My idea of good living is not about eating high on the hog. Rather, to me, good living means understanding how food connects us to the earth.
Obviously, if I'm in Argentina, I'm going to have a steak, but I don't love meat, really. I always think about where the food came from and who had to get it.
I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.
Laos is a country where everything is eaten. When I came back, I would find myself chopping parsley and thinking: 'Why am I throwing these stems away? They're perfectly edible.'
I'm not a vegetarian, but while I don't want to defend it, I try to be mindful about the amount of animal products I consume. I eat a lot of vegan meals at home, and I'm okay with paying more for higher quality meat and eggs as a tax.
To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
I was raised vegan. My mom would always make quinoa with squash and kale, hippie stuff like that. Now I eat meat, but I try to be conscious about where it's coming from.
In my home I tend to eat a very simple version of what we cook at the restaurant, which is vegetable-oriented, with a little bit of fish and very little meat. For instance, a dish in my home could be steamed spinach with spruce, where I take a spruce branch and put it in the pot and that infuses into the spinach.
I'm not a gourmet. I just like the planet.
I'm not a big chicken or meat eater, but sometimes I'll eat it if it's locally raised. The family dinner will be stir-fry, or we'll roll our own sushi with brown rice, spinach, salmon, sesame oil, sesame seeds, and seaweed. The kids love it!
It's really important to teach people how to get food, how to grow it, how to pick it, how to prepare it and what's safe to eat.
I'm not crazy about oysters and offal and brains and stuff like that. It's vegetables that I really like. I worked in the River Cafe restaurant when it first opened, and I used to eat the leftover vegetables on the plates. They were so delicious.
Beef should be organic and grass-fed; fish should be wild, not farm raised.
When I can afford it, I'm very into organic food and I love going to restaurants that use organic produce and such. I think that it's a shame for everyone that, unfortunately, organic can be pretty expensive, so you just do what you can.
If we really want to change the way Americans eat, we need to make delicious, sustainably-raised food accessible to everyone. Most people are not willing to sacrifice taste or pay a lot more when it comes to eating better. That's why the Chipotle model is so important.
As a consumer and a mom, I've always been interested in local products.
I eat meat, but no meat that isn't pastured is acceptable, and we probably need to eat a whole lot less.
I'm actually no longer a strict vegan. I don't hang out in the cheese section - I don't even eat cheese. I don't drink milk. But every once in a while I'll have an egg. I'm going to eat eggs that come out of my next-door neighbor's farm, that's just the way it is.
When I'm home, I cook my own dinner, all organic.
I won't eat frozen food and I like to know where my food has come from. I don't like anything going in my body that's from a packet. I used to eat microwave ready meals, because we were so busy, but now I like to eat clean.
I'm a bit of a dude. I like meat. But I am buying it more responsibly, where it's more sourced responsibly.
My family lived off the land and summer evening meals featured baked stuffed tomatoes, potato salad, corn on the cob, fresh shelled peas and homemade ice cream with strawberries from our garden. With no air conditioning in those days, the cool porch was the center of our universe after the scorching days.
I'm not completely vegan - my diet's probably about 80 percent plant based, but I do eat some meat. I try to know where everything comes from, though. And all bets are off if my husband and I go to a really great restaurant.
My father was an expert hunter, so we ate a lot of wild game when I was growing up in Montana. That helped broaden my palate generally, but I know it informed my distaste for factory farms and unspectacular commercial meat.
I go in the butchers and there's not a lot of meat I can eat these days, with having all the animals.
