Chef

I have a fireplace in my kitchen that I light every night, no matter what.

You have to take it upon yourself and preserve and can foods that you'll want for the winter.

People have become aware that way that we've been eating is making us sick.

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.

I am an optimist of the first order.

I know once people get connected to real food, they never change back.

I guess I don't really believe in retirement. I believe in shorter days and maybe in weekends!

I really like having someone who knows about food and what goes well together make a meal for me.

When you have good ingredients, cooking doesn't require a lot of instruction because you can never go very wrong.

I came to all the realizations about sustainability and biodiversity because I fell in love with the way food tastes. That was it. And because I was looking for that taste I feel at the doorsteps of the organic, local, sustainable farmers, dairy people and fisherman.

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.

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.

Food should be cheap, and labor should be cheap, and everything should be the same no matter where you go; whether it's a McDonald's in Germany or one in California, it should be the same. And this message is destroying cultures around the world. Needless to say, agriculture goes with it.

I love those tiny little onions in the spring that are so small they're almost like a little chive.

If I weren't involved with food, I'd be working in architecture. Design is that critical to me.

Whenever I want to know how to cook something, I can't ask one chef - I have to ask six.

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.

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.

Food culture is like listening to the Beatles - it's international, it's very positive, it's inventive and creative.

In countries around the world, people spend more money on food because they know how precious it is.