If we don't preserve the natural resources, you aren't going to have a sustainable society. This is not something for Chez Panisse and the elite of San Francisco. It's for everyone.

The fact that most kids aren't eating at home with their families any more really means they are eating elsewhere. They are eating out there in fast food nation.

In Berkeley, we built the garden and a kitchen classroom. We've been working on it for 12 years. We've learned a lot from it. If kids grow it and cook it, they eat it.

Create a garden; bring children to farms for field trips. I think it's 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.

Buy foods from nearby farms and have that food served in the cafeteria.

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

English food writer Elizabeth David, cook and author Richard Olney and the owner of Domaine Tempier Lulu Peyraud have all really inspired the way I think about food.

I just hope Americans come to understand that food isn't something to be manipulated by our teeth and shoved down our gullet, that it's our spiritual and physical nourishment and important to our well-being as a nation.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you're living?

The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Life is a lively process of becoming.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.

We eat every day, and if we do it in a way that doesn't recognize value, it's contributing to the destruction of our culture and of agriculture. But if it's done with a focus and care, it can be a wonderful thing. It changes the quality of your life.

When you have good ingredients, cooking doesn't require a lot of instruction because you can never go very wrong.

You have to take it upon yourself and preserve and can foods that you'll want for the winter.

It's so important to that we go into the public schools and we feed all of the kids something that is really good for them.

I feel like old age in America is a very sad thing. I have been many different places around the world where getting older is something you look forward to.

I'm always changing my work, as there are endless ways to think about food.

I guess I don't really believe in retirement. I believe in shorter days and maybe in weekends!

I think health is the outcome of eating well.

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

When I first went to Paris in 1965, I fell in love with the small, family-owned restaurants that existed everywhere then, as well as the markets and the French obsession with buying fresh food, often twice a day.

You’re not tapping into the widest possible pool of talent if you’re shutting some people out of particular careers.

We have plenty of young women coming into biology and medicine, but we don’t have enough coming into physics and engineering. It’s a really weird thing because, of course, all these subjects are completely neutral.

The scientific method is about trying to remove our own bias and subjectivity, and be as objective as possible. But then you can put it back into context and you’re allowed to be emotional and human about the way you engage with it.

But I think you can strip the emotion and the subjectivity away while you focus on doing the science - and that’s really important.

I’ve wanted to write a book on embryology, that extraordinary journey where you start off as a single cell and end up with a human body, for a general audience for years.

Did people’s attitudes towards me change after I appeared on TV? Yeah, definitely. During my career I’ve had some flak - particularly doing television.

At Bristol I found it quite difficult to continue trying to balance three things - teaching, research and public engagement, for which television was obviously the most prominent part.

I was effectively unemployed after my son was born. I resigned from Bristol because I wasn’t happy with the way my career was going then discovered I was pregnant when I was out of a job, but I was freelancing.

We have been talking about public engagement for a decade. For me it is about recognising that the mission of science has to be embedded within our culture - the direction in which science is going has to be determined by all of us, and so we need a dialogue with the public.

One of the big factors in me going to an independent school was the bullying at junior school. But it wasn't an easy choice for my parents. And now, I do have issues with independent schools.

We need to get across the excitement and creativity of science. That it isn't just a list of facts that have already been discovered - but a process, a creative project, that you are generating ideas, testing them and looking for evidence.

It is so stimulating for young children to hear someone who does science talking about it. It can be so exciting and inspiring. It is easy to get younger school children enthused about science.

I grew up in the Seventies; my dad is an aeronautical engineer and my mum was an English and arts teacher and for a while my family had to exist on one salary.

I was keen to earn my own money from an early age. I had a job as a paper girl in my local village when I was about 11 - and when I was a bit older, around 15, I was a waitress.

I was extremely lucky as I was in one of the last generations of British students who went to university and had my fees paid, and I had a grant as well. I also earned money from my waitressing and designing and selling my own range of dinosaur cards.

Choosing my career was always based on job satisfaction rather than financial security. I wanted to get a job in science; I enjoyed being a surgeon and I now enjoy being an academic and having a media career.

Educated guesswork’ is what science is. You form hypotheses, test them against the evidence, and if they fit the evidence, you can assume you’ve got close to the truth.

In fact, humans have less variation genetically than chimpanzees.