My father had a series of blue-collar jobs and never made more than $20,000 a year. When I was seven, he got injured on a job. That was a very important point - because of the injury, he couldn't walk, and the company he was working for did not pay him. There was no compensation. So there was no money and no food.
All of the plants that we do not consider food that are safe for the human body to digest, we don't eat because they're sour and bitter. The reason why you don't eat Kentucky bluegrass or crabgrass is because it tastes sour and bitter.
Don't try to be the next Rachael Ray or Bobby Flay, we already have those people. We want someone who is going to make their own mark on 'Food Network.'
Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not only do plants nourish us bodily - they nourish us psychologically.
Our ancestors relied upon their advanced brains to survive during times of food shortage, and fortunately, the human brain is able to utilize body fat as an extremely efficient fuel to sustain function when glucose-providing food is unavailable.
Chicken fat, beef fat, fish fat, fried foods - these are the foods that fuel our fat genes by giving them raw materials for building body fat.
I've gone through literally over 30 years of struggle with weight and food and body image... and I'm like, 'Wait a minute.'
What is this drive to be thinner, prettier, better dressed, other? Who exactly is this other and what does she look like beyond the jacket she's wearing or the food she's not eating? What might we be doing, thinking, feeling about if we didn't think about body image, ever?
If your body needs certain food, you have to give it to it. And as an athlete, if I'm doing 100 miles a week and working out, if I eat bad food one day, it's not bad for me because I burn it off.
You could be doing a million butt lifts, but your butt is not going to get any bigger because there is nothing to build on. Your body needs food to make that happen.
I try to start every day with some sort of vegetable and fruit juice before I eat any kind of solid food. Because that really jump starts your body and digestive system with the high content of micronutrients that your body needs.
I was a celebrity bodyguard. I didn't keep the best hours or choose the best food when I was on the road.
I was always with a single mom, and we never had schedules or anything. We were just Bohemian, us against the world, which was kind of great, but it certainly didn't breed security. I've gotten hyper-sensitive to schedules and bath time and eating at the dinner table. We don't just 'Bohemian' go out at nine o'clock and go get Chinese food.
With 'Survivor' - I didn't get any sleep, there was no food, we had to boil our water... plus, it was physically taxing during the day. That's what made it more difficult than three-a-day practices.
I credit my grandmother for teaching me to love and respect food. She taught me how to waste nothing, to make sure I used every bit of the chicken and boil the bones till no flavor could be extracted from them.
My dining and entertainment philosophy - I can boil it down to 'the three C's - I like my food like my fashion: casual, classic, and with a touch of couture.
While a pot of boiling water may not offer the char or smoke of a grill, it does give the cook an advantage when it comes to seasoning food.
The temperatures required for caramelization and browning almost always far exceed the boiling point of water. So the presence of water on the surface of a food, or on the bottom of a pan, is a signal that browning can't yet occur.
It's easy for people in an air-conditioned room to continue with the policies of destruction of Mother Earth. We need instead to put ourselves in the shoes of families in Bolivia and worldwide that lack water and food and suffer misery and hunger.
The passengers in our microbiome contain at least four million genes, and they work constantly on our behalf: they manufacture vitamins and patrol our guts to prevent infections; they help to form and bolster our immune systems, and digest food.
