I get goose-bumps when you talk about Diane Wilson. Who knows where she found that courage? When she was a child, she would crawl under the bed when a stranger came to the house. But in 1989, she found out that her county in south Texas was ranked worst in the country for toxic waste. She wondered if the effluent, dumped into the waters where she and her family had shrimped for generations, might be responsible for the dwindling fish populations. And she suspected that her son's autism might be related to the pollution.

Food has always been at the center of community bonding, of family life, and simple pleasure, but it is becoming more and more an obsession, a source of pain.

I think that luxury has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with beauty.

I had the realization that hunger is not caused by scarcity of food, it is caused by the production system and an absence of democracy throughout the world.

If we cannot know what's possible, then we are free to do that which is pulling our hearts and that which is life serving.

My children threw me a life line: "Return to your roots - food - and rewrite your first book, Diet for a Small Planet." I learned that if I could just show up, in this case, if I could just get myself out of bed, get to the computer in my tiny office at MIT, and start writing, help would start arriving.

With organic approaches, women - who have been gardeners for millennia and mothers forever - can rise because of their intimate knowledge of nature.