I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.

The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.

They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, pre-chewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.

There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that's both extensive and centralized. There's no substitute for petroleum. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful.

Without a complex knowledge of one's place and without the faithfulness to one's place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness, moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or "in" group.

I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men.

So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.