My philosophy from day one is that I can sleep better at night if I can improve an individual's knowledge about food and wine, and do it on a daily basis.
In Africa, we have the bush meat trade, which means that, on a very large scale, animals are being killed in the forests and sold in the cities as a luxury food.
Being Italian, I have a very special relationship with the culinary arts. One my projects was to share Italian cultural food with my colleagues.
We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.
In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don't have a bad deli. There's no mediocrity accepted.
Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.
If I'd never gone out and done more than one restaurant, my food wouldn't be as good as it is today. I've learned a lot from people who work for me.
Recipes are important but only to a point. What's more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that.
Go to the grocery store and buy better things. Buy quality, buy organic, buy natural, go to the farmers market. Immediately that's going to increase the quality of the food you make.
I believe in a tongue-first exploration of the world. Food is our most immediate daily relationship to our ecosystem, and there is something delectable and intriguing about it.
Very rarely does food enhance the conversation. If the food is really good, there'll be much less conversation because you'd be concentrating too much on the food.
Now the restaurants have begun to catch up with the wine-making; there are numerous great restaurants in Napa Valley, and it's wonderful because the people are there for just that: great food and great wine.
One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off.
There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.
They both go together; you can't be in front of the camera hosting a fitness television show in front of 75 million households and not have trained 6 days per week year round - in a bikini no less.
I believe it's extremely important to include some other type of fitness activity in your training, so cross training will help you to avoid injury when you are dancing.
I don't want to lose my fitness. I'm 45. I have two babies. I've got a long way to go and I want to keep in tiptop shape. There's no magic bullet.
When I left EastEnders, I could have earned an absolute fortune from sexy calendars, shoots for lads' mags, fitness videos and reality shows. But I always turned them down.
I don't smoke, don't drink much, and go to the gym five times a week. I live a healthy lifestyle and feel great. I can run a marathon, you know.
You can control what you put in your body - 100 percent. You really can control your level of fitness and how your body looks.
Please know that I am aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be a challenge to others.
