As a freelance writer, I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.

Music is my No. 1 passion. If you made me choose between music and food, it's definitely music.

One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.

Everyone would talk about their diets and working out and what it made me do was go to craft services where all the food for the cast and crew was and I would eat.

In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.