Top 40 Alice Waters Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “This is the power of gathering: it inspires us, delightfully, to be more hopeful, more joyful, more thoughtful: in a word, more alive.”

— Alice Waters

2. “The decisions you make are a choice of values that reflect your life in every way.”

— Alice Waters

3. “Good food is a right, not a privilege. It brings children into a positive relationship with their health, community and environment.”

— Alice Waters

4. “Good food should be a right not a privilege.”

— Alice Waters

5. “Good food depends almost entirely on good ingredients.”

— Alice Waters

6. “Because only slow food can teach us the things that really matter – care, beauty, concentration, discernment, sensuality, all the best that humans are capable of, but only if we take the time to think about what we’re eating.”

— Alice Waters

7. “Eating is an environmental act.”

— Alice Waters

8. “Let things taste of what they are.”

— Alice Waters

9. “How we eat can change the world.”

— Alice Waters

10. “Create a garden; bring children to farms for field trips. I think its important that parents and teachers get together to do one or two things they can accomplish well – a teaching garden, connecting with farms nearby, weave food into the curriculum.”

— Alice Waters

11. “Cooking and shopping for food brings rhythm and meaning to our lives.”

— Alice Waters

12. “I have a love affair with tomatoes and corn. I remember them from my childhood. I only had them in the summer. They were extraordinary.”

— Alice Waters

13. “People cooked with a certain integrity before fast food, 50 or 60 years ago. When the cheap food arrived, and we didn’t have the education and deep cultural roots to hold on, we got swept away by fast, cheap and easy.”

— Alice Waters

14. “When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.”

— Alice Waters

15. “The things most worth wanting are not available everywhere all the time.”

— Alice Waters

16. “I came to all the realizations about sustainability and biodiversity because I fell in love with the way food tastes. And because I was looking for that taste I feel at the doorsteps of the organic, local, sustainable farmers, dairy people and fisherman.”

— Alice Waters

17. “We’ve been so disconnected agriculturally and culturally from food. We spend more time on dieting than on cooking.”

— Alice Waters

18. “Our full humanity is contingent on our hospitality; we can be complete only when we are giving something away; when we sit at the table and pass the peas to the person next to us we see that person in a whole new way.”

— Alice Waters

19. “The problem with living in a fast-food nation is that we expect food to be cheap.”

— Alice Waters

20. “It’s about children cooking themselves, growing themselves. When kids grow it and cook it they eat it.”

— Alice Waters

21. “Change the food in the schools and we can influence how children think. Change the curriculum and teach them how to garden and how to cook and we can show that growing food and cooking and eating together give lasting richness, meaning, and beauty to our lives.”

— Alice Waters

22. “Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.”

— Alice Waters

23. “I think Americas food culture is embedded in fast-food culture. And the real question that we have is: How are we going to teach slow-food values in a fast-food world? Of course, its very, very difficult to do, especially when children have grown up eating fast food and the values that go with that.”

— Alice Waters

24. “When you’re really considering all the qualities of food, purity is right there at the top of the list. I’m unwilling to eat food that has been adulterated.”

— Alice Waters

25. “I feel that good food should be a right and not a privilege, and it needs to be without pesticides and herbicides. And everybody deserves this food. And that’s not elitist.”

— Alice Waters

26. “I believe there should be breakfast, lunch and afternoon snack, all for free and for every child that goes to school. And all food that is good, clean and fair. It’s unfair to charge for food in schools, especially to charge for food that is making children sick.”

— Alice Waters

27. “It’s a comfort to always find pasta in the cupboard and garlic and parsley in the garden.”

— Alice Waters

28. “Always explore your garden and go to the market before you decide what cook.”

— Alice Waters

29. “We have to bring children into a new relationship to food that connects them to culture and agriculture.”

— Alice Waters

30. “It is a fundamental fact that no cook, however creative and capable, can produce a dish of a quality any higher than that of its raw ingredients.”

— Alice Waters

31. “We can’t think narrowly. We have to think in the biggest possible way.”

— Alice Waters

32. “I am confident that we will see a growing consensus about the most effective way to transform food in America: building a real, sustainable and free school-lunch program.”

— Alice Waters

33. “I feel it is an obligation to help people understand the relation of food to agriculture and the relationship of food to culture.”

— Alice Waters

34. “I want every child in America to eat a nutritious, delicious, sustainably sourced school lunch for free.”

— Alice Waters

35. “Food should be cheap, and labor should be cheap, and everything should be the same no matter where you go; whether it’s a McDonald’s in Germany or one in California, it should be the same. And this message is destroying cultures around the world. Needless to say, agriculture goes with it.”

— Alice Waters

36. “I think the biggest impediment to fixing the food system in the United States is that we expect food to be cheap. We want to by other things with our money. We’re so disconnected from agriculture – from the culture in agriculture.”

— Alice Waters

37. “I love those tiny little onions in the spring that are so small they’re almost like a little chive.”

— Alice Waters

38. “To have a basic ingredient that can be prepared a million different ways is a beautiful thing.”

— Alice Waters

39. “I do feel like food should cost more, because we aren’t paying farmers a living wage. It has to cost more.”

— Alice Waters

40. “The way we subsidize food makes it cheaper to go to McDonald’s and get a hamburger than a salad, and that’s insane. It’s pure government policy.”

— Alice Waters

41. “If Ive gone to the market on Saturday, and I go another time on Tuesday, then Im really prepared. I can cook a little piece of fish; I can wilt some greens with garlic; I can slice tomatoes and put a little olive oil on. Its effortless.”

— Alice Waters

42. “He understands that creating a meal means creating your own reality...”

— Alice Waters

43. “It shouldn’t be an afterthought. The right environment around you can make whatever job you’re doing pleasurable, no matter how small the task.”

— Alice Waters