Much more has to be done to democratize the food movement. One of the reasons that healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food, whether you mean organic or grass-fed or whatever.
We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize these four crops - five altogether, but one is cotton - and these are the building blocks of fast food. One of the ways you democratize healthy food is you support healthy food.
Students are very engaged by the issues, and it's not surprising because food choices are one of the few powers a child has.
Once you introduce the issue to young people and suggest to them that they have the ability to vote with their forks, either by positively going for certain kinds of foods or rejecting other kinds of foods, they realize that this is a responsibility and an opportunity to shape the world a little bit by their own choices.
My hope is that if people have the knowledge, and if they actually see where their food comes from and have access to the information, they will make better ethical choices.
Pay more, eat less. Diversify your diet and eat wild foods when you can.
I think historically modern economics, capitalist economics, tends to erode moral categories... And this is where I think the right gets capitalism wrong. They kind of assume that there is a moral equivalence or moral valence to capitalism, but I tend to think that economics erodes all the kind of cultural taboos and inhibitions and values it comes into contact with.
I really try to write as an ordinary person would, not as someone who's too sophisticated about food, or too knowledgeable about things.
I get letters from classes all the time. Say it's assigned in someone's 8th grade class, and the teacher asks everyone to write a letter to me about their impressions and what they learned. So, it's incredibly gratifying to hear.
The issue of snacking is complicated. In principle, "grazing" is probably a good idea. It would even out the insulin spikes and things like that from eating large meals. The problem is it makes it harder for people to control the amount they're eating.
We're always projecting our moral categories on things. I think that's inevitable. But capitalism places no particular value on morality. Morality in the market is enforced by contract and regulation and law, because morality is understood to be in conflict with the motive force of greed and accumulation.
Journalism is one set of tools - one toolkit I have. One vocabulary, one lens.
The best farming systems are ones where animals and plants are put into a synergistic relationship.
There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.
It's estimated that about 30 percent of the increase in grain prices could be attributed to the decision to embrace biofuels, particularly corn-based ethanol. It has done nothing for climate change and the business is in real trouble now with the collapse of oil prices. It's completely dependent on a dollar subsidy and tariff from the government.
Oil companies have gas stations. There's this whole huge structure that is about finding a new liquid for the tank. And the idea that maybe there shouldn't be a liquid, that maybe the best is an electrical grid, a sustainably powered electrical grid that we all plug into, that doesn't sit well with oil companies.
I'm kind of a homebody, and the rhythm of my thinking and work is starting at home, going out and coming back, bringing back news, bringing back information, applying it.
Not that I'm against meat eating. But I think we're eating too much.
There are fundamental tensions between the biological reality of the planet and the economic reality. To some extent you can adapt the economy, create a new set of rules and incentives to send it down a better track, but finally people in the first world are going to have to consume a whole lot less.
I don't like writing as an expert. I like writing as an amateur. I like writing as an idiot. It's much more fun to start in ignorance.
The only one I have any trust in is storytelling - there's a couple I have a lot of trust in.
I think using waste oils as fuel makes sense. We do waste a huge amount of vegetable oil in this country and using that as a fuel source strikes me as fine.
I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.
Avoid food products that make health claims. at meals and eat them only at tables. And no, a desk is not a table.
We're spending, on average, 27 minutes a day cooking and about four minutes cleaning up, so basically about a half hour. Any one of TV shows takes twice as long to watch as that, which I think is very interesting because the main excuse people give for not cooking is they don't have time to cook, but somehow they're finding time to watch other people cook or eat on TV.
