Alice Waters Food Quotations

The problem with living in a fast-food nation is that we expect food to be cheap.

I know once people get connected to real food, they never change back.

Food can be very transformational, and it can be more than just about a dish. That's what happened to me when I first went to France. I fell in love. And if you fall in love, well, then everything is easy.

It's hard to come into a new relationship with food unless you're engaged in an interactive way at an early age; it's hard to change your values.

The biggest thing you can do is understand that every time you're going to the grocery store, you're voting with your dollars. Support your farmers' market. Support local food. Really learn to cook.

I think America's food culture is embedded in fast-food culture. And the real question that we have is: How are we going to teach slow-food values in a fast-food world? Of course, it's very, very difficult to do, especially when children have grown up eating fast food and the values that go with that.

Food isn't like anything else. It's something precious. It's not a commodity.

Food culture is like listening to the Beatles - it's international, it's very positive, it's inventive and creative.

It's around the table and in the preparation of food that we learn about ourselves and about the world.

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.

Create a garden; bring children to farms for field trips. I think it's important that parents and teachers get together to do one or two things they can accomplish well - a teaching garden, connecting with farms nearby, weave food into the curriculum.

Buy foods from nearby farms and have that food served in the cafeteria.

I really like having someone who knows about food and what goes well together make a meal for me.

If I weren't involved with food, I'd be working in architecture. Design is that critical to me.

Organize yourself so you aren't struggling to shop at the last minute. When you have real food, it's very easy to cook.

I don't want food that comes from animals that are caged up and fed antibiotics. I am really suspicious of that kind of production of meat and poultry.

I just hope Americans come to understand that food isn't something to be manipulated by our teeth and shoved down our gullet, that it's our spiritual and physical nourishment and important to our well-being as a nation.

The fact that most kids aren't eating at home with their families any more really means they are eating elsewhere. They are eating out there in fast food nation.

When I first went to Paris in 1965, I fell in love with the small, family-owned restaurants that existed everywhere then, as well as the markets and the French obsession with buying fresh food, often twice a day.

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.

I am disappointed because nobody is talking about food and agriculture. They're talking about the diets of children, but they're talking about Band-Aids. We're not seeing a vision.

I'm unwilling to eat food that has been adulterated.

First, kids should be involved in the production of their own food. They have to get their hands in the dirt, they have to grow things. They also have to become sensually stimulated, and the way to begin is with a bakery.

A lot of equipment can get in the way of the connection with food, with touching and feeling.

I'm always changing my work, as there are endless ways to think about food.

In countries around the world, people spend more money on food because they know how precious it is.

Usually, cheap food is not nutritious. You're feeding people, but you're not really feeding people something that is good for them.

I don't think it ever works to tell people what they can't eat. They can do it for so long, and then they fall off. You have to bring them into a new relationship with food.

We all need to know how to cook. I can buy a chicken and have many meals come from it. Is it affordable? Yes. Cheap? No. I want to pay the farmers the right price for food. They deserve it. They are the most important people in the country besides our teachers.

A whole set of values comes with fast food: Everything should be fast, cheap and easy; there's always more where that came from; there are no seasons; you shouldn't be paid very much for preparing food. It's uniformity and a lack of connection.

Basically, the person in the White House should be principled, should have a philosophy about food that relates directly to organic agriculture. I will continue to push for that.

English food writer Elizabeth David, cook and author Richard Olney and the owner of Domaine Tempier Lulu Peyraud have all really inspired the way I think about food.

Good food depends almost entirely on good ingredients.

Let things taste of what they are.

Good food should be a right not a privilege

Let things taste the way they are.

This is the next dimension of the farmers' market in San Francisco. It's to bring Slow Food people from across the country into this experience to celebrate what we have in this country -- all these special artisan products in these little pockets.