A quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Globally speaking, people consume more soft drinks and packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh...

Corporate growers, if their only motive is profit, will find ways to follow the letter of organic regulations while violating their spirit.

We only knew, somewhat abstractly, we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both love your neighbor and try not to wreck every blooming thing on...

Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods....

I am not sure how so many Americans came to believe only our wealthy are capable of honoring a food aesthetic.

But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option.

The only useful generalization I'd hazard about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of insider vs. outsider. When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first...

Eaters must understand," Wendell Berry writes, "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,...

Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus.... Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it...

the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

Watching Italians eat {especially men, I have to say} is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute...

Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the...

Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of...

Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the...

April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant {among other things} that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep,...