In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.

Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you.

High-quality food is better for your health.

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.

The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn't have. It's very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that's going wrong in society.

Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.

Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat.

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.

People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.

When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest - the added sugars and fats in processed foods.

Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I'm writing about.

This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.

In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism.

The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.

There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.

Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.

You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on; this is the black hole of American politics.

A cow out on grass is just an incredible thing to behold... Cows and other ruminants can do things we just can't do. They have the most highly evolved digestive organ on the planet, called the rumen. And the rumen can digest grass. It takes grass, cellulose in grass, and turns it into protein, very nutritious protein. We can't do that.

A lot of what you see in the supermarket I would argue is not really food. It's what I call edible, food-like substances.

A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

After writing 'The Omnivore's Dilemma,' I wanted to write a book that got past the choir, that got to people who didn't care about how their food was grown but who did care about their health.

Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.

Animals raised on corn produce fattier meat, but it's not just that it's fattier, it's the kinds of fats. Corn-fed beef produces lots of saturated fats. So that the heart disease we associate with eating meat is really a problem with corn-fed meat. If you eat grass-fed beef, it has much more of the nutritional profile of the wild meat.

As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.

As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for 'better' jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories.

As soon as you plow, you're releasing carbon.

Basically, farm chemicals are labor-saving devices, and farmers who don't use them - weed killers especially - have to work harder or hire more help.

Bayer's planned acquisition of Monsanto promises to increase concentration in both the seed and agrochemical markets.

Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not only do plants nourish us bodily - they nourish us psychologically.

Depending on how you farm, your farm is either sequestering or releasing carbon.