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...