We should be rolling in the dirt, gardening, wrestling with some brambles and skinning animals for supper. These are important immune system builders.

We don't need a law against McDonald's or a law against slaughterhouse abuse - we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.

Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley, or organic cut flowers from Peru, doesn't mean we should do it, not if we're really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism.

My advice to anyone who wants to join in on farming is diversify. Nature is diversified, and I know you'll always have a core thing that you'll really like, but hang stuff around the edges of it. It will make your place more interesting for people to come to, and it's a lot easier to sell something else to an existing customer.

I think it's one of the most important battles for consumers to fight: the right to know what's in their food, and how it was grown.

If it doesn't rot, it's not real food.

How many of us lobby for green energy or protected lands, but don't engage with the local bounty to lay by for tomorrow's unseasonal reality? That we tend to not even think about this as a foundation for solutions in our food systems shows how quickly we want other people to solve these issues.