A Quote by Dominique Crenn
As a chef, I've always been very conscious and very thoughtful about the way that I buy food or have my farmers produce it.
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The better the ingredients, the more farmers I can buy from, the closer I feel to the food I want to make that represents what I care about as a chef.
You do need some dispensation for local farmers, because the fast food industry will promote the unsanitary conditions of farming. With vegetables, you have to be careful where they come from; you have to know the farmers and trust them. If you buy from the farmers' market, it's already been investigated.
Go to the farmers market and buy food there. You'll get something that's delicious. It's discouraging that this seems like such an elitist thing. It's not. It's just that we have to pay the real cost of food. People have to understand that cheap food has been subsidized. We have to realize that it's important to pay farmers up front, because they are taking care of the land.
The traditional farm, the peanuts, the cotton, the corn, is probably not the thing to do, because you're up against big farmers who can afford all the equipment to grow those kinds of crops. But we need healthy food. We're being encouraged to eat more vegetables. Our school systems are being encouraged to buy locally. So, we need farmers who can produce that food.
The act of eating is very political. You buy from the right people, you support the right network of farmers and suppliers who care about the land and what they put in the food.
We have to understand that we want to pay the farmers the real price for the food that they produce. It won't ever be cheap to buy real food. But it can be affordable. It's really something that we need to understand. It's the kind of work that it takes to grow food. We don't understand that piece of it.
If there was ever a food that had politics behind it, it is soul food. Soul food became a symbol of the black power movement in the late 1960s. Chef Marcus Samuelsson, with his soul food restaurant Red Rooster in Harlem, is very clear about what soul food represents. It is a food of memory, a food of labor.
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.'
My food hero would be someone like Elizabeth David, because I think what she did for Britain was amazing. Also David Thompson, an Australian chef who does Thai food and really understands the basis of it, has always been very inspiring.
I really do think that cooking is very important. It's really important for the farmers because it means you're going to be buying real food and not processed food, so that means the farmers will capture more of your food dollar.
Marcus Samuelsson is a chef who inspires me everyday. He has such a deep understanding of flavors and techniques. His food is representative of the diverse world that we live in. What he has done in Harlem with Red Rooster is very special. Marcus is not just a chef, he's a food activist.
I know, for me, that I have always been very conscious of how I dress when I go to the studio, I'm very conscious of my body language when I'm working - a lot of times, I'm the only female in the room. It's a very male-dominated profession. I'm always around guys. Guys are going to try you all day, and they're going to flirt all day.
I've done my share of reading about Abraham Lincoln, throughout my life, and he wasn't always carved in stone. He was a human being. He was a very thoughtful, self-educated, complex, magnanimous human being, who was very, very strong, very smart and very canny, with a very strong sense of what was right and what was wrong. Through all that, he's become an icon, over the years, and some of his warmth and humanity has been lost. You don't tend to think of Lincoln as this warm, funny person, but he was.
When I grew up in Italy in the 1950s, it was still very agricultural. Food was very important; produce was very important. Everyone made their own olive oil. It took me a long time after I moved here to understand that Americans are much further away from their food.
I'm very honest about my food background; I've never tried to pretend like I was a chef.
Go to the grocery store and buy better things. Buy quality, buy organic, buy natural, go to the farmers market. Immediately that's going to increase the quality of the food you make.
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