Food Adaptation Quotes

Re-colonizing it and sort of reverse-colonizing it to the point that today the national dish of Great Britain is Chicken Tikka Masala.

I'm more comfortable weaving Indian flavors into American classics.

Chicken masala is now Britain's true national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences.

I think Korean barbecue is very accessible to Americans because it's sort of similar to something we know, but with different flavours.

Throughout history, particularly in the last 2,000 years, Jews have been key in adapting local foods to Jewish sensibilities and dietary laws and then spreading them.

When people are poor, they find ways of making things taste like fish.

If you were a Colombian, you would have your version of an empanada. If you are an Argentinean, you might find a dough that's baked and has a butter sheen on it. And then in Ecuador, you'll find more crispy-fried empanadas. So, yeah, every culture has their own version of empanadas.

Pizza is a great segue into unfamiliar flavors - plus, you can pile on the veggies.

You may say, "Oh, no. You can't touch a traditional recipe." But we ask: why can't you? Back in 1350, a vinaigrette was a stew, so we ask, why not? This can be applied to any kind of cooking, and that's the shocking part of it. It kind of bends all the traditions. It's a good thing.

All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it's all up for grabs. From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse.

Our pasta primavera was born when I promised fresh pasta with tomatoes and basil to critic Craig Claiborne, but we had no tomatoes.

The one important rule I have with the kids is that when we go to a place, we eat what they eat. I'm not bringing food or going to waste time trying to find foods that I know they like. Eating is a part of travel.

You know why the French hate us so much? Thay gave us the croissant. And you know what we did with it? We turned it into our croissandwich, thank you very much.

Some of the recipes in the book have evolved for us. Many haven't.

In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.

It's true that cilantro has a strange, strong flavor. People seem to love it or not like it at all. Even I didn't like it at first when I had it in Peru. But I got used to it - it's hard not to in South America - and now I can't live without it.

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.

Just because it tastes good in Hong Kong, it doesn't necessarily translate elsewhere.

The first time I had sushi, I hated it. And the second time was no different, and then, I just started loving it. I actually crave for sushi. It's one of the healthiest meals. My experiments with food began when I was working in New York as an architect, be it Korean or Ethiopian food or fusion food.

One of the keys to Jewish culinary history is that the Jewish role was not so much innovation but transition and transformation.

You just feel a little odd when you don't get your kind of food. Fortunately, there are Indian restaurants all over the world.

I'm not asking any of you to make drastic changes to every single one of your recipes or to totally change the way you do business. But what I am asking is that you consider reformulating your menu in pragmatic and incremental ways to create healthier versions of the foods that we all love.