"Eating is an agricultural act."
— Wendell Berry (What Are People for Essays By Wendell B)

"Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors--however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"Here are two facts that should not both be true:
- There is sufficient food produced in the world every year to feed every human being on the planet.
- Nearly 800 million people literally go hungry every day, with more than a third of the earth's population -- 2 billion men and women -- malnourished one way or another, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization."
— Michael Dorris (Rooms in the House of Stone)

"If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona. When this giant new tap turned on, developers drew up plans to roll pink stucco subdivisions across the desert in all directions. The rest of us were supposed to rejoice as the new flow rushed into our pipes, even as the city warned us this water was kind of special. They said it was okay to drink but don't put it in an aquarium because it would kill the fish.

Drink it we did, then, filled our coffee makers too, and mixed our children's juice concentrate with fluid that would gag a guppy. Oh, America the Beautiful, where are our standards? "
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, is emblematic of the whole dirty deal. Having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency. Maintaining a natural breeding poultry flock is a rebellion, at the most basic level, against the wholly artificial nature of how foods are produced. "
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"[pages 120-123 on growing organic vegetables]"
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"He cannot wisely consent to spend the best years of his life in getting ready to live."
— Horace Greeley (What I know of farming)

"The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all."
— Wendell Berry

"When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings."
— Masanobu Fukuoka (One-Straw Revolution)