I kept thinking, 'Somebody has to make a food show that is actually educational and entertaining at the same time... a show that got down to the 'why things happen.' Plus, I hated my job - I didn't think it was very worthwhile.

I only really fake it anymore with sommeliers who are being really snotty to me and I don't want to take their grief and so I try to do something to kind of throw them off or put them on the defensive, even if I don't know what I'm talking about.

Seriously. I'm not very bright, and it takes a lot for me to get a concept - to really get a concept. To get it enough that it becomes part of me. But when it happens I get real excited about it.

We're getting dumbed down, taste-wise.

My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don’t talk about heat as an ingredient, I don’t quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes.

I can’t talk about anything or write about anything if I don’t understand it. So a lot of the stuff that I go through and a lot of the time that I spend is understanding.

My feeling has always been that ‘Good Eats’ would have never happened had it been left to a committee.

My college degree was in theater. But the real reason, if I have any success in that milieu, so to speak, is because I spent a lot of years directing, I spent a lot of years behind the camera.

My mantra was to educate people – to actually give them the know-how they could use – and to do it in a very subversive kind of way. I would entertain them, and I was going to teach them whether they knew it or not.

So on one hand, honey is an amazingly sophisticated and efficient food source. On the other hand, it’s bee backwash.