Any kind of food you eat is going to have an impact on the world. If you switch to tofu and get off meat, the soy bean is doing enormous damage in the Amazon and all throughout South America.

When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.

One of the reasons we eat fast food is that we don't have to cook fast food. We are out-sourcing cooking to corporations, they tend to cook with far too much salt, fat, and sugar.

A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.

Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.

Much more has to be done to democratize the food movement. One of the reasons that healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food, whether you mean organic or grass-fed or whatever.

The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.