Top 40 Alice Waters Quotes

I once had an Early Girl tomato at my friend Jay’s house, and I thought that was the best thing I’d ever had. But then I visited friends in Senegal, and I ate sea urchin pulled fresh out of the sea. It tasted like the ocean.

I feel like old age in America is a very sad thing. I have been many different places around the world where getting older is something you look forward to.

I wanted people to come to the restaurant and feel at home, so I put it in a house.

We’ve been so disconnected agriculturally and culturally from food. We spend more time on dieting than on cooking.

We eat every day, and if we do it in a way that doesn’t recognize value, it’s contributing to the destruction of our culture and of agriculture. But if it’s done with a focus and care, it can be a wonderful thing. It changes the quality of your life.

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

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

If I’ve gone to the market on Saturday, and I go another time on Tuesday, then I’m really prepared. I can cook a little piece of fish; I can wilt some greens with garlic; I can slice tomatoes and put a little olive oil on. It’s effortless.

I think health is the outcome of eating well.

I really appreciate the many neighbourhoods of Berkeley. There is still the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. And it has the University of California, which is the greatest gift, to my mind, to be close to it. It keeps the place alive.

Americans don’t have deep gastronomic roots. They wanted to get away from the cultures of Europe or wherever they came from. We stirred up that melting pot pretty quickly.

I have been talking nonstop about the symbolism of an edible landscape at the White House. I think it says everything about stewardship of the land and about the nourishment of a nation.

We make decisions every day about what we’re going to eat. And some people want to buy Nike shoes – two pairs, and other people want to eat Bronx grapes and nourish themselves. I pay a little extra, but this is what I want to do.

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

We need to have a course in school that teaches about ecology and gastronomy. I could imagine that all children could eat at school for free and that the cafeteria would become part of the school’s curriculum.

Food should be cheap, and labor should be cheap, and everything should be the same no matter where you go; whether it’s a McDonald’s in Germany or one in California, it should be the same. And this message is destroying cultures around the world. Needless to say, agriculture goes with it.

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.

When you have good ingredients, cooking doesn’t require a lot of instruction because you can never go very wrong.

I want every child in America to eat a nutritious, delicious, sustainably sourced school lunch for free.

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.

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.

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

I do feel like food should cost more, because we aren’t paying farmers a living wage. It has to cost more.

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.

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

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

My real emphasis is on the farmers who are taking care of the land, the farmers who are really thinking about our nourishment.

I believe there should be breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack, all for free and for every child that goes to school. And all food that is good, clean and fair.

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

I was a very picky eater.

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.

I think you have to plan ahead. When I go to the market on a Saturday, and I’m buying for family and friends, I’m thinking about what I’m going to eat on the weekend but also about what I’m going to make for the following week.

I eat meat, but no meat that isn’t pastured is acceptable, and we probably need to eat a whole lot less.

I’m an optimist. I’m hopeful.

I used to think that I wanted to be a hat maker, but I don’t think that would have worked out.

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

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

I really am at a place where I think we need to feed every child at school for free and feed them a real school lunch that’s sustainable and nutritious and delicious. It needs to be part of the curriculum of the school in the same way that physical education was part of the curriculum, and all children participated.

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

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.