The other thing that soy contributes to, of course, is hydrogenated oil. This is the main oil. This is the fast-food oil.

The interesting thing I learned was that if you're really concerned about your health, the best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmers and the best decisions for the environment-and that there is no contradiction there.

For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?

There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.

Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.

A natural historian is somebody who looks at something in terms of its relationship to the rest of the natural world. You look at things ecologically. When you see a cow on a feedlot, you don't just see a cow; you see a cow that is eating certain food. You follow that food and that food takes you back to a corn field.

Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.