so you’re probably all hungry right
let’s talk about food it’s one of my
favorite things and to get in the mood
I’d like you all to think about a
favorite home-cooked meal okay can be
sweet or savory I’m gonna think about my
grandma Lillian’s brisket this is my
family having it over a holiday meal and
the interesting thing is we all love
food right but we don’t all love cooking
cooking as a life skill is less and less
valued there’s a million other ways to
get food prepared for you by other
people fast food delivery apps you can
get everything brought to you now and
let’s face it cooking’s a chore it’s
messy there’s cleanup it’s annoying to
plan meals boring to do the shop maybe
you’ve got picky kids maybe there’s no
good grocery near where you live
maybe you only have a hot plate to cook
on or maybe you’re like me you like the
special occasion meals right so when I
cook my grandma Lillian’s brisket it’s
four and a half hours that is that’s a
long recipe and I but I love it I love
to read through her recipe she had this
little trick of adding gingersnap
cookies at the end to thicken the gravy
and I think about her as I do that
recipe but daily meals you know we all
could do without that and it does make
me wonder if cooking is even relevant
anymore so as a food designer I’ve
gotten to go around the world talking to
people about food their likes dislikes
needs desires and in my travels I’ve
learned some pretty interesting things
one I want to share with you that I
learned in Japan is this idea about
mothers tastes and what is mother’s
taste
well mother’s taste
is really about the flavors of home
cooking and how they imprint on your
family so if for example you’re gonna
feed your child their first tomato you
better pick a really good juicy one it
better be the best tomato you can find
because your child is gonna remember
that tomato right it’s gonna determine
partly whether they enjoy tomatoes and I
thought that was a really cool way to
understand the foods that we grow to
like and dislike the other thing I’ve
seen in my research is a really exciting
push by people from healthier food
they’re really demanding healthier food
and in that push they’re looking for
better solutions right they’re starting
to recognize that good food is good
medicine it’s good for you so often what
I’m designing for is the gap between the
healthy food that they know they want
and the skills that can’t quite get them
there so food really matters but we also
know food is making us sick this number
86 million Americans this is a number of
Americans that are estimated to be
pre-diabetic so that’s one in three okay
so I can’t quite see you out there but
look to your neighbor on the left and
your neighbor on the right and yourself
it’s likely one of you is pre-diabetic
and if that’s not scary enough 9 out of
10 people don’t know they’re
pre-diabetic okay so pre-diabetes leads
to often leads to type 2 diabetes and
that can lead to things like heart
disease stroke blindness kidney failure
and I am one of those 86 million
Americans I was diagnosed as
pre-diabetic 2 years ago and let me tell
you what a shock that was right I’m a
northern California foodie I eat kale
I I really had a self-image as this
healthy person who occasionally indulged
but what I learned was that I was a very
indulgent eater who occasionally chose
something healthy sounds familiar right
yeah so uh the key here for me was you
know what to do with that knowledge
because we all think were the exceptions
right we never like to think of
ourselves as a center of the bell curve
what happened was my doctor said I need
to lose weight and exercise and he sent
me to a nutritionist the nutritionist
showed me some plastic bowls of food she
told me that I should only have this
much protein and made a fist and there’s
much jeez that’s like an inch cube which
for me like that that’s nothing that’s a
crumb it was a long list of don’ts it
was all about deprivation and
restriction and it was depressing so in
my work I used this approach design
thinking and I decided in this moment to
turn that on myself and try to design my
way out of this what is design thinking
design thinking is about getting
inspired by people and experiences
it’s about being generative and
optimistic and about creating
experiments and prototypes and trying
them out in the world and so knowing
deprivation and don’ts was not going to
work for me
I find it to find a different way in to
a new relationship with healthy food and
I want to share three of those
experiences or or prototypes with you
experiments one is really around extreme
an extreme behavior and that’s meant to
inspire me another one is around just
relearning some basic skills and the
last one is about just getting smarter
right just learning a little bit more
about nutrition so the first one let’s
go to the wilds of Northern California
this is point raised
we’ll see Shore I’m with my friend Eve
we are foraging it is raining it’s cold
we have big boots on
we’re bushwhacking through brambles
there’s poison oak everywhere you can
see the look on my face I’m not too
convinced by all of this and I
definitely don’t think we’re gonna find
dinner here but Eve is also a
mindfulness expert she’s worked with the
Dalai Lama she’s taught meditation
workshops around the world so my fantasy
of this extreme experience is that she
is going to use all those Jedi
mindfulness skills on me that I’m gonna
become enlightened about food I’m gonna
lose my attachment to cheese and salami
I am going to eat slowly and
deliberately I’m going to be happy with
a small bowl of raw native plants
nope didn’t quite happen I did it was so
exciting it was a super thrill we did
come back with some really cool plants I
didn’t know you could eat and trust me
don’t just go out and eat stuff now to
