“-perhaps by sitting down to enjoy one of the microwavable organic TV dinners(four words I never expected to see conjoined)stacked in the frozen food case.”

“Organic Oreos are not a health food. When Coca-Cola begins selling organic Coke, as it surely will, the company will have struck a blow for the environment perhaps, but not for our health. Most consumers automatically assume that the word "organic" is synomymous with health, but it makes no difference to your insulin metabolism if the high-fructose corn syrup in your soda is organic.”

“I like to be able to open a can of stock and I like to talk about politics, or the movies, at the dinner table sometimes instead of food.”

“I wondered if this wasn't a case of making the ideal an enemy of the good, but Salatin was convinced that industrial organic was finally a contradiction in terms. I decided I had to find out if he was right.”

“The final standards do a good job of setting the bar for a more environmentally responsible kind of farming but, as perhaps was inevitable as soon as bureaucratic and industrial thinking was brought to bear, many of the philosophical values embodied in the word "organic" - the sorts of values expressed by Albert Howard - did not survive the federal rule making process.”

“Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.”

“A charge often levied against organic agriculture is that it is more philosophy than science. There's some truth to this indictment, if that it what it is, though why organic farmers should feel defensive about it is itself a mystery, a relic, perhaps, of our fetishism of science as the only credible tool with which to approach nature. ... The peasant rice farmer who introduces ducks and fish to his paddy may not understand all the symbiotic relationships he's put in play--that the ducks and fishes are feeding nitrogen to the rice and at the same time eating the pests. But the high yields of food from this ingenious polyculture are his to harvest even so.”