Eric Schlosser Quotes

Buy foods from nearby farms and have that food served in the cafeteria.

All schools should teach children basic cooking skills. Every school should be able to buy sustainable, good quality food wherever possible from local sources. Every school should include food-growing in the curriculum. For some, that will mean twinning with willing farms. For others, it will mean literally building their own small farms.

Our commitment to serving produce from local farms and other sustainable sources is one of the ways we are changing the way people think about and eat fast food.

I've got to find local farmers and get natural foods.

Change the food in the schools and we can influence how children think. Change the curriculum and teach them how to garden and how to cook and we can show that growing food and cooking and eating together give lasting richness, meaning, and beauty to our lives.

One reason we planted the White House vegetable garden was to set an example about what food can mean, but to also begin a broader conversation about how we're feeding our kids, what they know about the food that they eat, how they're taking care of themselves.

A farmer friend of mine told me recently about a busload of middle school children who came to his farm for a tour. The first two boys off the bus asked, "Where is the salsa tree?" They thought they could go pick salsa, like apples and peaches. Oh my. What do they put on SAT tests to measure this? Does anybody care? How little can a person know about food and still make educated decisions about it? Is this knowledge going to change before they enter the voting booth? Now that's a scary thought.

People complain that cities don't have fresh, sustainable food, but it's just not true.

The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.

We've become slaves to words like 'local,' 'fresh,' and 'seasonal.' We all want to be Thomas Jefferson's agrarian hero, but sustainable food is a difficult beast.

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

I love to shop at the farmer's market or grab something from the garden and roast that.

We want our communities to know what real food is.

Remember, one in every five people in America goes hungry and there are certainly a whole lot of folks who are getting three meals a day who do know where their next week's food is coming from who are very sensitive to this issue who would like everybody to be fed. Add to that the number parents who have children in schools who would like their children to be eating healthy, wholesome food and don't want sugary sodas or chocolate milk to be chuggable at any moment of the day by their kids.

Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldn't spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit.

To have 95% of the ingredients sourced, food and wine, within 100 miles radius, that's a dream come true for any chef.

The chef has kids complaining to their parents the food they get in school is better than what they get at home. He's turned this group of kids into curious, adventurous eaters.

Every kid in every school no matter their background, deserves to learn the basics about food - where it comes from, how to cook it and how it affects their bodies. These life skills are as important as reading and writing, but they've been lost over the past few generations. We need to bring them back and bring up our kids to be streetwise about food.

Imagine a world where children were fed tasty and nutritious, real food at school from the age of 4 to 18. A world where every child was educated about how amazing food is, where it comes from, how it affects the body and how it can save their lives.

I find a lot of people say, “Oh organic and local’s expensive and I just don’t have time.” And I’m like, well how much TV do you watch? Where are your priorities right now? I always take the time to eat well and eat locally because it’s common sense.

Some kids have never seen what a real tomato looks like off the vine. They don't know where a cucumber comes from. And that really affects the way they view food. So a garden helps them really get their hands dirty, literally, and understand the whole process of where their food comes from. And I wanted them to see just how challenging and rewarding it is to grow your own food, so that they would better understand what our farmers are doing every single day across this country and have an appreciation for ... that American tradition of growing our own food and feeding ourselves.

If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. But when none of this is presented to them, if they're not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever you put in front of them.

We do children an enormous disservice when we assume that they cannot appreciate anything beyond drive through fare and nutritionally marginal, kid-targeted convenience foods. Our children are capable of consuming something that grew in a garden or on a tree and never saw a deep fryer. They are capable of making it through diner at a sit-down restaurant with tablecloths and no climbing equipment. Children deserve quality nourishment.

I’ve met kids who haven’t had the best of parents but because they had something in them, or they had somebody at school help develop them, they turned out fine.

We have to grow our food differently because industrial farming will soon end. That means growing more food locally on smaller farms with more human attention.