Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).

The whole problem of industrial agriculture is putting all of your eggs in one basket. We need to diversify our food chains as well as our fields so that when some of them fail, we can still eat.

...think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people to conquer the trees.

When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.

I really try to write as an ordinary person would, not as someone who's too sophisticated about food, or too knowledgeable about things.

[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.

...A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food.