We're spending, on average, 27 minutes a day cooking and about four minutes cleaning up, so basically about a half hour. Any one of TV shows takes twice as long to watch as that, which I think is very interesting because the main excuse people give for not cooking is they don't have time to cook, but somehow they're finding time to watch other people cook or eat on TV.

If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat

To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America - not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

There are things we know and things we don't know about food. But there are certain basic things we do know, and that's what I've tried to build these rules on.

The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.