History doesn't proceed in incremental little notches.

I think back to when I was growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1950s, during the [John] McCarthy era, with two parents who founded a Unitarian Church. We lived in a little frame house, and my bedroom was just down the hall from the kitchen. My favorite memories of childhood are of the smell of coffee wafting into my bedroom as my parents and their friends talked about the big, important things - about racism and about how to move our country to live its values.

You have increasing poverty and increasing wealth. Fine food is one way to dispense with a lot of money... It's understanding that our daily choices about food connect us to a worldwide economic system. And that economic system - not scarcity - creates worldwide hunger for millions of people.

We'll learn fear might not mean 'stop'; personally, I've come to believe fear usually means 'go.' It always means listen closely.

Approaches to growing food that align with nature changed human relationships.

Many families participate in the Community Supported Agriculture movement, which allows a family to buy shares in a farmer's produce so that they know where their food is coming from, and they can take their families out and see the farm and meet the farmer. That movement has helped create a new culture around food.

Breaking with the pack may be exactly what we should be doing. Saying "no" to the dominant culture that is trapping us in destructive ways of living might be the most life-serving thing we can do.