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.

Change the food in the schools and we can influence how children think. Change the curriculum and teach them how to garden and how to cook and we can show that growing food and cooking and eating together give lasting richness, meaning, and beauty to our lives.

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.

We can't think narrowly. We have to think in the biggest possible way.

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

If Ive gone to the market on Saturday, and I go another time on Tuesday, then Im really prepared. I can cook a little piece of fish; I can wilt some greens with garlic; I can slice tomatoes and put a little olive oil on. Its effortless.

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.