Eating is an agricultural act,’ as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we...

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we...

Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees...

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals – Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine – which set the agenda.

People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human – in the fact that so much of what we...

Cooking is all about connection, I’ve learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human...

the greater fool theory.” Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool...

The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn’t have. It’s very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame...

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the...

Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and...

Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we’ve designed a food system that produces a lot of...

Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists...

It’s brutal out there. A bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. as a rule, animals in the wild don’t get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones.

The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are...

It turns out Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman, was a real historical figure who played a very important role in the frontier in the Northwest territory.

Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of them shown to their best advantage. Tulips whose petals had flexed wide were held shut...

Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves and all the other species on which we...

Hard” cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)

There’s been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.

When chickens get to live like chickens, they’ll taste like chickens, too.

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It’s not as though...

Every major food company now has an organic division. There’s more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.

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...