Alice Waters Quotes

American food is the food of immigrants. You go back a couple of hundred years, and we were all immigrants, unless we're going to talk about Native American cuisine.

The podcast by 'The Kitchen Sisters' celebrates the staggering variety of a society of immigrants via its food, from the Sheepherders' Ball in Boise, Idaho, through the favoured cuisine of Emily Dickinson to the unbelievable rituals of the great rural barbecue.

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

America gave the world the notion of the melting pot - an alchemical cooking device wherein diverse ethnic and religious groups voluntarily mix together, producing a new, American identity. And while critics may argue that the melting pot is a national myth, it has tenaciously informed the America's collective imagination.

It may be the optimist in me, but I think America has a uniquely powerful and capacious glue internally. The American identity has always been ethnically and religiously neutral, so within one generation you have Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Jamaican-Americans - they feel American. It's a huge success story.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

They [the Americans] are a mixture of British, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race called Americans have now arisen.

Assimilation is what has made America great.

America is a country of immigrants. It's what makes America unique.

Nobody's American," said Wednesday. "Not originally. That's my point.

I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration. We fundamentally have been a culture that's been put together from the explosions of other cultures. But it's hard for us to see. We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is.

People from all over the world came to America and assimilated into a single culture rooted in the founding, which is rooted in individual liberty and primacy of citizen over government. Everybody who came here, that's what drew them.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.

You know that American dream and American spirit of innovation we always talk about? Turns out, the bulk of it was built by people who came to America from somewhere else, not people born American. We have no birthright or natural lock on these things.

I hear that melting-pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven't melted.

Sweden was once a very homogenous society, but no more. For decades, people have been coming into Sweden from all over the world, and that's changed the way we cook.

Our nation is built upon a history of immigration, dating back to our first pioneers, the Pilgrims. For more than three centuries, we have welcomed generations of immigrants to our melting pot of hyphenated America: British-Americans; Italian-Americans; Irish-Americans; Jewish-Americans; Mexican-Americans; Chinese-Americans; Indian-Americans.

America is a such a melting pot, I'm not sure if roast chicken is the classic comfort food for everybody.

Yeah, I think that's sort of the American way. And it's also the Polish way, it turns out.

When you get into the third or fourth generation of Latino immigrants to the United States, you see the kids speaking more English than Spanish, and it's important that we don't lose our identity, our language.

America is the sum of all our journeys as we search for our national community and our national culture.

America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!

I'm so proud of my Chinese ancestry, but I was born and raised in America, and I really believe in American values, our American system, our freedom, our liberties.

I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.