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Food is a lens for culture.

I think that food ties us to our community and our traditions, and it's the thing that makes us feel good and connected.

Food as a hobby used to be an elite pastime, and it has become something that is totally ordinary for people of every background. In that way, we see the growing up of the American food scene: that it's okay to be a regular person and be really into food.

Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.

Food has become such an interesting issue in the nation and the world.

I used to have a monthly cookery column, and am a big cook, so that whole sense of connecting what one does with food to one's cultural identity has always been fascinating to me.

As a culture, we really like our food passive.

Food is an excellent way to do very elegant worldbuilding - the kind that can make a fictional world seem real, like it extends way past the edges of the frame.

There are a lot of great things about food, but it's something that's an eternal struggle in our contemporary society, where and how food is made, where it's coming from, how much to consume. There are so many layers to it.

I realized that food was actually a metaphor for bringing us all together. It's about us communicating and being like family.