Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.

Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.

No kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.

Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we've accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: "Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self."

I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.

Loose lips sink ships.

What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.