Just because the Americans are so good at rattling out accessible and cheap junk food, nobody looks twice when it comes to their food. But there are golden nuggets everywhere.
We need to realize that these industrial methods of farming have gotten us used to cheap food. The corollary of cheap food is low wages. What we need to do in an era when the price of food is going up is pay better wages. A living wage is an absolutely integral part of a modern food system, because you can't expect people to eat properly and eat in a sustainable way if you pay them nothing. In fact, it's cheap food that subsidized the exploitation of American workers for a very long time, and that's always been an aim of cheap food.
Much more has to be done to democratize the food movement. One of the reasons that healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food, whether you mean organic or grass-fed or whatever.
Food is the only snobbery allowed. Imagine pulling up in your expensive car alongside somebody at the lights with a cheap car and saying, 'Is that all you've got?' But people do it with food.
Food is strength, and food is peace, and food is freedom, and food is a helping hand to people around the world whose good will and friendship we want.
I think for diners, it is about crafting an identity around food which we have not really had in a mainstream way in this country. So there is a mass movement of people who identify themselves through their food preferences or even just that they prioritize food - that's where we get this idea of being a foodie.
I think it's possible to have food that's healthy, that's good for you to eat, that's also inexpensive. We don't have to have this cheap, unhealthy food being so aggressively promoted.
I think food is the great equalizer. Other than the ocean and the air, food is the thing that we all share in common. I think along with that comes the question of why are some people starving, and why do some people produce more food than they need, and why is food going to waste.
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.
When you grow up where healthy food isn't easily accessible, you eat a lot of processed food and whatever else is available - McDonalds, fast food, cheap food.
I go to the fanciest restaurants in the world and try them out. I like to see these chefs that are wizards do their thing. I like two types of food: cheap fast food - In-N-Out Burger, Taco Bell, stuff like that - or expensive food. Anything in between just bothers me.
The current fast food that we have is inexpensive when you buy it, but the long-term costs of eating it and the long-term costs to society, are much too high. This cheap food, when you add up all the total costs, is much too expensive.
We have food all around us all the time, and if we haven't eaten for three hours, we think we're starving. You're not starving - human beings can go for 30 days without food.
While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health.
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.
Nobody trusts the industrial food system to give them good food.