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.

There is no conflict between a better meal and a better world.

Cooking, I mean, food, cooking foods is just everything that I do from morning to night. It's how I choose to live my life: through cooking, people that are in food culture. And I love it.

If you see how a plant grows and you taste it in situ you have a perfect example of how it should taste on the plate.

If you see someone in the kitchen that has good hands and a quick brain, then you need that person to be in the front of everything.

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?

I still cook at home. A lot of chefs I think don't cook at home. But I still do, I love cooking at home, I love having friends.