There are things we know and things we don't know about food. But there are certain basic things we do know, and that's what I've tried to build these rules on.

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

You want to say the thing that will drive everybody in the direction you want to go. But as a writer you have a pact with your readers that you'll be really straight with them at all times.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

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.

Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.