If you're going to change the food system, there is a lot that you, the consumer, can do on your own; but in the end, it will be very important to make changes at the national level.

The real food is not being advertised.

I really try to write as an ordinary person would, not as someone who's too sophisticated about food, or too knowledgeable about things.

Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.

Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.

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.

Human health should now be thought of as a collective property of the human-associate d microbiota, as one group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on microbial ecology - that is, as a function of the community, not the individual.