On the plane, I like to read fiction set in the location I'm going to. Fiction is in many ways more useful than a guidebook, because it gives you those little details, a sense of the way a place smells, an emotional sense of the place. So, I'll bring Graham Greene's The Quiet American if I'm going to Vietnam. It's good to feel romantic about a destination before you arrive.

If you've ever hauled a 28-pound two-year-old around New York, you'll find that men fold at the knees a lot quicker than women.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things - and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

Food is so personal - I mean someone is talking to you when people are cooking for you. I like to hear an identifiable voice.

The bible of cooking. The all-time argument ender. Early in my cooking career, I wielded my Larousse like a weapon and it never let me down.

If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It's reflective of history, often a painful history. It's central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It's communication at its most fundamental.

You know, it's not the world I would have wanted, for sure.