Quotes About Sustainability

Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. Cook it yourself. Eat anything you want—just as long as you're willing to cook it yourself.

Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist

The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but "health" is simply not one of them, because it is given.

But the western mind can't bear an opt- out option. we're going to have to re-fight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt-out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate. Joel Salatin

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.

how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world--and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.

Wrangham cites several studies indicating that in fact humans don't do well on raw food: they can't maintain their body weight, and half of the women on a raw-food regimen stop menstruating. Devotees of raw food rely heavily on juicers and blenders, because otherwise they would have to spend as much time chewing as the chimps do. It is difficult, if not impossible, to extract sufficient energy from unprocessed plant matter to power a body with such a big, hungry brain.

Sometimes the large scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back.

To plant trees," Russell Page wrote in his memoir, "is to give body and life to one's dreams of a better world.

Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.

we need, and now more than ever, to learn how to use nature without damaging it.

the typical item of food on an American's plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there

researchers found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies; spent on a whole food like carrots, the same dollar buys only 250 calories. On the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar, or 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate.

Today these four crops account for two thirds of the calories we eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some eighty thousand edible species, and that three thousand of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the human diet. Why should this concern us? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between fifty and a hundred different chemical compounds and elements in order to be healthy.

Among the many, many things the green thumb knows is the consolation of the compost pile, where nature, ever obliging, redeems this season's deaths and disasters in the fresh promise of next spring.

Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn]

Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.

One-fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food.)

The dinner we have eaten tonight," he told his audience in a 1928 lecture, "was a part of the sun but a few months ago." Industrial food both obscured these links and attenuated them. In lengthening the food chain so that we could feed great cities from distant soils, we were breaking the "rules of nature" at least twice: by robbing nutrients from the soils the foods had been grown in and then squandering those nutrients by processing the foods.

Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to the center of a well-lived life.

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

At every level, from the soil to the plate, the industrialization of the food chain has involved a process of chemical and biological simplification

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. (These

pensar no alimento como puro e simples combustível é interpretá-lo mal.