Chefs have a new opportunity - and perhaps even an obligation - to inform the public about what is good to eat, and why.

When you start at catering college, nobody prepares you for a book tour or public speaking.

I only have the restaurant. If I do other things, it's only to do with the restaurant.

I had turned down other head chef jobs. I didn't want to take over someone else's cuisine. I wanted to start from scratch.

When you get close to the raw materials and taste them at the moment they let go of the soil, you learn to respect them.

That's how people make sense of a meeting: they eat something. If they were in a sad moment it would be the same thing, they'd be eating something. It's what makes life fun. We don't need it to be delicious or great or all these things if we're just to survive. But it's one of those things that makes life fun, livable. And the more I submerge myself in it, the more fun I seem to have.

21 years ago when I started cooking, to be a cook meant that you were going to stay in the basement. Being a chef, you would never be on a book tour. You could never dream that 20 years later on you would be on a book tour. It wasn't a part of your dreams because it was just totally unrealistic. When did cooks - restaurant cooks, not cooks that have 15,000 television shows - when did cooks become part of pop culture the way they are?