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 problem with living in a fast-food nation is that we expect food to be cheap.

We still need to learn how to talk about food and education, because they haven't been talked about together, really. Education depends on our good health. It depends on our understanding of the environment and somehow we got those separate.

Create a garden; bring children to farms for field trips. I think its important that parents and teachers get together to do one or two things they can accomplish well - a teaching garden, connecting with farms nearby, weave food into the curriculum.

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.

This is the power of gathering: it inspires us, delightfully, to be more hopeful, more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive.

To have a basic ingredient that can be prepared a million different ways is a beautiful thing.