We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don't have grocery stores. They have to get on a bus and take a long ride to get to a source of fresh produce.

It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

I get letters from classes all the time. Say it's assigned in someone's 8th grade class, and the teacher asks everyone to write a letter to me about their impressions and what they learned. So, it's incredibly gratifying to hear.

...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

I try very hard to tell stories and not lecture. I try to approach things as an amateur and not an expert, so that when I'm doing something, I'm starting out in a place a lot like where my readers start out - which is to say, naïve.

When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.

Cooking (from scratch) is the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being.