Nigella Lawson in

EAT: THE STORY OF FOOD

Michael Pollan, author: Great French fries are pretty damn good.

Rachael Ray, television personality: My favorite breakfast as a child was good strong espresso on a Nabisco biscuit with icy cold or warm milk poured over it. I just don’t feel complete without coffee. All of this is extremely ironic because I make the world’s worst coffee.

Nigella Lawson, chef: It’s a family joke that all I ever do is roast a chicken. But the dish that is most resonant for me is a dish I call my mother’s Praised Chicken, which is halfway between poached and braised. It’s a very, very old-fashioned way of cooking a chicken that most cultures have when you put a chicken in a pot with some vegetables and water, cook it slowly, and in a sense you have a strong soup with a gently poached chicken in the middle of it. For me, that is the smell and taste of home.

Marcus Samuelsson, chef: My favorite recipe is my grandma’s meatballs because it’s really the start of cooking for me. I would not have become a chef without my grandma’s meatballs. It was not just when we ate them we loved them, but it was also the whole procedure of making them. It was something that taught me respect in the kitchen.

José Andrés, chef: One of my favorite sandwiches was my father would slice two very thin slices of bacon and put them right on the flat top. Then the bacon goes inside two slices of toasted bread, and all the fat is released into the beautiful bread. That’s it. A bacon sandwich like no other.

Barton Seaver, chef and National Geographic Society Fellow: Barbeque is my favorite food outside of fish because of the soul of smoke. The soul of barbeque is the smoke. Smoke is the most wonderful transformative ingredient, because it is the only cooking method that actually becomes an ingredient in and of itself.

Simon Majumdar, author: If I had to eat one thing for the rest of my life, it would actually be my favorite dish in the whole world, which is a red lentil dal from India. We call it LSD or “life-saving dal.” It's a red lentil soup, and it's almost like our chicken soup. It's a food that nourishes body and soul.

Curtis Stone, chef: Fish and chips! What a marriage. I have no idea who started it, but what a thing to do.

Garrett Oliver, Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster: People often ask me “what’s your favorite beer?” and in one of my books I put 300 of my favorite beers. So I don’t have a single favorite beer, but I have to say that if I ended up on a desert island for a month, not forever, I would take Saison.

Ruth Reichl, food writer: I am loathe to admit this, but I love caviar. There are many different kinds of caviar, but I personally like ossetra, which has a wonderfully fruity flavor. It’s kind of fruit and salt and it pops gently in your mouth and it’s just the most delicious substance.

Eric Greenspan in

EAT: THE STORY OF FOOD

Eric Ripert, chef: I do have a favorite junk food. If we consider gummy bears junk food, I eat junk food.

Eric Greenspan, chef: Are there junk foods that I would crave? Oh, yeah. There's a couple. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I freak out about those things.

Graham Elliot, chef: When it comes to junk food, my all-time favorite go-to is CheezIts.

Nigella Lawson, chef: I think my favorite junk food is a pack of potato chips, preferably salt and vinegar flavor, because it is a bit of an assault on the senses, which junk food can be.

Graham Elliot in

EAT: THE STORY OF FOOD

Ruth Reichl, food writer: I think food is what brings us together as a community. We all eat at least three times a day. It is the one thing we all have to do. And since we have to do it, it seems to me that it behooves us to do it with as much care and thought and dignity as we possibly can.

Graham Elliot, chef: Food is a looking glass into that culture. Wherever you’re at, whatever country, or city, or even neighborhood that you’re in, find where the locals eat and go and try that. You really understand who those people are.

Rachael Ray, television personality: Who knows if you live more than once, but if you only go around once, it’s nice to have a little taste of all things.

Marcus Samuelsson in

EAT: THE STORY OF FOOD

Noah Fecks, author: I think eating is one of those things that’s a human requirement, but it’s the one thing you have control over. You’re not making your own clothes, you’re not building your own house. You’re making your own food.

Marcus Samuelsson, chef: What makes food really personal is that food makes you think. What tribe are you? Who are you? Who are we as a family? Who are we as a community? And what does this specific dish mean to us?

Curtis Stone, chef: Without food, none of us are here to talk about it.

Simon Majumdar

Simon Majumdar, author: I think one of the things we need to think about food is that we’re caretakers. You know, we don’t own the world, we’re caretakers for the next generation, the generation after that and we have to teach good practices to our children as well.

Ruth Reichl, food writer: I believe that the meat of the future is insects. I think that we have this huge population of completely edible creatures out there that poor populations in other parts of the world have no compunctions about eating: ants and spiders and ant eggs and larva. I have eaten a lot of insects and there is no reason to turn your nose up at insects. They’re perfectly delicious.

How Spam Saved the Russians: A few years after Spam hit shelves in 1937, Hitler plunged the world into war. Food was rationed. Everyone had to make sacrifices. Nylons, coffee, cigarettes, basic necessities were in short supply. But in the U.K. and the Soviet Union, there was plenty of Spam. Nikita Khrushchev said, “Without Spam we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army.” Since the 1930s, this gelatinous throwback has sold more than 6 billion cans — and it’s still selling. In fact — Americans eat, on average, 2.8 cans per second.