I think right now the focus of people involved in food issues have to be legislative resolution at the county, city, state, and national level. I just don't think we can run away from it anymore.

The whole decision to do my show was that I was trying to "true up" my work life and my personal life and I wanted the principles in both of them to be the same. And the only way that I could think of to do that was to make a show about exploring cultures through food that demonstrated those principles with every story that we told.

There's a great book by my friend Nate Garvis called Naked Civics that was very important in my development as someone with a social conscious and that has become, I guess, something of an activist.

I think right now the focus of people involved in food issues have to be legislative resolution at the county, city, state, and national level. I just don't think we can run away from it anymore.

Remember, one in every five people in America goes hungry and there are certainly a whole lot of folks who are getting three meals a day who do know where their next week's food is coming from who are very sensitive to this issue who would like everybody to be fed. Add to that the number parents who have children in schools who would like their children to be eating healthy, wholesome food and don't want sugary sodas or chocolate milk to be chuggable at any moment of the day by their kids.

Don't eat till you're full, eat till you're tired.

It's just starting. I think it's going to take another year and a half to get up to critical mass, but everybody loves Chinese food, Thai food, Japanese food, and it's all been exploited. The Filipinos combined the best of all of that with Spanish technique. The Spanish were a colonial power there for 500 years, and they left behind adobo and cooking in vinegar - techniques that, applied to those tropical Asian ingredients, are miraculous.