The Kobe craze really annoyed me. Most of the practitioners had no real understanding of the product and were abusing it and exploiting it in terrible and ridiculous ways. Kobe beef should not be used in a hamburger. It’s completely pointless.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

I would say there are some foods that I strongly recommend that you do not eat. No. 1 on that list, I believe, is doughnuts. Comfort food. Zero value. Don’t eat them.

I’m not trying to take New York by storm. I just want to sneak in there, keep my head down, batten down the hatches and cook.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

I’m just wanting to make the proper breakfast and keep the house. That’s my passion. At the request of my kids, I’m taking cooking classes. As I go to sleep at night, I think, ‚Did I do a great job as a mom, or was that an average day?‘

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

I’m sure that at no point in my life could I ever have shown the kind of focus and discipline and commitment necessary to work a station at elBulli or Le Bernardin. No. That ain’t me.

Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish – too much handling will spoil it.

After a hard day of basic training, you could eat a rattlesnake.

I’ve never eaten a strawberry in my life. I have no desire to do that.

I love a Hebrew National hot dog with an ice-cold Corona – no lime. If the phone rings, I won’t answer until I’m done.

I cook, I create, I’m incredibly excited by what I do, I’ve still got a lot to achieve.

When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink – boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts.

The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that’s what’s happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal.

Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it.

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

Eating is so intimate. It’s very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you’re inviting a person into your life.

Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Oh yes, there’s lots of great food in America. But the fast food is about as destructive and evil as it gets. It celebrates a mentality of sloth, convenience, and a cheerful embrace of food we know is hurting us.

‚Kitchen Confidential‘ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to minus 271.3*C – not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.

What nicer thing can you do for somebody than make them breakfast?

The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.

It’s very hard when you eat out every day for a living, and a new restaurant comes along and you haven’t got that same vigour that you had 10 years ago.

Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you’ve got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it’s a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

I love food.

Barbecue may not be the road to world peace, but it’s a start.

Some people wanted champagne and caviar when they should have had beer and hot dogs.

I’ve been my mom’s kitchen helper since I was a little kid.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

Those places I don’t understand, just doing bad food. It takes some doing. Making good pasta is so much easier than making bad stuff. It actually takes quite an effort to make poor linguine pomodora.

I was mischievous. I wasn’t bad. I stole food so we could eat. My mother didn’t know. I used to tell her some man gave me $10 to sweep out the yard. I was like Robin Hood. I took from the rich and gave to the poor. Me.

My mom had Julia Child and ‚The Fannie Farmer Cookbook‘ on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

I’m not looking to freak people out – eating rodents or bugs. I don’t do that anymore.

Of course, animals have to be killed for food or to prevent their doing injury to others or to property. But such killing is too often carried out without regard to the pain inflicted.

My mother cooked like a scientist. She had a giant Chinese-style cleaver that she chopped with, and a cupboard full of spices.

Another suggestion is to cook a meal, maybe not every night, but a couple more times a week than you usually do. That way you have leftovers, and you take your lunch to work.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

My weaknesses have always been food and men – in that order.

Why can’t I just eat my waffle?

I try to very hard to avoid a situation where I would be eating cat or dog; I’ve managed to gracefully avoid that. It’s hypocritical of me and an arbitrary line, but one that I have managed to avoid crossing.

Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.

I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.

I eat steak primarily. That’s pretty much what my diet consists of. Sometimes I supplement that with other steaks.

Kitchens are hard environments and they form incredibly strong characters.

I’ll bring my grits when I travel, because I get so hungry on the road.

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I’m taking with me when I go.

Understand, when you eat meat, that something did die. You have an obligation to value it – not just the sirloin but also all those wonderful tough little bits.

I hid myself in food.

Wherever I go, as long as I get a hot vegetable dish, I am okay. If I am in Gujarat, I have Gujarati food. If it’s Shillong, it’s northeastern.

Every chef I know, their cholesterol is through the roof. And mine’s not so great.

I’m just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.

Nobody in Singapore drinks Singapore Slings. It’s one of the first things you find out there. What you do in Singapore is eat. It’s a really food-crazy culture, where all of this great food is available in a kind of hawker-stand environment.

Life would pall if it were all sugar; salt is bitter if taken by itself; but when tasted as part of the dish, it savours the meat. Difficulties are the salt of life.

After an era of everything being super-sized, who would have thought that major companies would be racing to market smaller, lower-calorie versions of their snacks and beverages – from half-sized candy bars to little, mini soda cans? We see it everywhere we go.