In '71 or '72 I returned to New Orleans and stayed there. I started cooking Louisiana food. Of all the things I had cooked it was the best-and it was my heritage.

I started eating healthier. I actually gave up fast food. I gave up candy and potato chips and everything else. I started watching what I ate.

As a chef I had started working with groups like Share Our Strength and various local food banks in New York raising money for hunger-related issues. And not only me but the entire restaurant industry has been very focused on this issue.

In my travels I also noticed that kids in Thailand like spicy food and kids in India love curry. I'm hoping to introduce my son Hudson to lots of veggies and spices when he's young. I say that before he's started on solid foods so it could be easier in theory than practice!

I wasn't passionate about food until I'd been cooking for a while. I started long before food became part of the mainstream media. I just wanted to cook period.

I used to eat because food tastes so good. I love food it's one of the best things on this planet. But I changed the way I was thinking. I started asking myself 'Hey am I eating because it tastes good? Or because I really need some more? Am I really still hungry?'

I think a lot of food shows especially when we started 'Good Eats' back in the late '90s they were still really about food. 'Good Eats' isn't about food it's about entertainment. If however we can virally infect you with knowledge or interest then all the better.

Ever since Eve started it all by offering Adam the apple woman's punishment has been to supply a man with food then suffer the consequences when it disagrees with him.

With both kids I started working out again at 16 days postpartum but I treated myself with kindness doing mild workouts because my fitness level was lower.

I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money to finance this earnest work and then I chucked it out.

Honest to God all my life I have had such a fear of spiders. In fact I use to have a reoccurring dream about one. Very clearly it was black with a red head. It would sit up in the corner of the bedroom and when it started getting closer I would wake up in a panic.

Some very famous directors have started in the mail room which is just getting inside the studio getting to know people getting to know the routine.

In Australia there is a very famous show called 'Home and Away.' I was cast on that at 15. The day I started filming my life changed.

When I wasn't famous I had a lot of friends almost all of them Italian. The racism only started when I started to play football.

I always thought it was strange when these artists like Kurt Cobain or whoever would get really famous and say 'I don't understand why this is happening to me.' There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn't some magical thing that just started happening.

Thus after finishing high school I started with high expectations and enthusiasm to study chemistry at the famous Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

When I started on MySpace people wanted to support me but once I rose to fame with the MTV show they felt like I had abandoned them for some reason that I was too famous to talk to them anymore.