We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.
Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have li...
People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our ha...
If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970's, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level- at home, as it were....
The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products,...
Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination.
Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.
[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.
So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when all mean egotism vanishes. Wonders (and terrors) we’re ordinarily defended against flow into our awar...
In ancient Greece, the word for cook, butcher, and priest was the same -- mageiros -- and the word shares an etymological root with magic.
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 simple thi...
The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality—the v...
Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car yo...
The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to...
Our brains are prediction machines optimized by experience,
I realized that the answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated question of what we should eat wasn't so complicated after all, and in fact could be boiled down to just seven words: Eat food. Not...
They can print more money, he liked to say, and they can print new stocks and bonds, but they can’t print more land.
Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually realized being as simply a person with an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.
The repetitive phases of cooking leave plenty of mental space for reflection, and as I chopped and minced and sliced I thought about the rhythms of cooking, one of which involves destroying the order...
What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!
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