But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in...
My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.
The idea that brains create consciousness—an
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, w...
It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to do one thing at a time. One thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly, uni-tasking.
Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare bree...
USDA regulations spell out precisely what sort of facility and system is permissible, but they don’t set thresholds for food-borne pathogens. (That would require the USDA to recall meat from packers w...
The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead. This
In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the g...
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 deepe...
Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat deter...
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...
You are what what you eat eats.
Today it [high fructose corn syrup] is the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year. (A bushel of corn yields 33 pounds of fructose)
The dream of control is seductive but it leads to monoculture in the field and fortified white bread in the supermarket.
Shake the hand that feeds you.
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 f...
But along with the feeling of ineffability, the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed to you is a hallmark of the mystical experience, regardless of whether it has been occa...
Existential distress
We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.