This productivity means Joel’s pastures will, like his woodlots, remove thousands of pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year; instead of sequestering all that carbon in trees, however, grasslands store most of it underground, in the form of soil humus. In fact, grassing over that portion of the world’s cropland now being used to grow grain

These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are “antifoaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding

The industrial values of specialization, economies of scale, and mechanization wind up crowding out ecological values such as diversity, complexity, and symbiosis.

since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass. A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.

By the same token, the digestive tract of primates like us has grown progressively shorter as we’ve evolved to eat a more varied, higher quality diet.

“In an ecological system like this everything’s connected to everything else, so you can’t change one thing without changing ten other things.

A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food.

At either end of any food chain you find a biological system—a patch of soil, a human body—and the health of one is connected—literally—to the health of the other.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is about the three principal food chains that sustain us today: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer.