If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it's not hard to imagine you're looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, cap...
We ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. (quoting Joel Salatin)
The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relat...
Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth
The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef.
A mere four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift & Company, and National) now slaughter and market four of every five beef cattle born in this country
Memory is the enemy of wonder
To the extent we push meat a little bit to the side and move vegetables to the center of our diet, we're also going to be a lot healthier.
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.
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 livelies...
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 increa...
Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.
Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume...
What gets a steer from 80 to 1100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.
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 h...
The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: the greater fool theory. Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Inter...
Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain- new muscle, fat, and bone.
The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical.
The kernels of wheat entered the aperture virtually in single file, as if passing between a thumb and an index finger. To mill any faster risked overheating the stone, which in turn risked damaging th...
It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading...