The thing that helped me get into the film business was that I went to school in Athens, Georgia and managed to get on, um, working on music videos for a band called R.E.M. and that kind of opened up a lot of doors for me.

The skin is forming because of proteins, just like if you cook milk or anything else that's got a coagulant protein in it.

I am a filmmaker. That is all I've ever been. You know, Martin Scorsese makes films about the mob. And I make movies about food.

I never spoke about politics, with the exception of Election Night.

You know we fixate on the food so much itself: “Oh, the ultimate brownie or the ultimate this or that” -- well, let me tell you something: It’s all poop in about 12 hours, okay? The real power that food has is its ability to connect human beings to each other -- that’s the stuff right there and, to me, everything else is secondary to that.

I'm an absolute connoisseur of cheeseburgers and like to think that I can detect even mere percentages of shift in fat content in ground meat in a burger and can actually name the temperature to which it was actually cooked to the degree if I'm, you know, really on my game.

I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth - I just hate what is being done with it.