It's really important for your health, because you will never use as much salt and fat and sugar as a corporation will use cooking for you.

Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

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.

Avoid food products that make health claims. at meals and eat them only at tables. And no, a desk is not a table.

Human health should now be thought of as a collective property of the human-associate d microbiota, as one group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on microbial ecology - that is, as a function of the community, not the individual.

Avoid food products with more than five ingredients; with ingredients you can't pronounce.