Omnivore's Dilemma

spiritual. I could see now how characteristic that mixing is, and that perhaps the sentence isn’t so awkward after all: “One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.”

The end result of this adventure was what I came to think of as the Perfect Meal, not because it turned out so well (though in my humble opinion it did), but because this labor- and thought-intensive dinner, enjoyed in the company of fellow foragers, gave me the opportunity, so rare in modern life, to eat in full consciousness of everything involve

This is why Howard spent so much time studying peasant agricultural systems in India and elsewhere: The best ones survived as long as they did because they brought food forth from the same ground year after year without depleting the soil.

There are things in it that will ruin their appetites. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing.

the word “organic” to food and farming occurred much more recently: In the 1940s in the pages of Organic Gardening and Farming. Founded in 1940 by J. I. Rodale, a health-food fanatic from New York City’s Lower East Side, the magazine devoted its pages to the agricultural methods and health benefits of growing food without synthetic chemicals—“organ

As it happens, in the years since Howard wrote, science has provided support for a great many of his unscientific claims: Plants grown in synthetically fertilized soils are less nourishing than ones grown in composted soils;1. such plants are more vulnerable to diseases and insect pests;2. polycultures are more productive and less prone to disease

And yet the new follies we are perpetrating in our industrial food chain today are of a different order. By replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize, we are taking ris

I asked him what was on his bookshelf. J. I. Rodale. Sir Albert Howard. Aldo Leopold. Wes Jackson. Wendell Berry. Louis Bromfield. The classic texts of organic agriculture and American agrarianism.

“decidedly Eastern, connected, holistic product, and selling it through a decidedly Western, disconnected, reductionist Wall Streetified marketing system.”