Quotes About Sustainability

To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesticides found their way into any farmworker's bloodstream, no nitrogen runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed, no soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no subsidy checks were written. If the high price of my all-organic meal is weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from the larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in karmic terms, like a real bargain.

The mysteries of germination and flowering and fruiting engaged me from an early age, and the fact that by planting and working an ordinary patch of dirt you could in a few months' time harvest things of taste and value was, for me, nature's most enduring astonishment.

Treat meat as a flavoring or special occasion food.

Thousands of plant and animal varieties have fallen out of commerce in the last century as industrial agriculture has focused its attentions on a small handful of high yielding and usually patented varieties, with qualities that suited them to things like mechanical harvesting and processing.

Here in my garden the second law of thermodynamics is repealed. Here there is more every year, not less. Here it is ever early, never late. Here, in the ungainly form of a Sibley squash, newness comes into the world.

One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.

To eat corn directly (as Mexicans and many Africans do) is to consume all the energy in that corn, but when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90 percent of its energy is lost—to bones or feathers or fur, to living and metabolizing as a steer or chicken.

There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well—everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn.

pile, I started to see the golden kernels everywhere, ground into the mud by tires and boots, floating in the puddles of rainwater, pancaked on the steel rails. Most of this grain is destined for factory farms and processing plants, so no one worries much about keeping it particularly clean. Even so, it was hard not to register something deeply amiss in the sight of so much food lying around on the wet ground.

The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.

What gets a steer from 80 to 1100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.

YOU ARE WHAT WHAT YOU EAT EATS TOO.

IF YOU HAVE THE SPACE, BUY A FREEZER.

Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain- new muscle, fat, and bone.

The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef.

century ago, the typical Iowa farm raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. Now it raises only two: corn and soybeans.

Madison, Deborah. Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmer's Markets (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). Nabhan

Monoculture is where the logic of nature collides with the logic of economics; which logic will ultimately prevail can never be in doubt.

GET OUT OF THE SUPERMARKET WHENEVER POSSIBLE.

EAT WILD FOODS WHEN YOU CAN.

So much of the intelligence and local knowledge in agriculture has been removed from the farm to the laboratory, and then returned to the farm in the form of a chemical or machine. "Whose

When most of us think about food and health, we think in fairly narrow nutritionist terms—about our personal physical health and how the ingestion of this particular nutrient or rejection of that affects it. But I no longer think it's possible to separate our bodily health from the health of the environment from which we eat or the environment in which we eat or, for that matter, from the health of our general outlook about food (and health).

DON'T GET YOUR FUEL FROM THE SAME PLACE YOUR CAR DOES.

Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.