The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can only eat about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products - CDs, say, or shoes - there's a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year - 1 percent being the annual growth rate of American population. The problem is that [the industry] won't tolerate such an anemic rate of growth.

I really do think that cooking is very important. It's really important for the farmers because it means you're going to be buying real food and not processed food, so that means the farmers will capture more of your food dollar.

In a way, the more techniques you apply, the less important the ingredients are. It shouldn't be that way, but you can get away with it. But if you're highlighting this astounding artichoke, it's got to be an astounding artichoke.

Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you.

Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.

I'm very hopeful that we'll see some change in our food system. I don't know how far we'll go, or how quickly we'll get there, but there is no question that a significant percentage of the American public is dissatisfied with the food system.

Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness.