Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.

Cooking creates a sense of well-being for yourself and the people you love and brings beauty and meaning to everyday life. And all it requires is common sense – the common sense to eat seasonally, to know where your food comes from, to support and buy from local farmers and producers who are good stewards of our natural resources.

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

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.

If our public school system is a truly democratic institution. It's the place where we can reach every child in this county from kindergarten. What an opportunity to edibly educate them. I don't just mean a glorified cooking class. I've never thought of it that way. I have always thought of it as a way to empower students to learn, to give them confidence, and to nourish them. So, I think the centerpiece has to be a free, sustainable school lunch for every child.

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.