What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.

Nature abhors a garden.

A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.

Studies show that organically grown crops produce more of the things (ascorbic acid, lycopenes, resveratrol, flavonols in general, etc) that our bodies need and also have less toxic residue. Science is still catching up with this. J. Agric. Food. Chem. Vol. 51, no. 5, 2003.

The interesting thing I learned was that if you're really concerned about your health, the best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmers and the best decisions for the environment-and that there is no contradiction there.

It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.