TIME 100 Roundtables

On sustainable food
Anybody that loves to eat good food and is interested in pursuing good flavor is an environmentalist, is a nutritionist, is a community organizer, in that they build communities rather than destroying them. The best-flavored food comes from the most dynamic and most sustainable use of soil on a farmland, and that's a blessing. That's a nice way to be in business.

On home cooking
Simply put, people have to cook more. If we cook in our kitchen with fresh foods, we end up opting out of where most of our food is now coming from, which is to say a conventional food chain that makes its profits off processing, off adding to what is a raw material. If we just cook more, food becomes less processed, by definition.

On local food
What's missing from the local food chain, the regional food chain, is an infrastructure that makes sense and brings down the costs, because the cost in the game of sustainable food is in distribution — it's not in growing. It's an enormous misconception that smaller farmers are more inefficient than larger farmers, that farmers that grow in monocultures have huge advantages in economies of scale. It works for a year or two, but increasingly, as every credible study has shown, an acre of diversified, regional-specific farming for any vegetable is just as productive as an intensive monoculture.

On the end of cheap food
The industrial model, where most of our food comes from now, is dead. The success of our cheap food is based on three things: cheap oil, plentiful water and a constant weather pattern. So even if you don't believe in global warming, the one point that you can't really argue is that at some point in the future, the price of gasoline is going to go up, and the big food chain was built on $30 a barrel of oil not $130.