Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Organize yourself so you aren't struggling to shop at the last minute. When you have real food, it's very easy to cook.
It's so important to that we go into the public schools and we feed all of the kids something that is really good for them.
My real emphasis is on the farmers who are taking care of the land, the farmers who are really thinking about our nourishment.
I feel it is an obligation to help people understand the relation of food to agriculture and the relationship of food to culture.
Usually, cheap food is not nutritious. You're feeding people, but you're not really feeding people something that is good for them.
Good food is a right, not a privilege. It brings children into a positive relationship with their health, community and environment.
This is the power of gathering: it inspires us, delightfully, to be more hopeful, more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive.
I have a love affair with tomatoes and corn. I remember them from my childhood. I only had them in the summer. They were extraordinary.
The dinner table is a rite of civilization and we need to participate in that to keep our families together, to keep our communities together.
When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.
The way we subsidize food makes it cheaper to go to McDonald's and get a hamburger than a salad, and that's insane. It's pure government policy.
It's hard to come into a new relationship with food unless you're engaged in an interactive way at an early age; it's hard to change your values.
It is a fundamental fact that no cook, however creative and capable, can produce a dish of a quality any higher than that of its raw ingredients.
I don't want food that comes from animals that are caged up and fed antibiotics. I am really suspicious of that kind of production of meat and poultry.
When you're really considering all the qualities of food, purity is right there at the top of the list. I'm unwilling to eat food that has been adulterated.
I feel like old age in America is a very sad thing. I have been many different places around the world where getting older is something you look forward to.
I believe there should be breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack, all for free and for every child that goes to school. And all food that is good, clean and fair.
The fact that most kids aren't eating at home with their families any more really means they are eating elsewhere. They are eating out there in fast food nation.
Everything tastes better with butter. Meat that has fat in it is tender in a certain way, flavorful in a certain way. It's hard to deny the flavor quotient there.
English food writer Elizabeth David, cook and author Richard Olney and the owner of Domaine Tempier Lulu Peyraud have all really inspired the way I think about food.
If we want children to learn to tend the land and nourish themselves and have conversations at the table, we need to communicate with them in ways that are positive.
In Berkeley, we built the garden and a kitchen classroom. We've been working on it for 12 years. We've learned a lot from it. If kids grow it and cook it, they eat it.
I am confident that we will see a growing consensus about the most effective way to transform food in America: building a real, sustainable and free school-lunch program.
Americans don't have deep gastronomic roots. They wanted to get away from the cultures of Europe or wherever they came from. We stirred up that melting pot pretty quickly.
I feel that good food should be a right and not a privilege, and it needs to be without pesticides and herbicides. And everybody deserves this food. And that's not elitist.
I don't think it ever works to tell people what they can't eat. They can do it for so long, and then they fall off. You have to bring them into a new relationship with food.
The act of eating is very political. You buy from the right people, you support the right network of farmers and suppliers who care about the land and what they put in the food.
Basically, the person in the White House should be principled, should have a philosophy about food that relates directly to organic agriculture. I will continue to push for that.
I believe that every child in this world needs to have a relationship with the land...to know how to nourish themselves...and to know how to connect with the community around them.
I am disappointed because nobody is talking about food and agriculture. They're talking about the diets of children, but they're talking about Band-Aids. We're not seeing a vision.
If we don't preserve the natural resources, you aren't going to have a sustainable society. This is not something for Chez Panisse and the elite of San Francisco. It's for everyone.
My kitchen has a wood-burning oven, a large worktable, and windows all around, including one above the sink. I think whoever is washing the dishes needs to have a lot of beauty around.
I have been talking nonstop about the symbolism of an edible landscape at the White House. I think it says everything about stewardship of the land and about the nourishment of a nation.
I can remember the three restaurant experiences of my childhood. All I wanted to do on my birthday was to go to the Automat in New York... but I don't know if you consider that a real restaurant.
The biggest thing you can do is understand that every time you're going to the grocery store, you're voting with your dollars. Support your farmers' market. Support local food. Really learn to cook.
Food can be very transformational, and it can be more than just about a dish. That's what happened to me when I first went to France. I fell in love. And if you fall in love, well, then everything is easy.
We need to have a course in school that teaches about ecology and gastronomy. I could imagine that all children could eat at school for free and that the cafeteria would become part of the school's curriculum.
Hard-boiled eggs are wonderful when they're really done right. I bring the water to a boil, and then I put in the eggs. And then I boil them for - well, it depends on the size of the egg - maybe eight minutes.
When I first went to Paris in 1965, I fell in love with the small, family-owned restaurants that existed everywhere then, as well as the markets and the French obsession with buying fresh food, often twice a day.
Our full humanity is contingent on our hospitality; we can be complete only when we are giving something away; when we sit at the table and pass the peas to the person next to us we see that person in a whole new way.
People cooked with a certain integrity before fast food, 50 or 60 years ago. When the cheap food arrived, and we didn't have the education and deep cultural roots to hold on, we got swept away by fast, cheap and easy.
I just hope Americans come to understand that food isn't something to be manipulated by our teeth and shoved down our gullet, that it's our spiritual and physical nourishment and important to our well-being as a nation.
First, kids should be involved in the production of their own food. They have to get their hands in the dirt, they have to grow things. They also have to become sensually stimulated, and the way to begin is with a bakery.
In terms of kids not liking the food, I am shocked. I know that it's not true. I know that when kids are not educated about healthy food, they have a resistance to it. The resistance comes, again, from the fast-food culture.
I once had an Early Girl tomato at my friend Jay's house, and I thought that was the best thing I'd ever had. But then I visited friends in Senegal, and I ate sea urchin pulled fresh out of the sea. It tasted like the ocean.
Because only slow food can teach us the things that really matter - care, beauty, concentration, discernment, sensuality, all the best that humans are capable of, but only if we take the time to think about what we're eating.
I think you have to plan ahead. When I go to the market on a Saturday, and I'm buying for family and friends, I'm thinking about what I'm going to eat on the weekend but also about what I'm going to make for the following week.
We make decisions every day about what we're going to eat. And some people want to buy Nike shoes - two pairs, and other people want to eat Bronx grapes and nourish themselves. I pay a little extra, but this is what I want to do.
I think the biggest impediment to fixing the food system in the United States is that we expect food to be cheap. We want to by other things with our money. We're so disconnected from agriculture - from the culture in agriculture.
It's interesting that we are sensorially deprived. And not always because of poverty or hunger, but because we have been really indoctrinated into such a way that we don't sit in the present. Technology takes the place of food often.