For a dinner date, I eat light all day to save room, then I go all in: I choose this meal and this order, and I choose you, the person across from me, to share it with. There's a beautiful intimacy in a meal like that.

Never try to get your kid to eat anything she doesn't already want to eat. Just eat interesting stuff in front of her while completely ignoring her. Never, ever suggest "try it." Never say those dreaded words "try it, it's good." Or worse, "It's good for you." That'll poison the well.

In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful.

As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc.," an overwhelmingly large percentage of "new," healthy," and "organic" alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. "They got you comin' and goin'" has never been truer.

Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

Don't lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don't do it again. Ever

In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.