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.

Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I’m writing about.

For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it’s more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.

My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The...

I don’t think it’s a journalist’s job to issue shopping lists or policy descriptions. We’re supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as...

A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space — a place not just set apart but reverberant — and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind...

Suffering… is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.

manufacturing a controlled substance.” Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge.

I mean, we’re really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn’t necessarily expect to witness.

Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians — we just want to opt out. That’s all the Indians ever wanted — to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs...

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are...

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it’s not the other way around.

You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).

For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?

Anyway, in my writing I’ve always been interested in finding places to stand, and I’ve found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I’m writing about.

celebration.

Imagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that food in a way that restored the land. Imagine if we could eat every meal knowing these few...

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not.