It's so funny because my mom is Thai and my dad is this big American guy - and our food tastes were so similar growing up. He was meat and potatoes, I was meat and potatoes.
I know when I was little, having my Thai mom, even I was weird about fish sauce and fish heads and clams. I kind of sided with my dad because he was a big American guy. So, we were very meat and potatoes, but I really wish I had grown up appreciating my mom's taste a bit more.
Meat is a big deal in my life. I do love breakfast food, but I don't think that's extraordinary. I'm a normal American. We love eggs and meat and potatoes and gravy.
For the Anglo-Saxons, meat was the main meal of the day, which revolved around 'before-meat' and 'after-meat.' But it has ended up as the metaphor for the most basic: 'meat and potatoes' is as far from sassy - from 'sauce' - as you can get.
I stopped eating carbs and red meat for a month and a half, and I was like, 'Oh, no, I lost my butt!' I have to eat potatoes and rice and meat to bulk up. But I do try not to eat too much fast food.
I was a big Jersey meat-and-potatoes kind of guy before I got here.
Chicago's always been known as this meat and potatoes place, and a lot of restaurants play that up. They try to outdo each other by adding another 10 ounces, so their 80 ounce steak becomes a 90 ounce steak with 10 pounds of mashed potatoes on the side.
At Thanksgiving, my mom always makes too much food, especially one item, like 700 or 800 pounds of sweet potatoes. She's got to push it during the meal. "Did you get some sweet potatoes? There's sweet potatoes. They're hot. There's more in the oven, some more in the garage. The rest are at the Johnson's."
There are many people who don't do well on a vegetarian or vegan diet, that for them, meat is a very nutritious food. So, I'm not prepared to give up meat. I don't think we need to give up meat, but we certainly need to change the way we raise meat and diminish the amount of it in our diet.
Meat eaters don't like me because I call for moderation, and vegetarians don't like me because I say there's nothing wrong with eating meat. It's part of our evolutionary heritage! Meat has helped to make us what we are. Meat helps to make our big brains.
Meat is an inefficient way to eat. An acre of land can yield 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but that same acre would only graze enough cows to get 165 pounds of meat.
"Yeah, well, if you eat red meat, it stays in your colon for fifteen years!" Good! I paid for it; I want it in my ass, okay? I want them to find a meat sweater from my esophagus to my asshole when they open me up in the end! "This guy's covered in meat! He's Meat-Man! He's Meat-Tracheotomy-Man!"
I basically have the diet of a 19th-century Irish navy, apart from the litre of stout a day. It's meat and potatoes and bread and cheese: those are my four food groups.
Unless we change our food choices, nothing else matters. Because it is meat that is destroying most of our forests. It is meat that pollutes the waters. It is meat that is creating disease which leads to all our money being diverted to hospitals. So, it's the first choice for anybody who wants to save the Earth.
I love to cook comfort food. I'll make fish and vegetables or meat and vegetables and potatoes or rice. The ritual of it is fun for me, and the creativity of it.
I don't have a strict diet; I keep it simple. I try to eat fish, meat, veg and carbs - potatoes and rice - but I'll try and pack it in because as I'm burning so much energy. I have to see food as an energy source.
My mum and my husband are from Irish backgrounds, so we have a lot of potatoes. Chips, mashed, boiled, new potatoes, I love them all. Even the slightly wonky ones like Duchess potatoes that go up in a little spiral.