Cookin' Good!

I’m feeling inspired!

I’m off today and digging into my pile of books, painfully aware of the gaps in my knowledge. I have a graduate degree. I’m a nurse practitioner. Yet I never had a class on nutrition and I learned even less about practical ways to help people make life-saving dietary changes. Just like doctors, I learned the basics of American medicine: prescriptions and proscriptions. Food was the province of dietitians. And I never met a single one in all my years in ambulatory care. If preventive dietary counseling is supposed to happen in a doctor’s office, consumers are screwed.

This morning, while checking out a course on plant-based nutrition, I stumbled on this:

PLANEAT.co.uk Trailer from planeat.co.uk on Vimeo.

These Brits, without any traditional financing, made an incredible, engaging film. For now, you can only watch it online; it costs $5.99. The best part of this little documentary gem, is that it features many professional chefs who cook only plant-based menus. Some of this food is very “high end,” beautifully presented, and would appeal to even die-hard foodies. I’ve never, ever seen anything like this level of creative, vegan food offered in my community. Many of the recipes in the film are posted on the movie’s web site for use by commoners, like me.

But there aren’t just chefs, there are ordinary people cooking lovely meals at home for friends and family. One is an Israeli scientist, now living in the U.S. Another is Ann Esselstyn, the wife of Dr. Esselstyn, the Cleveland Clinic surgeon and researcher who has done work on the impact of diet on advanced heart disease. You might think that Ann can’t possibly be ordinary. You would be wrong. There she was, in the family kitchen (with a well-worn toaster oven, no less), making lunch. She was so enthusiastic and had such ease working with some of her favorite foods, that she was infectious. Between making lunch, she recounted her own story. She had to invent recipes when her husband began to seriously change his lifestyle. Why? To paraphrase him: “I could tell people why they needed to change, but I couldn’t tell them ‘how to’. That is what Ann could do.” She became his partner, helping people learn how to cook tasty food so they could stick to the change. In the few moments she was featured, I learned some cooking tricks I’d never seen before! She doesn’t make fancy food, she makes practical food. In a kitchen just like mine.

When the film ended, I knew more than ever before that bringing nutritional solutions to people absolutely requires kitchen mastery. Eating is a sensual pleasure for most of us. Eating brings people together. Eating bad food, pulls people apart. You can’t get anyone’s attention if you make them feel as if they are going to be deprived of wonderful food for the rest of their lives. Who wants to live that way? Quality of life, not just surviving, is critical.

So, cooking and teaching go hand in hand. I have to know how to do both. Information without new skills guarantees failure. My own family thinks it’s impossible to eat a yummy plant-based diet. I must begin in my own kitchen, cooking delicious, wholesome food for friends and family. Because in the end, feelin’ good comes from cookin’ good!