Recognise excellence. Celebrate weirdness and innovation. Oddballs should be cherished, if they can do something other people can't do.

I think fine dining is dying out everywhere... but I think there will be - and there has to always be - room for at least a small number of really fine, old-school fine-dining restaurants.

On one hand we encourage and allow major pharmaceutical companies to openly hook vast sectors of our population on narcotics, and then we cut them off and throw them in jail, and moralize about it. It is clearly a huge, huge, and growing problem. It's devastating. We need to treat it as a health crisis, which it is, and stop moralizing.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

I, personally, think there is a really danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture.

I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport - would never do it and don't like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it's fine.

I don't have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what's appropriate or attractive.