Food Authenticity Quotes

You go to any town, any city, any state in America and there's always a McDonald's. In a lot of places around the world, it's almost the same thing. And Nikki Giovanni was like, "Damn, where are we keeping all these cows?" And it made me think to myself, like, "Damn, where are we keeping all these cows?!" It makes me think that the beef we're eating isn't even close to being real. There can't even be enough cows in the whole world just to sustain the appetites of just Americans! I'll always remember that.

Believe me, I did not come to London to cook farmed fish. All my fish are wild.

Most brown bread is merely white bread with a fake tan.

There are certain foods that are somewhat sacred or you're not supposed to mess with. When you do mess with them, it touches a nerve where you have to compare it to the original, and then that thing you're creating has a loosing change right out of the gate.

I'm obviously very hippie-like, and I'm always in a different city and town and country, and I thought, 'Why is it that the big food chains are always so promoted? I want the whole ingredients. I don't want preservatives. I want what this town and these farmers produce and see how their chefs create.'

If you are writing about baloney, don't try and make it Cornish hen, because that's the worst kind of baloney there is. Just make it darn good baloney.

If you start with a great peach, there's nothing you're ever going to do that's going to make it any better than when it comes off the tree. In 1970, that was a revolution.

Adopting big-business practices is one thing, and adopting agribusiness practices that would dilute the meaning of 'organic' is another. On the whole, I think we're doing a pretty good job of preserving the integrity of organic foods.

The French fried potato has become an inescapable horror in almost every public eating place in the country. 'French fries', say the menus, but they are not French fries any longer. They are a furry-textured substance with the taste of plastic wood.

Nobody makes bouillabaisse from scratch. It's all a bunch of malarkey. Even the restaurants buy a commercial-grade product. I had a very famous chef tell me that.

It's difficult when you travel around America to get local food; it used to be very easy. You went from town to town and were more in touch with things.

A Finnan haddock has a relish of a peculiar and delicate flavour, inimitable on any other coast than that of Aberdeenshire. Some of our Edinburgh philosophers tried to produce their equal in vain. I was one of a party at dinner where the philosophical haddocks were placed in competition with the genuine Finnan fish. These were served round without distinguishing whence they came; but only one gentleman out of twelve present espoused the cause of philosophy.

I hate turkeys. If you stand in the meat section at the grocery store long enough, you start to get mad at turkeys. There's turkey ham, turkey bologna, turkey pastrami. Some one needs to tell the turkey, 'man, just be yourself.'

I was possibly the first to showcase Chinese ingredients. So I was one of the first to say, 'Hey, you do not have to use imported vegetables to make it good.'

Really annoys me any time I see Asian fusion too. Asia is a big place; which Asian are you talking about? You notice it's never Uzbek or Tajik food. It's Thai, and it's generally insulting.

My role as a chef is respecting the produce. Why should I change and mask the original flavors of the produce that I'm utilizing?

Now you can get artisanal everything - pickles, coffees, house-cured meats, mustard. The pendulum has swung back to this kind of food, and it gives me the greatest hope for the future, especially because we're living in a time with issues like polluted Gulf Coast seafood and food labeled organic that may not really be organic.

Growing up in Mexico, I know what real Mexican food is - and isn't.

All of my books have been about authentic Italian food in Italy and bringing that message about simple and authentic food.

What we've done with our modern food supply is absolute insanity. It's not even real any more. You used to be able to give a kid an apple and they would love it. Kids can't even taste apples any more. Apples taste like paper to kids now.

People want honest, flavourful food, not some show-off meal that takes days to prepare.

When you cut that eggplant up and you roast it in the oven and you make the tomato sauce and you put it on top, your soul is in that food, and there's something about that that can never be made by a company that has three million employees.

Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone... Bad food is fake food... food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people's ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives.

Don't go and cook Indian food if you never cooked Indian food, you know?

My job is to show people that true Mexican cheese is not neon yellow cheese. We don't eat tacos all day long and we don't eat burritos stuffed with everything in the kitchen sink.