How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the...

As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly...

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.

so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again.” It is the brain’s own drug for coping with the human condition.

A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.

I asked the feedlot manager why they didn’t just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don’t want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops...

This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.

Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn’t disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you’d be willing to share.

Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously...

Fairness forces you – even when you’re writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done – to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately...

But that’s the challenge — to change the system more than it changes you.

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual’s control–what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature....

The repetitive phases of cooking leave plenty of mental space for reflection, and as I chopped and minced and sliced I thought about the rhythms of cooking, one of which involves destroying the order of...

Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what’s on their hides when they go to slaughter, so...

The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.

Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in...

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.

When the choice comes down to industrial organic or local, I opt for the local, because it supports much more than good agricultural practice.

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,...

Every cuisine has its characteristic ‘flavor principle,’ Rozin contends, whether it is tomato-lemon-oregano in Greece; lime-chili in Mexico; onion-lard-paprika in Hungary, or, in Samin’s Moroccan dish, cumin-coriander-cinnamon-ginger-onion-fruit. (And in America? Well, we do have Heinz...

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at...

Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

It’s all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

Uncle Jeff insisted that I also take a tray of unseasoned barbecue, so I could see for myself that what’s going on here at the Skylight Inn does not in any way, shape, or form...

People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.

According to the surgeon general, obesity today is officially an epidemic; it is arguably the most pressing public health problem we face, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. Three of...

French paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make...

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

When Wal-Mart and McDonald’s start selling organic food, it will drive down the price to farmers and risk growing a new monoculture.

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think...

Sooner or later your fingers close on that one moist-cold spud that the spade has accidentally sliced clean through, shining wetly white and giving off the most unearthly of earthly aromas. It’s the smell of...

When we use these words and we talk about plants having a strategy to do this or wanting this or desiring this, we’re being metaphorical obviously. I mean, plants do not have consciousness. But, this...

High-quality food is better for your health.

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well....

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest – on behalf of the senses and the microbes – against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a...

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition.

Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we’re made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life—the...

Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.

When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest – the added sugars and fats in processed foods.

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...

But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn’t lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is...

Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it’s a short way from not knowing...

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a...

Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever...

The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.

freedom.

The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism.