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 river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

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 and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead."Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals]." The food scientists' chemistry set is designed to extend shelf life, make old food look fresher and more appetizing than it really is, and get you to eat more.

Obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time in food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower it's rate of obesity.

Watch out for those health claims.

If we're only going to eat the prime cuts of young animals, we're going to have to raise & kill a great many more of them. And indeed, this has become the rule with disastrous results for both the animals & the land... If we are going to eat animals, it behooves us to waste as few and as little as we possibly can. Something that the humble cook-pot allows us to do.

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.

This ambivalence about the value of cooking raises an interesting question: Has our culture devalued food-work because it is unfulfilling by it's very nature or because it has traditionally been "women's work"?

Yet, running just beneath the surface of food industry feminism was an implicit anti-feminist message. Then as now, ads for packaged foods are aimed almost exclusively at women and so reinforced the retrograde idea that responsibility for feeding the family fell to mom. The slick new products would help her do a job that was hers & hers alone.