I always knew the importance of it, since I was three or four years old my mother used to feed me wine and water. I grew up with wine as liquid food.

If you go back to the Greeks and Romans, they talk about all three - wine, food, and art - as a way of enhancing life.

When I hosted the dinner I served fast food hamburgers. It had nothing to do with black, white, purple, yellow, green race. it had nothing to do with Tiger or his family or his golf game.

As a freelance writer, I do be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.

Music is my No. 1 passion. If you made me choose between music and food, it is definitely music.

One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.

Everyone would talk about their diets and working out and what it made me do was go to craft services where all the food for the cast and crew was and I would eat.

In corn, I think I have found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.

Fairness forces you - even when you are writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

If you are out, and starving, and need a bite to eat, then you need fast food.

A few years ago, kids from poor areas in France were asked to draw items of food. For a chicken, they drew a drumstick. For a fish, they drew a fish stick. Those are extremes, but there is a lot that needs to be done to help children discover good food.

Talking about food is like talking about your dreams. Everyone has something to say. We all have to eat, it is just what we eat which differs. Some people eat for fuel and I feel bad for them.

Mexican food is far more varied than people think. It changes like dialects. I was brought up in Jalisco by the sea on a basic diet - tomatoes, chillis, peppers of every size and rice, which is a Mexican staple. The Pacific coast has a huge array of seafood.

I think the water dictates how food will taste in a country. In England the apples taste unlike apples grown in any other place. England is an island, there is a lot of salt in the air and in the water. I think that has something to do with it.

Latin food suffers like Chinese. You can do marginal Chinese and be successful. You can do crappy Mexican and be packed.

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.