To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe.

I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family.

There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion.

California’s Proposition 37, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential to do just that - to change the politics of food not just in California but nationally too.

When chopping onions, just chop onions.

I think that there's some brainwashing going on with this idea that we don't have time to cook anymore. We have made cooking seem much more complicated than it is, and part of that comes from watching cooking shows on television-we've turned cooking into a spectator sport. ...My wife and I both work, and we can get a very nice dinner on the table in a half hour. It would not take any less time for us to drive to a fast-food outlet and order, sit down, and bus our table.

Eat with consciousness. When you eat with consciousness, and you know what you're eating, and you eat it in full appreciation of what it is, it's enormously satisfying.