The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Cooking meat over a fire is one of the most stirring of those ritual acts, usually performed outdoors, on special occasions, in public, and by men.

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

It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

We're always projecting our moral categories on things. I think that's inevitable. But capitalism places no particular value on morality. Morality in the market is enforced by contract and regulation and law, because morality is understood to be in conflict with the motive force of greed and accumulation.