When you pursue great flavor, you also pursue great ecology.

For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It's hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love - the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish - they've collapsed.

I said, 'Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?'

I think all chefs who pursue great flavor have good ethics.

It takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. Not very sustainable. It doesn't taste very good either.

I'm not here to say I don't eat vegetables - I do, a lot of them - but, from a soil perspective, they're actually more costly than a cow grazing on grass.

The greatest lesson came with the realization that good food cannot be reduced to single ingredients. It requires a web of relationships to support it.