go with someone who knows what they’re
doing but we came home with a basket
full of miner’s lettuce delicious
peppery garlic flowers and stinging
nettles
so stinging nettles literally if like
any of it touches even the tiniest bit
of your skin you have like a burning
sting for hours it’s terrible so anyway
this is me going off the deep end I’m
cooking in my gardening gloves because I
have my stinging nettles to work with I
decided to make fresh pasta to go with
the stinging nettles this was like hours
and hours in the kitchen by the time I
served my family it was ten o’clock at
night I was exhausted they thought it
was awesome I was totally exhausted and
the interesting thing was that the big
learning I took away from it is that
grocery stores are awesome
grocery stores could take some
inspiration from foraging because you
know it gets a little boring in there
but really they’re good stuff my next
adventure was with this guy this is chef
Danny Brooks he is a real chef he’s
worked at three-star Michelin
restaurants in Spain he has all kinds of
horror stories from the kitchen you guys
probably can imagine one of one chef he
worked with burned him with a pan on
purpose like who does that right other
other bosses were very patient and kind
but anyway I I wanted to work with Danny
because now he has a regular
nine-to-five job he’s married kids you
know just like the rest of us and I
thought if anybody can inspire my day to
day cooking it it’s gonna be Danny but I
wanted to set it up as like a kind of
real-life experiment so we went to the
grocery store together plan the meal and
then would bring it home and cook at
home while the kids were running around
and all that so we go to the grocery
store and I’m so excited because my
three-star Michelin chefs was gonna go
to the grocery store with me right but
and I think he’s gonna plan the menu but
he doesn’t plan the menu he goes into
the produce section and talks to the guy
in the produce section it says hey what
should we eat tonight I was like what
that’s not how it’s supposed to work but
it turns out the produce guy he knows
everything right he’s tried everything
in there he has relationships with the
growers if he hasn’t tried it
he knows what when it’s come in at least
so he knows what’s fresh and he told us
asparagus green onions
avocados they’re on sale oranges
delicious so we’re done with that and we
get home and I learned a couple more
things from Danny I want to share with
you so when you’re doing a vegetable
forward meal do one hot vegetable dish
and one cold and let the ingredients
determine what those are the other thing
you should know about vegetables this is
Danny’s advice is you have to cook them
separately so when I grew
you know was when you cooked vegetables
it was like stir-fry just throw it all
in a pot that’s not how you’re supposed
to cook vegetables you’re supposed to
cook each one individually the each one
needs a slightly different cook time and
Danny told me this and I thought this is
ridiculous this is way too much time but
the flavor convinced me otherwise so
each one we cooked individually put it
together and they all had a slightly
different texture it was great
Danny is also showing you his favorite
kitchen tools his hands his fingers have
no nerve endings in them because he’s
dipped in and out of so many hot pans
but don’t forget your hands they’re
really great kitchen tools and as far as
fancy chef stuff I would say that the
fanciest thing we did was our pursuit of
great ingredients and you can do that
easily at your own farmers market where
they will have the best flavors and the
best prices my last stop on this journey
was to get informed to really get up to
speed on nutrition the latest in
nutrition science and I did it with dr.
David Ison Berg he’s the associate
professor of nutrition at Harvard and he
is a founder of something called healthy
kitchens healthy lives which is a
conference up in Napa and it’s not a
typical medical conference it’s at the
Culinary Institute of America which is a
very nice cooking school and the
vineyards of Napa and dr. Eisenberg
brings chefs and doctors together and
health care providers and they learn
about nutrition science share papers but
they also take cooking classes together
and they also eat together fascinating
it’s really his ideas to sort of build
on the success story of smoking
cessation so I don’t know if you’ve seen
those graphs but at the point where
doctors started to quit smoking their
patients followed suit so the idea here
is to if you educate and and get health
care providers and doctors to love
healthy food and know how to cook it
that maybe then they can talk to their
patients a little more
wincing Lee and then it was dr.
Eisenberg Stern to get up on the stage a
cooking doctor he got up on the stage
there was a demonstration kitchen
he had an apron on and he told us a
story he told us a story about how his
father his grandfather was a baker and
how he grew up loving baked goods and
that led him on his own path towards
healthy eating and then he told us how
just like everyone else he rushes home
to cook a wholesome meal for his family
and he shared a recipe it was a couscous
salad with roasted or toasted nuts and
herbs and dried fruit and he explained
how toasting the nuts released the
flavor a little bit how you have to
fluff the couscous
how the dried fruit was just a little
bit of sweetness but didn’t matter what
kind of dried fruit and he took a pan
down and he put it on the demonstration
stove and he started to cook and I
started to cry it was it was I was being
cared for not treated it was something
that my mom would have done and it was
about food and cooking as self-care and
I needed to hear this message and I
needed to hear it from a doctor and dr.
