I work very hard on finding good characters who can explain things to me, and I use them to help tell the story. I organize my pieces not just around people but around animals and plants, energy flows, the path that carbon takes through the food system.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.

There are many people who don't do well on a vegetarian or vegan diet, that for them, meat is a very nutritious food. So, I'm not prepared to give up meat. I don't think we need to give up meat, but we certainly need to change the way we raise meat and diminish the amount of it in our diet.

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.

Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.