...A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food.

Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.

Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

The banquet is in the first bite.

Eating is a political act.

One of the reasons we eat fast food is that we don't have to cook fast food. We are out-sourcing cooking to corporations, they tend to cook with far too much salt, fat, and sugar.

I try very hard to tell stories and not lecture. I try to approach things as an amateur and not an expert, so that when I'm doing something, I'm starting out in a place a lot like where my readers start out - which is to say, naïve.