So that's us: processed corn, walking.

One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you're going to put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That's politics at its most basic.

What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!

Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well.

Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.

The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.