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Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology.

Progress makes us lose the feeling of a ceremony that cooking should have. It has significantly shifted our values so that now it seems to us that only activities with an economic reward are worth pursuing.

I have always read all the latest cookery books and magazines, from all over the world.

Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing, and some learn from books.

I wouldn't say that processed food, ready meals and even takeaways aren't relevant to modern life, it's just that over the past 40 years there are three generations of people who have come out of school and gone through their home life without ever being shown how to cook properly.

Cooking is all about people. Food is maybe the only universal thing that really has the power to bring everyone together. No matter what culture, everywhere around the world, people get together to eat.

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

Since the Renaissance, a concept called 'progress' has been baked into our society. Progress - founded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case of science, through experiment). To build on the past rather than endlessly relive it. That's what separates us from the beasts.

If we're eating industrially, if we're letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook our food, we're going to have a huge, industrialized, monoculture agriculture because big likes to buy from big. So I realized, wow, how we cook or whether we cook has a huge bearing on what kind of agriculture we're going to have.

I don't feel my capabilities in cookery are as big as my desire - as with so many aspects of my life.