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.

This is the first generation to know that the choices we're making have ultimate consequences. It's a time when you either choose life or you choose death ... Going along with the current order means that you're choosing death.

I was a compulsive eater in my late teens and until I wrote Diet for a Small Planet, so I know what it feels like when food becomes a threat.

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.

I read a book in the late 1990s called The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, by Erich Fromm, and it had a profound impact on me. Fromm takes Descartes' statement, "I think, therefore I am" and changes it to "I effect, therefore I am."

[Fear] means that we are human beings walking into the unknown, and that we are risking breaking with others for something we believe in.

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.