Ruth Reichl
I've always hated Zagat. If I'm going to listen to someone else's opinions on restaurants, I don't care if I agree or not. I just want to know who they are.
There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.
M. F. K. Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life.
We in America have gotten addicted to cheap food. The result of that is antibiotic-laden fish, foods that are bred to be portable.
One of the effects of cheap food is, we have food that is so unsatisfactory. We need to go back to flavor.
You can be a decent critic if you know about food, but to be a really good one, you need to know about life.
I was in Berkeley when the food energy in America was in Berkeley. Then it moved to Los Angeles, and I went to Los Angeles. It moved to New York, and I went there.
The implications of Americans devoting their lives to fast food are more profound than the fact that our kids aren't eating well. There are real repercussions that we need to know about and think about.
The truth is, as much as I loved writing restaurant reviews, it always felt very self-indulgent to me. It was so much fun, I loved doing it, but there's so much else to say about food.
I like to work. I believe that work helps us find our self worth.
What I like best is the challenge of learning something I didn't know how to do, going beyond my comfort level.
When I came to 'Gourmet,' I had no clue how to run a magazine; for television, I am fascinated to learn about editing.
A real woman is someone who knows what she wants. If you want to stay home, that's fine, but you have to be clear-eyed.
I don't care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.
Some magazines are run from the top down, where the editor-in-chief decides what every article is going to be and who's going to write them, and then they're doled out. My idea is to do it the opposite way, to do it from the bottom up.
My idea of management is that what your job is as the boss is to find really good people and empower them and leave them alone.
I came from a family where, you know, we sat down at the table every night, and you better have a story to tell. My father never wrote his stories down. And you know, I learned that they went farther if you wrote them down.
I don't have my own garden; we're on shale and in the woods. And if I did have a garden, the deer and chipmunks and squirrels and bears would eat everything anyway.
Let's face it: my life tends to revolve around food, and I love feeding people.
I like poached eggs, but I'll make scrambled or fried or whatever anybody wants.
Given a choice between great food and boring company or boring food and great company, I'll take the great company any day.
If you're going to tell stuff, you might as well tell the real stuff.
If you have caviar, the way to eat it is by the spoonful. Don't combine it with shrimp, pomegranate seeds and huitlacoche.
Reading an audio book is a very odd experience because there are three people sitting out there while you're reading in this glass booth, and you can see their reactions.
If you really taste a doughnut, it's pretty disgusting. They taste of grease.
I have to admit I've never had a Fruit Loop.
I couldn't live without butter. Butter is probably my single favourite food.
I think it's part of the DNA of human beings. We are a cooking animal. What differentiates us from all the other animals is that we cook and they don't.
You look at the Barefoot Contessa or Lydia Bastianich, and it's just like watching your mother cooking.
I have to say I know much more about football than I would like to, because my husband is a rabid football fan, and it's been so horrible.
What often, too often, happens in magazines is that you end up with a great editorial product, and then you're selling things that you don't really approve of.
In really good times, you say, 'No, I'm not taking that ad.' But in bad times, you'll take anything.
I'm a home cook, and I'm constantly embarrassed by twentysomethings who really do know the mechanics of cooking. How to build a sauce.
The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.
By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.
I once ate nothing but grapefruit for an entire month. I didn't lose a pound.
Hunger, I discovered, is very much a matter of the mind, and as I began to study my own appetites, I saw that my teenage craving had not really been for food. That ravenous desire had been a yearning for love, attention, appreciation. Food had merely been my substitute.
When I ate slowly and deliberately, giving myself time to consider whether I actually wanted that next bite, I often discovered that I didn't.
If you start with a great peach, there's nothing you're ever going to do that's going to make it any better than when it comes off the tree. In 1970, that was a revolution.
If we make it national policy that we will support small farmers the way we support agribusiness, we'll suddenly see it change in terms of the cost of organic food.
To me, cooking is man's natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I've ever done.
What I always do in times of trouble or stress is to try and do something I don't know how to do.
Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it's no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.
I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to share food; we're there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.
It was through cooking food and sharing it with each other that our ancestors learned how to become social animals.
Don't make a big to-do about the turkey; brine it, put it in the oven, and don't think about it again.
Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.Collection: Food
A thousand years ago the Chinese had an entirely codified kitchen while the French were still gnawing on bones. Chopsticks have been around since the fourth century B.C. Forks didn't show up in England until 1611, and even then they weren't meant for eating but just to hold the meat still while you hacked at it with your knife.Collection: Years
One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don't know how to do, to keep learning.Collection: Inspiring