If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're not hungry.

It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.

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.

People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost.

The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of "antinutrients" - compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.