People are familiar with 'the stick' of the Tea Party... challenging incumbents, flooding the phone lines. What they're not so much familiar with, and what I want to expand, is 'the carrot.' So when a Mitch McConnell, or when a Republican caucus stands firm... we have to reward them.

The way I eat in my day-to-day life is, like, very simple to the point of being absurd. Like, my boyfriend makes fun of me because if I'm eating a snack, it's often, like, a pickle and then a hard-boiled egg and then crackers and then maybe a carrot, and it's like I'm eating like a baby.

Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future, even if you don't make those investments.

It's the aspirations that capitalism is promoting as beautiful, positive attributes that are dangerous. All that is in the bedrooms of the poor and in the villages of the Third World, and it's like a cruel carrot that's being waved in front of people's noses. It's a seduction, an unattainable dream.

I love essential oils - there's one for every problem. It's kind of like nature's answers for what to put on your skin. I had acne when I was a teenager, and I did a pretty intense tea tree thing. You dilute it in a base oil, like carrot seed oil, which is good because it gives your face a little glow.

I think everyone can recognize the one-upmanship and the competition that go on wherever you are, especially among groups where the women don't have to hold down office jobs and instead get in a total snit about who won the longest carrot contest or took first prize for summer chutney in the August fete.

U.K. psychologist Daniel Nettle thinks of happiness as a carrot on a stick, designed by evolution to show the right way, and also designed so that we will never permanently reach it. We likely would just sit around and eat sweet and fatty foods all day, and that is simply not in the interest of evolution.

I love carrot cake - that's probably my favorite - and I'm obsessed with peanut butter. I eat anything with peanut butter - maybe not carrot cake with peanut butter - but, I think I got this from 'The Parent Trap': Oreos and peanut butter; I like that. And peanut butter and apples, peanut butter and chocolate.

Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it's pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.

For people who are at the bottom economically, the world is becoming a harder and harder place. And yet the incentives to become rich are so great because enormous amounts of wealth are being accumulated. And so those two things, that carrot and stick, are beating people along this trajectory of trying desperately to move up in the world.

If you truly get in touch with a piece of carrot, you get in touch with the soil, the rain, the sunshine. You get in touch with Mother Earth and eating in such a way, you feel in touch with true life, your roots, and that is meditation. If we chew every morsel of our food in that way we become grateful and when you are grateful, you are happy.

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