Organic Oreos are not a health food. When Coca-Cola begins selling organic Coke, as it surely will, the company will have struck a blow for the environment perhaps, but not for our health. Most consumers automatically assume that the word "organic" is synomymous with health, but it makes no difference to your insulin metabolism if the high-fructose corn syrup in your soda is organic.

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.

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.

My hope is that if people have the knowledge, and if they actually see where their food comes from and have access to the information, they will make better ethical choices.

We need to create incentives for our ranchers and farmers to manage their lands to maximize carbon sequestration.

The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.

The food system is a very complex beast. There are people who are going to get their food at Wal-Mart or at Safeway; they're not going to the farmers' market. Those people need choices too.