“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.”

“Switching to all organic food production is the single most critical (and most doable) action we can take right now to stop our climate crisis.”

“Most people of my grandparents' generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics ... This knowledge has vanished from our culture. We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn't too important. Consider how many Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools ... A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids' attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-the-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor and dirt--two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.”

“Instead of hunting and gathering, instead of farming and harvesting in the area where we live, we are flying God’s fruits and vegetables around the planet, not eating foods designed for our terrain and climate. We are distributing, selling and consuming “fresh foods” (or so the package says) days and weeks after they have been harvested.”

“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.”

“[The] concentration of our food supply is also a national security threat. A few dedicated terrorists with a crude map could, in a few days, wipe out most of the food supply of this country. We were much less vulnerable when farm animals were dispersed all over the country.”