Alice Waters Quotes

I always knew that food and wine were vital, with my mother being Italian and a good cook.

Usually I wear my grandma's old aprons, or others I have collected in my travels. When I was young, I would sit and watch my grandma prepare stuff. She wasn't Italian, but she did really good Italian food.

My grandmother was the genesis of my connection and passion to food.

A chef's palate is born out of his childhood, and one thing all chefs have in common is a mother who can cook.

My mother and my grandmother are pioneers of Mexican cuisine in this country, so I grew up in the kitchen. My mom, Zarela Martinez, was by far my biggest influence and inspiration - and toughest critic.

I don't have a long family history of good cooks in my family.

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

My mom's collard greens. No one else in the world can make them like hers. I'm not just saying that because she's my mom. She's got some Mississippi secret. I could seriously eat them every day.

I cook the food of Macau, my roots and soul food.

Many of the things the slow food people honor were innovations within historical times. Somebody had to be the first European to eat a tomato.

I'm a simple hillbilly. I don't like eating modern, industrialized, fast food. I grew up eating home-cooked food. So when I'm traveling abroad, like when I recently received a six-month writing fellowship to Iowa in the U.S., I like to cook my own food.

I love the simplicity, the ingredients, the culture, the history and the seasonality of Italian cuisine. In Italy people do not travel. They cook the way grandma did, using fresh ingredients and what is available in season.

Nobody cooks anymore. To me, to watch your parents cook, and to have a house that smells warm and delicious, is a very vital memory that I think kids don't really have anymore.

My mother always cooked, every day, proper food. We didn't have fast food. It was probably pretty much meat and two veg, but as time went on and new things came into the culture, she embraced all of that. I grew up with mealtimes and sitting around the table with proper cooking and eating.

I think it's important to recall... what you remember your grandmother making, where you're from and the foods you enjoyed as a child yourself, and pass that information off to your kids.

I think that food ties us to our community and our traditions, and it's the thing that makes us feel good and connected.

Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.

My wife was born and raised in Italy until she was about 9, and then she came to America, and her mom was a great cook, and they have great recipes, and whenever her mom would come into town, we would have all these friends just randomly showing up at our house, and eventually we figured out why. They wanted Mama's cooking.

I think America's food culture is embedded in fast-food culture. And the real question that we have is: How are we going to teach slow-food values in a fast-food world? Of course, it's very, very difficult to do, especially when children have grown up eating fast food and the values that go with that.

There's just so much love that goes into home cooking, and I think it will really help the American family overall. I'm hoping to maybe get a cookbook out one day because I've got some great family recipes.

All the women in my family were superb cooks.

I was raised cooking my grandmother's food, my mom's recipes.

Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.

Progress makes us lose the feeling of a ceremony that cooking should have. It has significantly shifted our values so that now it seems to us that only activities with an economic reward are worth pursuing.

For me, food is all about nostalgia.