Wedding Bell Peppers for Food and Health

The Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the CIA (née the Culinary Institute of America) were married in Napa Valley over the course of a four-day-long celebration, from April 10 to April 13. Ceremonies were officiated at the CIA’s Greystone Campus by the Bernard P. Osher Associate Professor of Medicine, Dr. David M. Eisenberg; the Vice President of the CIA at Greystone, Mark Erikson; and the CIA’s Executive Director for Strategic Initiatives, Greg Drescher. They are the proud parents of Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives, an educational and interactive conference between physicians and culinary professionals whose goal is to show that nutritious and gourmet are not mutually exclusive.

Pinch me.

As an aspiring chef, writer, and doctor (it’ll make sense by the end of this column, I promise), I was on cloud nine, albeit one made of alfalfa sprouts and arugula greens. I was a guest of Mollie Katzen, the celebrated cookbook writer and advisor to the Harvard University Dining Services. Dr. Kathy McManus, the Director of Nutrition at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was my chauffeur and confidante. The rock star of baked goods, Mark Furstenberg, served as my bagel research paper advisor. Dr. Walter Willet, the most cited nutritionist in the world, and his equally illustrious contemporaries were my dinner companions. I was home yet tongue-tied with awe. After arguing for years with my hopelessly carnivorous friends that eating healthfully doesn’t mean sacrificing taste, I finally found myself in a roomful of people who were making their career out of just that philosophy.

The Healthy Kitchens’ motto—“See one, do one, teach one”—boils down simply and cleanly to the reversal of the “apple a day” adage. After too many years with not enough apples in the modern diet, it’s the doctor’s turn to give the apple—this time in the form of a recipe or two for baked apples and homemade apple sauce. According to this philosophy, if cooking returns to its roots and becomes commonplace knowledge among members of a society, the rate of packaged food consumption will decrease dramatically. Along with this sharp decline in processed food, the American population would dramatically lower its intake of sugars, salts, and unhealthy fats, and the obesity epidemic would plateau, if not decline.

Eisenberg structured the conference as a pseudo-teaching kitchen, his dream location for the application of this philosophy. Eisenberg sought to structure the workship by creating autonomous departments in which attendees learn everything from how to pick healthy food in the supermarket to how to prepare nutritious and delicious recipes under budget and time constraints. Give a man a packaged, fried fish stick, he’ll balloon into dangerous BMI territory; teach a man to filet, grill, and zest his tilapia, he’ll maintain a healthy weight.

Like the teaching kitchen, the conference was divided into three principle parts: didactic nutrition sessions, culinary demonstrations of recipes consistent with the nutritional guidelines, and kitchen workshops in which participants learned how to prepare the food themselves. In reality, though, the most effective education broke down into three separate categories: breakfast, lunch, and dinner (with snack time and wine tasting as twice-a-day bonuses). Tropical fruit spreads, bowls of berries, cauldrons of rich, hot, nut-filled cereal, plates of smoked King Salmon, pear butter, and baskets of Blueberry Peanut muffins covered three ping-pong-sized tables. And that was just breakfast. “I’ve never seen so much eating at a healthy food conference,” one attendee said.

Stuffed to a state of gastronomic bliss, the message seemed to ring loud and clear to all those present: Healthy was delicious.

The question is, will this marriage last in the real world? Is it the product of true love, or of a Temptation Island for Foodies? Dining in the heart of Napa Valley, eating fine fare prepared by CIA chefs in perfect 75-degree weather, the latter seemed likely. The HMS-CIA union made sense in the palm tree-lined, perfectly manicured estate (read: castle) of the former Christian Brothers Winery. But take the philosophy home; bring it back to Bell Buckle, Tennessee or Garfield, Arkansas. How well does nutritional advice hold up in the face of a deep-fried Twinkie or country-fried steak? In neighborhoods where residents have to take two buses to get to the nearest supermarket, how realistic is a recipe for beet salad with farro and crumbled gorgonzola? Even growing up in New York City, my unrepresentative taste buds were apparent—I remember discovering in kindergarten, “Wait, most kids don’t crave dill pickles and garlic string beans?”

To be fair, the conference did not insist on serving Moroccan tagines in cities where even vegetable burgers have trouble gaining a foothold. The “dessert-flips” (think more fruit, less cheesecake) demonstrated under the instruction of Stephen Dufree—pastry chef at the French Laundry—and the Turkish Roasted Eggplant Sandwiches taught by goddess of Mediterranean cuisine Joyce Goldstein were more marketing ploys to sell the idea than specifics about the plan of implementation. Panelists and attendees consistently broke down the practical application of the nutritional advice and offered recipe alternatives that would be palatable to less adventurous diners. Progress is slowly being made throughout the country, one whole-wheat bun at a time. And with a 500 million dollar grant from the Robert Wood Johnson foundation and their promise to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015, the promise of a healthy and delicious future seems bright.

However unrealistic the superstar roster of the Healthy Kitchens conference and its vineyard paradise setting may have been, at the end of the day its message was powerful and legitimate. Doctors and chefs, whether or not they’re Harvard Faculty or CIA-trained master chefs, must work together to change the American way of approaching food. Healthy eating doesn’t mean doom and gloom cuisine, just as cooking doesn’t mean rushed nights, splattered shirts, and burnt vegetables. We need to turn cooking and eating back into social events and away from their abstracted, spectator sport status. Maybe canteens in the meat- and potato-addicted states will take a while to catch on, but that should only further motivate this effort. When statistics consistently show that lifestyle and diet changes are more effective than any medicine, a patient should be happy with a prescription for a 30-minute run and cardamom roasted cauliflower with his statin any day. It’s a marriage worth fighting for.

—Columnist Rebecca A. Cooper can be reached at cooper3@fas.harvard.edu.