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 b...
For great many species today, fitness means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.
Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?
It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person's mind, that mind's connection to the sensual world has grow...
I could, like some of the meat we were cooking, relax into it, clear my mind of competing desires & give myself over to the work... This time became a kind of luxury. And that is precisely when I bega...
Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn]
Every new step in the direction of simplification – toward monoculture, say, ore genetically identical plants – leads to unimaginable new complexities.(intended as challenges)
To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undi...
Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. (Hard cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all...
Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever...
A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.
Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.
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 instead of patent medicines and l...
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.
The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own.
Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing...
More than any other single trait, it is the apple’s genetic variability—its ineluctable wildness—that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as different from one another as New Eng...
A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature’s complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. A...
The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.
Organic Oreos are not a health food. When Coca-Cola begins selling organic Coke, as it surely will, the company will have struck a blow for the environment perhaps, but not for our health. Most consum...