Why Ask Chefs: The James Beard talk
Allison Adato I gave a talk today at the James Beard Foundation. Simpson Wong of Wong and Café Asean joined me. Here's an excerpt:
I thought first I might tell you why I decided to talk to chefs about how they eat, particularly with a thought to staying fit. After all, chefs are not nutritionists or dieticians or doctors. As a group, fashion models are uniformly skinnier. And chefs are notorious for feeding us the very foods that ruin our diets. They wrap things in bacon, bathe dishes in cream, they sauté innocent vegetables in duck fat.
And, of course, we love them for it. We pay them good money for it. But are these the people we should be consulting about eating well and being healthy? This turned out to be a question on more people’s minds than just my own.
Right before the book came out, Paula Deen announced that, after years of celebrating fatty and fried foods on television, she had been diagnosed with diabetes. And Frank Bruni from the New York Times called me and we talked about --not about Paula in particular, because she isn’t someone I interviewed -- but about how what many chefs feed us is not necessarily the way they feed themselves. How eating oatmeal with berries for breakfast every day, as Art Smith does, and some form of salad and protein for lunch, as many chefs do, wasn’t really sexy. Talking about this kind of real-life eating isn’t what celebrity chefs engage in, or really even what we want them to.
With JBF president Susan Ungaro and chef Simpson Wong, who graciously provided summer rolls for a very hot day.
Then a different newspaper called, and that reporter wanted to know: Didn’t chefs have a responsibility to help their customers eat healthfully? Especially, she said, the high profile chefs, didn’t their fans deserve from them the same healthy menus that school children, who have no choice whatever, deserve from the lunch lady?
For me, the answer is no. If I am lucky enough to get an invitation to, for instance, Per Se, I don’t want Thomas Keller to skimp on the butter. If I’m in the mood to eat what my friend Alyssa Shelasky brilliantly calls “ironic fried chicken” at Momofuku, I think it should actually be fried, not some baked version or with the skin removed. And I take responsibility for making sure that such outings are a rare occurrence, not the way I’m eating every day. David Chang should do his thing, and I’ll do mine. But what I do think chefs might do is disabuse us of the notion that the food they serve us is the food they most often eat. So I asked them, and plenty were happy to tell me.
Which brings me back to the question: Why ask chefs about staying slim? First of all, because many of them have managed to stay in shape. And they they’ve done so while spending their professional lives around the bacon and the butter and the cream and the duck fat, and so on. This is a greater hurdle than most of us have to face; I mean, how often have you met a slim chef or maybe seen one on TV and thought, “if I had your job, I’d be as big as a house”?
Second, chefs are people who care about food as more than simply nutrients that the body needs. They think about flavor foremost. How does it taste? How does it make you feel when you eat it? What shared memories does it trigger? I found that when I asked about how they eat today, we always came around to how each chef ate when they were growing up. Michelle Bernstein tells a story of being five years old and the last one in her family at the table, still dipping pieces of bread in the salad bowl to get every drop of her mother’s salad dressing. Chefs aren’t going to tell you to eat salad with just a squeeze of lemon – because no one ever gets misty-eyed remembering how their mother put just lemon juice on lettuce.
Generally speaking, chefs aren’t willing to cut out whole categories of food, or decide that for the next 10 days all they will eat is cabbage and cayenne pepper. Rick Moonen put it best, I think, when he told me, “Chefs are fun and they drink and people don’t want to give that up. There’s a happiness factor.”
Even harder than maintaining weight while working with food is losing a lot a weight that you’ve put on. And while I would never tell anyone not to consult a doctor about changing unhealthy habits, I liked hearing from Michael Psilakis, the chef at Kefi who took off about 80 pounds, when he told me: “Doctors are looking at the problem from a scientific perspective, saying 'This is what you should eat.' But what if you want to eat something else? There has to be another way.”
It was my hope that this “other way” would be one that would value flavor and food the way that chefs do. So I spent about a year interviewing fit chefs at home, and hanging out with them in their restaurants, and at food festivals, and listening to them talk about food, and work, and weight and diets, and exercise and everything they know about bringing all of that into balance. And about the best way to experience all that this moment in the food world has to offer us, without letting it take our bodies in a direction we don’t want them to go....
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