Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.

Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

If you care about the animals, actually, organic might not be the best answer because now we have organic feedlots, organic factory farms. If you care about the environment - pesticides, especially - organic is the answer.

But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you.

Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. Cooks have their ways of saying grace too... Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it.