- Cooking is conversation, as a meal gathers values, tastes, rituals, and words that are passed on for generations and play an extremely important social role not only over holiday seasons.
- Cooking is conviviality and sharing, especially when cooking with others—a spouse, a friend, or children.
- Cooking is education and eating at the table is a good way to teach kids about respecting food, learning to be responsible for their own bodies, and teaching them the art of conversation, manners, and pleasure.
- Cooking is fun, from picking the produce to preparing the dishes to serving the final preparation, and sharing the results with others.
- Cooking is healthy.
- Cooking is humor—let us not take ourselves seriously and make dishes with thirty ingredients, a batterie de cuisine with two days of preparation. If a chicken falls off the counter, pick it up; if the cake cracks, frost it.
- Cooking is improvisational; recipes are a guide not a formula for intimidation. Make do with what you have and how you like it.
- Cooking is le goût or taste, a heightening awareness and refinement of the senses in conflict, in harmony, and in combination and celebration with one another.
- Cooking is memory, as it links to a person’s culture and values. Whenever we eat something, the taste and memory of all the times we have eaten that dish live in the present.
- Cooking is nourishment of the body and soul.
