I feel like old age in America is a very sad thing. I have been many different places around the world where getting older is something you look forward to.

Good food is a right, not a privilege. It brings children into a positive relationship with their health, community and environment.

This is the power of gathering: it inspires us, delightfully, to be more hopeful, more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive.

When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.

How we eat can change the world

Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.

I am confident that we will see a growing consensus about the most effective way to transform food in America: building a real, sustainable and free school-lunch program.

I believe that every child in this world needs to have a relationship with the land...to know how to nourish themselves...and to know how to connect with the community around them.

The decisions you make are a choice of values that reflect your life in every way.

We have to bring children into a new relationship to food that connects them to culture and agriculture.

To have a basic ingredient that can be prepared a million different ways is a beautiful thing.

Why doesn’t anyone go to the moon anymore? What happened to our optimism?

It's not communism, it's shouldn't be that everybody gets a try no matter how good or bad they are. It's our profession and our art, so we should eventually strive to be working with the best people.

You can't overestimate the need to plan and prepare. In most of the mistakes I've made, there has been this common theme of inadequate planning beforehand. You really can't over-prepare in business!

I've always felt like I'm from another planet.

One of these days, you're going to fall in love with some guy, and you're not going to know what to do with yourself.

But really I'm not terribly interested in what I eat.

You cannot be happy with your family while being personally unhappy with your work. It's a Catch-22 kind of thing.

Any harm you do to a man should be done in such a way that you need not fear his revenge.

I went to a number of foreign countries, and during whenever I went, I would try to go to an orphanage or a home for children. And I was seeing thousands of kids around the world that needed homes.

I am and always will be a catalyst for change.