Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.

The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.

We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize these four crops - five altogether, but one is cotton - and these are the building blocks of fast food. One of the ways you democratize healthy food is you support healthy food.

Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.

I'm not talking about having to consult Julia Child before you can take a pot off the rack. I think that's something we can all do more and do better.

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.