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

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

For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It's hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love - the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish - they've collapsed.

It takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. Not very sustainable. It doesn't taste very good either.

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.

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.

The history of food has never had a better biographer. Required reading for anyone who eats.