“We instinctively feel an overwhelming desire to take sides: organic or conventional, fair or free trade, "pure" or genetically engineered food, wild or farm-raised fish. Like most things in life, though, the sensible answer lies somewhere between the extremes, somewhere in that dull but respectable placed called the pragmatic center. To be a centrist when it comes to food is, unfortunately, to be a radical.”

“Maybe most important, farm food itself is totally different from what most people now think of as food: none of those colorful boxed and bagged products, precut, parboiled, ready to eat, and engineered to appeal to our basest desires. We were selling the opposite: naked, unprocessed food, two steps from the dirt.”

“Organic is something we can all partake of and benefit from. When we demand organic, we are demanding poison-free food. We are demanding clean air. We are demanding pure, fresh water. We are demanding soil that is free to do its job and seeds that are free of toxins. We are demanding that our children be protected from harm. We all need to bite the bullet and do what needs to be done—buy organic whenever we can, insist on organic, fight for organic and work to make it the norm. We must make organic the conventional choice and not the exception available only to the rich and educated.”

“Increasingly, we will be faced with a choice: whether to keep the oceans for wild fish or farmed fish. Farming domesticated species in close proximity with wild fish will mean that domesticated fish always win. Nobody in the world of policy appears to be asking what is best for society, wild fish or farmed fish. And what sort of farmed fish, anyway? Were this question to be asked, and answered honestly, we might find that our interests lay in prioritizing wild fish and making their ecosystems more productive by leaving them alone enough of the time.”

“Bycatch and discards are a fact of life to a fisherman. There is no fishing method that catches only the quarry. ...The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about a third of what is caught worldwide, some 29 million tons, goes over the side. This takes what is hauled from the sea to around 132 million tons a year. Add to that the number of organisms that are killed or damaged by net, line, or trap and are never landed--such as whales, porpoises, turtles, and birds--and the number of animals destroyed on the bottom, and the total catch by fishermen reaches something more like 220 million tons a year. Consider that much of the weight of palatable fish is head, cartilage, bone, and offal, which goes over the side or is thrown away by processors. Consider also that about 44 million tons of fish are caught to make industrial products and food for farmed fish. Consider that some of the palatable fish caught will be turned into products for other than human consumption--as cat food, for instance. Consider that there may be an element of waste because some fish will not sell. Taking all these things into account, it is possible to conclude that the amount of protein eaten by someone or something is maybe less than 20 percent of the 104 million tons landed, and only 10 percent of the amount of marine animals destroyed annually in the oceans. These are rough figures, but, given a wide margin of error, they are about right. So catching wild fish is a wasteful business.”

“Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.”