The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands..... Relations are what matter most.

Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well.

One USDA scientist went so far as to claim that there has never been a documented case of food-borne illness from eating fermented vegetables.