I've always been interested in plants because I'm a gardener, so I have a basic understanding of botany and things like that, but it's all self-taught.

We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.

Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.

Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.

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

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