Barbara Kingsolver: "It seemed so ordinary..."

"It seemed so ordinary on the face of things, to try to do what nearly all people used to do without a second thought."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (on growing one's own food)

Wendell Berry: "Eaters must understand..."

"Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used."

—Wendell Berry

Barbara Kingsolver: "'This is New York...'"

"'This is New York', she assured me. 'We can get anything we want, any day of the year.' So it is. And I don't wish to be ungracious, but we get it at a price. Most of that is not measured in money, but in untallied debts that will be paid by our children in the currency of extinctions, economic unravelings, and global climate change."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver: "It is both extraordinary...

"It is both extraordinary and unsympathetic in our culture to refrain from having everything one can afford."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver: "I enjoy denial as..."

"I enjoy denial as much as the next person, but this isn't rocket science: our kids will eventually have to make food differently."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver: "It's true what the..."

"[It's] true what the strategists say about hearts and minds - you have to win them both. We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to... but when we want to."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver: "At its heart..."

"At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver: "Where are our ingrained..."

"Where are our ingrained rules of taste and civility, our ancient treaties between our human cravings and the particular fat of our land? Did they perhaps fly out the window while we were eating in a speeding car?"

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver: "Owing to synthetic fertilizers..."

"Owing to synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, genetic modification, and a conversion of farming from a naturally based to a highly mechanized production system, U.S. farmers now produce 3,900 calories per U.S. citizen, per day. That is twice what we need, and 700 calories a day more than they grew in 1980.

Commodity farmers can only survive by producing their maximum yields, so they do. And here is the shocking plot twist: as the farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day. That is the well-oiled machine we call Late Capitalism."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver: "When we walked as..."

"When we walked as a nation away from the land, our knowledge of food production fell away from us like dirt in a laundry-soap commercial."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver: "The baby boom psyche..."

"The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor, and dirt - two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.

Is the story of bread, from tilled ground to our table, less relevant to our lives than the history of the thirteen colonies?"

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver: "In two generations we've..."

"In two generations we've transformed ourselves from a rural to an urban nation. North American children begin their school year around Labor Day and finish at the beginning of June with no idea that this arrangement was devised to free up children's labor when it was needed on the farm.