"Television is the single most dangerous thing ever invented in our culture. It gives you the false impression that you are having a relationship with humans, when you are not. In fact, it stands against human relationships. Conversation ends when television begins."
The speaker: Graham Kerr, once known as The Galloping Gourmet and a man whose wild success (and excess) as a television chef made it possible for all of the Emerils and Bonnie Sterns and Martha Stewarts who followed.
The words are barely out of Kerr's mouth when he acknowledges the delicious irony in what he has just said: he has a platform to speak about the numerous subjects that engage his considerable intellect because of his very success on the medium he has just trashed.
"Yes, the irony is overwhelming," he says, flashing the trademark smile and the sparkling personality that lit up hundreds of thousands of living rooms when he was on top of the culinary world.
Kerr now has a new life and a new television series, though chances are you, like me, have never heard of the show. It's called Graham Kerr's Gathering Place.
While it is a cooking show, gathering recipes from various cultures and communities around the world and "slenderizing" and adapting them to North American tastes, it is so much more. It's part travelogue, part health show (there's a science or health authority on each program) and part philosophy.
Kerr's life on top of the TV world was a car wreck waiting to happen. He was an alcoholic and his wife Treena was addicted to valium. They had a huge house and oodles of money but no humanity in their lives.
That's all changed now for the 72-year-old and Treena, who have found God, renounced most of their worldly possessions, travel around in a motor home and have developed their own mantra for personal happiness. You can check it out at www.outdulgence.com.
Their credo is to reconnect with other humans and reduce their impact on the planet before it's too late. Their website lays out a series of relatively small steps you can take to give up a bad habit and take the personal or monetary capital from doing that and reinvest it in someone who really needs help. It means taking personal responsibility for your life and your planet, something Kerr has already done.
Now that he is an advocate for slenderizing our approach to consumption of all things, Kerr finds himself on the other side of the marketing machine that made him famous. Getting his show on the air is a tough sell.
"Everything we're doing is about relinquishment," Kerr told me. "Everything marketing is doing is about acquisition."
Check out Graham Kerr's Gathering Place, if you get the chance, and get an insight into a man who has pulled his own life back from the brink of the precipice and still has hope that mankind can do the same.