For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187

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

The two things are synergistic, the health care crisis and the food crisis. Right now, to a large extent, the food industry's biggest product is patients for the health care industry and we have to break that.

When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity"-to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to-he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.

It's very important to get out, to do reporting. It's also really interesting. I come at it as a journalist, and I think that's helped me, and I come at it as someone who sees nature wherever he looks, and that helps.

For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.