Ruth Reichl
Ruth Reichl
Ruth Reichlis an American chef, food writer, co-producer of PBS's Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie, culinary editor for the Modern Library, host of PBS's Gourmet's Adventures With Ruth, and the last editor-in-chief of the now shuttered Gourmet magazine. She has written critically acclaimed, best-selling memoirs: Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise and Not Becoming My Mother. In...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth16 January 1948
CountryUnited States of America
The cook doesn't want to be locked away in the kitchen anymore. He or she wants to be around the guests. That means that kitchen appliances suddenly become like a sofa and table ? things that everybody is going to look at. I think it's a real indication of where we are in food culture today.
I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to share food; we're there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.
I came from a family where, you know, we sat down at the table every night, and you better have a story to tell. My father never wrote his stories down. And you know, I learned that they went farther if you wrote them down.
I think it's part of the DNA of human beings. We are a cooking animal. What differentiates us from all the other animals is that we cook and they don't.
Laos is a country where everything is eaten. When I came back, I would find myself chopping parsley and thinking: 'Why am I throwing these stems away? They're perfectly edible.'
Really, the only way to face the biggest problems we have is for the government to change the way they subsidize food. The way we subsidize food makes it cheaper to go to McDonald's and get a hamburger than a salad, and that's insane.
I think I wrote my first piece about food in 1978.
M. F. K. Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life.
We in the media have been guilty about not doing a better job of making people understand how really simple cooking is. We've made everyone feel like they have to be a chef.
Some magazines are run from the top down, where the editor-in-chief decides what every article is going to be and who's going to write them, and then they're doled out. My idea is to do it the opposite way, to do it from the bottom up.
My idea of good living is not about eating high on the hog. Rather, to me, good living means understanding how food connects us to the earth.
My mother really would make these dreadful concoctions. She really prided herself on something called 'Everything Stew,' where she would take everything in the refrigerator, all the leftovers, and put them all together.
The American government policy on what we supported and subsidised in agriculture was a social experiment on a whole generation of children.
I think of fiction as the highest calling. I'm kind of addicted to it. It's the thing that has gotten me through all the hard points in my life.