Sustainable Cooking Quotes

As a chef, I feel that it is my duty to make the most of what the earth gives us.

Cooking Tip: Wrap turkey leftovers in aluminum foil and throw them out.

I've been using carrot tops to make pesto and broccoli stalks to make broccoli 'rice.' There's no reason to throw those things away - just get creative.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

When a banana gets rotten people love to tell you that you can make banana bread out of it. I have never seen anyone actually do it.

Learning about issues such as sustainability and locavorism are things that you need to have as part of you as a chef because it will make you cook more delicious food.

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?

Like in Africa, if somebody doesn't have fuel, they're still going and collecting firewood. If they get an oven, that's a huge difference. You can do things to reduce the inequities by making sure that they can get clean energy, safe energy. To make sure they're not having to collect water every day. That's huge for women in the developing world.

Celery leaves are an underused ingredient, most likely because supermarkets sell mostly leafless stalks.

When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.

My goal is to make Italian food clean and accessible and beautiful and tasty, with simple ingredients that people can find at a local grocery store, because people don't want to go to a gourmet shop in search of items that will sit in their pantry for years after they use just a teaspoon or pinch of them.

I'm a chef, I'm a cook, I was created by this industry, and I like to think I'm giving back. But I'm not giving back because I can make a scallop souffle, I'm giving back because I can make compost.

To transfer food into a bowl from a pan that you've just cooked in, it's a loss of energy; it's wasteful. People think it's very sophisticated, I don't think it's so smart.