Alice Waters

Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.

If we don't preserve the natural resources, you aren't going to have a sustainable society. This is not something for Chez Panisse and the elite of San Francisco. It's for everyone.

The decisions you make are a choice of values that reflect your life in every way.

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 can remember the three restaurant experiences of my childhood. All I wanted to do on my birthday was to go to the Automat in New York... but I don't know if you consider that a real restaurant.

This is the power of gathering: it inspires us, delightfully, to be more hopeful, more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive.

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

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

I came to all the realizations about sustainability and biodiversity because I fell in love with the way food tastes. That was it. And because I was looking for that taste I feel at the doorsteps of the organic, local, sustainable farmers, dairy people and fisherman.

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.

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 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.

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

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

I feel it is an obligation to help people understand the relation of food to agriculture and the relationship of food to culture.

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.

We have to bring children into a new relationship to food that connects them to culture and agriculture.

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