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.

Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.

To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.

If you establish, or reestablish, local economies on the right scale and with the right standard, then politics would come right as a matter of course. I don't know what you'd call the result - probably not capitalism or socialism.

Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.

We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.

...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.