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.

A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the ‘pieds de Dieu’—the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.

If you're a politician it's very useful to say that we can have economic growth and at the same time green the economy, but writers just have to face up to the fact that there are some fundamental tensions between the economic order and the biological order.

Studies show that organically grown crops produce more of the things (ascorbic acid, lycopenes, resveratrol, flavonols in general, etc) that our bodies need and also have less toxic residue. Science is still catching up with this. J. Agric. Food. Chem. Vol. 51, no. 5, 2003.

...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.