In the rush to industrialize farming, we've lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity.

At the end of the day, yes. It's all about the marbling and maybe a few other things along the way. But intramuscular fat, that's where you get a lot of flavor. Fat carries the flavor but in the last 50 years it's been bred out of pigs. When American chicken exploded in the 70's and became such a huge commodity, it took away pork sales. The pork industry suffered and had to change.

If you just think exclusively about what would be the best tasting or the most profitable, you're just not seeing the big picture.

If you look at the carrying capacity of agricultural areas throughout the world, their ecological habitats are changing. So I think we're looking at - in our lifetime - great collapses of food services.

Vegetables deplete soil. They're extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals.

We're achieving better marbling and better flavor with old world wisdom that's been passed down for generations but we're still using technology.

I think all chefs who pursue great flavor have good ethics.