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)

Barbara Kingsolver: "Food is not a product..."

"Food is not a product but a process, and it never sleeps. It just goes underground for a while."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver: "People might wish to..."

"People might wish to sleep in, but cows never do."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver:" A thriving field of..."

"A thriving field of vegetables is as needy as a child, and similarly, the custodian's job isn't done till the good have matured and moved out."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver: "'Perfect' is not the..."

"'Perfect' is not the currency of farming."

—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: "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.