Let things taste of what they are.

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.

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 want every child in America to eat a nutritious, delicious, sustainably sourced school lunch for free.

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.

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

Eating is an environmental act.