Marcus Samuelsson Quotes

I cook British food, but it doesn't mean I'm jingoistic about it. People can cook very good fusion 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 is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as food. Just like I would never write about baseball just as baseball.

Using food as a way of understanding empire is highly effective. Food knows no barriers of race, gender or even time.

For me, cooking is an expression of the land where you are and the culture of that place.

It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.

Ang Lee was educated in the West and his English is good.

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

From food trucks to hot dog stands to county fair favorites, 'street food' has enjoyed a rich and storied history in American cuisine. However, street food has been around for thousands of years. In fact, street food is believed to have originated as far back as Ancient Rome.

Old cookbooks connect you to your past and explain the history of the world.

The world is getting more connected through technology and travel. Cuisines are evolving. Some people are scared of globalization, but I think people will always take pride in cultural heritage.

Food culture is like listening to the Beatles - it's international, it's very positive, it's inventive and creative.

Food is a way to explore culture and ground the story in a specific time and place. I still remember the meals and snacks from my first novel, 'Shug': pork chops and applesauce and Coca-Cola and peanuts, which are very Southern. When a character has roots elsewhere, food is a way to connect with home and another culture.

To know a community is to know its food.

I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us - about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.

I take a cooking class everywhere I travel. I find it's the best way to get to know a culture.

I don't have doctrinaire views about how we should relate to Asia. But novelists reflect the world they live in, and that world propels you, to some extent. I'm a creature of the British Empire, and of the period of transition from the Empire.

Everyone is so estranged; no one is rooted. That's what I like to write about more than anything else. Everything being so mixed up. Racially mixed up, people moving from place to place, everything shifting.

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

My work has been much more Caribbean and eclectic. I am interested in people, and where they come from happens to have fallen within an area of Africa.

You have to remember that I was an Australian girl of the Fifties and Sixties. For Australians at that time, it was imperative to get out of the country and discover the world.

So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else.

I do notice that when I come in to meet casting people, they love that I'm Australian. Maybe it's our good work ethic.

Walking into a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the rural area of Malaysia is the cheapest trip to America many Malaysians will ever be able to take.

For the vast majority of humans in history, people lived, traveled, worked and died within a few miles of their birthplace.