The Basic Nutrition Problem



The basic problem I run up against when trying to talk to people about health and food is that most people seem to imagine an opposition between food that is good for you and food that you like and imagine eating healthy means giving up everything you like. That is absolutely not so! I get a lot of pleasure from my food and I think I get much more pleasure from the food that I eat now than the food that I ate when I was much younger and really didn't know these things. But if people have never seen that, there is a lot of dreadful health food out there, and that has really turned people off. Unless you have actually had the experience of eating something that is delicious, that is also good for you, I think you may not believe that it's possible. The other thing that I run into is people either say they don't know how or they don't have time to make food anymore and that's a huge problem. When I was growing up, our family always had two meals together everyday, breakfast and dinner, and on weekends, lunches. The percentage of American families that sit down together at even one meal is really low. The number of people who eat in their cars, who eat while watching television, is just astonishing. When I wrote the cookbook, "The Healthy Kitchen" with Rosie Daily who was Oprah's chef, we went out on a book tour and Rosie told me a story that I liked. She worked for Oprah for seven years and had rented a very nice apartment in downtown Chicago and when she left at the end of seven years they wouldn't give her the deposit back because the kitchen had been used. I think that just shows where our society is at the moment.