Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

I made the unexpected but happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions that most occupied me was in fact one and the same: Cook.

...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.

California’s Proposition 37, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential to do just that - to change the politics of food not just in California but nationally too.

Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.

I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.