The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.

There are things we know and things we don't know about food. But there are certain basic things we do know, and that's what I've tried to build these rules on.

All the arguments about nutrition are really about what is the problem ingredient in the western diet. Is it the fat? Is it the lack of fiber? Is it the refined carbohydrates?But we don't have to worry about it. We just have to try to get off that diet to the extent we can.

When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.

It's really important for your health, because you will never use as much salt and fat and sugar as a corporation will use cooking for you.

Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

It's very important to get out, to do reporting. It's also really interesting. I come at it as a journalist, and I think that's helped me, and I come at it as someone who sees nature wherever he looks, and that helps.