“A collective spasm of carbophobia seized the country,...”

“In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a “dead concept,” but equally unhealthywere all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-abracand mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time.”

“There are scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases; in countries where people eat a pound or more of vegetables and fruits a day, the rate of cancer is half what is in the United States.”

“Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.”

“When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.”

“...There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. ”

“But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter.”