sacred relationship. Interfaith efforts, such as the recent Sacred Foods Project sponsored by the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, are pushing for ethical principles in the food industry and a distribution system that honors the land, water, and air as well as bodies and souls.

"Eating is a moral act," says the Rev. David Andrews, former director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, one of the partners in the Sacred Foods Project. "We can change the world with our knives and forks."

The religious imperative » In the beginning, says the Bible, there were animals, but not to eat. The Garden of Eden was rich in grains and nuts. After Adam and Eve fell from grace, all that God added to their diet was "herbs of field and vegetables.''

It was not until after Noah and his creature couples survived the flood, when all the vegetation was destroyed, that the people were allowed to eat meat. But any meat had to be drained of all blood, which was the start of Jewish kosher laws.

Lisa Goldstein Kieda, assistant principal at Congregation Kol Ami's religious school, became a vegetarian in 1990 after working in an orthopedic lab. One day, she went home to cook a chicken and couldn't help noticing the similarity between it and the cadavers. "That was the beginning of stepping back and looking at what I eat and when I eat it," Kieda says. "It's been a long, slow journey psychologically and religiously."

Now she is a full-on vegan, and that makes it easier to eat kosher, which forbids the mixing of meat and dairy, for example.

"Taking time to think about what you're doing is a very Jewish concept," she says. "Plus, it's fun. It challenges you to eat more colors and spices, to think creatively, to listen to what's going on in the planet. It's a way to be empowered on two levels, the spiritual and nutritional."

For Linda Walton, a Seventh-day Adventist chaplain at Utah Valley University in Orem, nutrition is a spiritual concept.

"Our bodies are temples," Walton says. "If we don't take good care of them, we are not doing what God wants."

About 40 percent of Seventh-day Adventists are vegetarians, and all SDAs avoid pork, because it is "unclean," she says. They also eschew alcohol, tobacco and drugs. "The overriding concern is health," Walton says, "not sin."

Misunderstood health code » Like Adventists, Mormons avoid tobacco and alcohol. They also give up "hot drinks," such as coffee and tea. But LDS scripture also lays out specific instructions about meat and vegetables, which are largely ignored by the majority of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The code, spelled out in LDS Doctrine and Covenants, section 89, says that herbs and fruits should be eaten in their seasons and that "flesh of the bests and of the fowls of the air" should be used "sparingly," only in winter, cold or famine.

His Mormon faith compels Christopher Foster to be a vegetarian activist.

"I'm in it for the animals," says Foster, a Brigham Young University philosophy professor and faculty adviser to the school's Vegetarian Club. "The gospel doesn't have a clear and consistent message, but it does emphasize that we should eat animals only if necessary to prevent starvation."

Indeed, LDS Church leaders have taught that "animals have reason, intelligence, language and love," says Foster. "Animals are sentient beings; they feel pain the same way we do. If we are creating suffering in a fellow being that feels it as we do, then that's a problem, objectionable, or wrong."

Not all ethicists are vegetarians.

To Kate Holbrook, a Utah-based labor activist and a Latter-day Saint, it's a complex issue.

"My own key consideration is seeing that people get enough food to eat," says Holbrook, who is writing her dissertation, Radical Food: Religion and Alimentary Revolt in 20th Century America, at Boston University. "I want animals to be treated well, but I always think people are more important." This is not the right time to boycott the cattle and poultry industries, she says. "We want to encourage them to improve their methods but also to keep prices low. We don't want to put the companies and the people who work there out of business."

Holbrook favors buying local, supporting Utah farms and orchards, and joining food co-ops to help limit our carbon footprints. "We are making choices now that people were making in the 1930s,when land had been farmed in ways that you could no longer grow anything on it," she says. "People were experimenting then with different ways of producing food, went back to the land, suspicious of industrialized food."

Today, it is equally important to support food production that cares for the soil and keep local farmers afloat. Eating ethically, Holbrook says, means thinking about all of society's priorities and "making food choices that support those priorities."

Peggy Fletcher Stack writes about religion and spirituality. Reach her at pstack@sltrib.com or 801-257-8725.