Though they won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.

The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical.

Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.

While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health.

French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way.

Depending on how you farm, your farm is either sequestering or releasing carbon.

Shake the hand that feeds you.

Though the industrial logic that made feeding cattle to cattle seem like a good idea has been thrown into doubt by mad cow disease, I was surprised to learn it hadn't been discarded. The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat; my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June.

A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.

As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.

Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.

It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for 'better' jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories.

The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism.

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

The environment is not just around you, it's passing through you.

Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist.

A lot of what you see in the supermarket I would argue is not really food. It's what I call edible, food-like substances.