Eisenberg truly changed my life that day
so why cook so it turns out that people
who cook fresh ingredients are healthier
okay that is a widely accepted fact by
health care professionals so I heard
that and I thought it’s got to be
correlational like what else are they
doing you know are they exercising are
they wealthier so they have more access
to healthy food what
going on but I have to say through my
own journey that if you cook you do
start to do other things I really
started to care about the ingredients I
was using and if I was gonna be in the
kitchen they were gonna be great
fresh ingredients and I was going to
bother going to the farmers market I got
more efficient in the kitchen and loved
the creativity and fun of being in there
and seeing dr. Eisenberg walk the walk
was just that right amount of motivation
for me and to think about cooking a
self-care right I had been told to
exercise I went and did that
I didn’t outsource that why would I go
outsource my the food I was gonna put in
my body so cooking does require a deeper
level of engagement in how you care for
yourself and it really does matter to
your family’s health cooking makes
health possible and that’s why cooking
might save your life thank you
you
let’s talk about food it’s one of my
favorite things and to get in the mood
I’d like you all to think about a
favorite home-cooked meal okay can be
sweet or savory I’m gonna think about my
grandma Lillian’s brisket this is my
family having it over a holiday meal and
the interesting thing is we all love
food right but we don’t all love cooking
cooking as a life skill is less and less
valued there’s a million other ways to
get food prepared for you by other
people fast food delivery apps you can
get everything brought to you now and
let’s face it cooking’s a chore it’s
messy there’s cleanup it’s annoying to
plan meals boring to do the shop maybe
you’ve got picky kids maybe there’s no
good grocery near where you live
maybe you only have a hot plate to cook
on or maybe you’re like me you like the
special occasion meals right so when I
cook my grandma Lillian’s brisket it’s
four and a half hours that is that’s a
long recipe and I but I love it I love
to read through her recipe she had this
little trick of adding gingersnap
cookies at the end to thicken the gravy
and I think about her as I do that
recipe but daily meals you know we all
could do without that and it does make
me wonder if cooking is even relevant
anymore so as a food designer I’ve
gotten to go around the world talking to
people about food their likes dislikes
needs desires and in my travels I’ve
learned some pretty interesting things
one I want to share with you that I
learned in Japan is this idea about
mothers tastes and what is mother’s
taste
well mother’s taste
is really about the flavors of home
cooking and how they imprint on your
family so if for example you’re gonna
feed your child their first tomato you
better pick a really good juicy one it
better be the best tomato you can find
because your child is gonna remember
that tomato right it’s gonna determine
partly whether they enjoy tomatoes and I
thought that was a really cool way to
understand the foods that we grow to
like and dislike the other thing I’ve
seen in my research is a really exciting
push by people from healthier food
they’re really demanding healthier food
and in that push they’re looking for
better solutions right they’re starting
to recognize that good food is good
medicine it’s good for you so often what
I’m designing for is the gap between the
healthy food that they know they want
and the skills that can’t quite get them
there so food really matters but we also
know food is making us sick this number
86 million Americans this is a number of
Americans that are estimated to be
pre-diabetic so that’s one in three okay
so I can’t quite see you out there but
look to your neighbor on the left and
your neighbor on the right and yourself
it’s likely one of you is pre-diabetic
and if that’s not scary enough 9 out of
10 people don’t know they’re
pre-diabetic okay so pre-diabetes leads
to often leads to type 2 diabetes and
that can lead to things like heart
disease stroke blindness kidney failure
and I am one of those 86 million
Americans I was diagnosed as
pre-diabetic 2 years ago and let me tell
you what a shock that was right I’m a
northern California foodie I eat kale
I I really had a self-image as this
healthy person who occasionally indulged
but what I learned was that I was a very
indulgent eater who occasionally chose
something healthy sounds familiar right
yeah so uh the key here for me was you
know what to do with that knowledge
because we all think were the exceptions
right we never like to think of
ourselves as a center of the bell curve
what happened was my doctor said I need
to lose weight and exercise and he sent
me to a nutritionist the nutritionist
showed me some plastic bowls of food she
told me that I should only have this
much protein and made a fist and there’s
much jeez that’s like an inch cube which
for me like that that’s nothing that’s a
crumb it was a long list of don’ts it
was all about deprivation and
restriction and it was depressing so in
my work I used this approach design
thinking and I decided in this moment to
turn that on myself and try to design my
way out of this what is design thinking
design thinking is about getting
inspired by people and experiences
it’s about being generative and
optimistic and about creating
experiments and prototypes and trying
them out in the world and so knowing
deprivation and don’ts was not going to
work for me
I find it to find a different way in to
a new relationship with healthy food and
I want to share three of those
experiences or or prototypes with you
experiments one is really around extreme
an extreme behavior and that’s meant to
inspire me another one is around just
relearning some basic skills and the
last one is about just getting smarter
right just learning a little bit more
about nutrition so the first one let’s
go to the wilds of Northern California
this is point raised
we’ll see Shore I’m with my friend Eve
we are foraging it is raining it’s cold
we have big boots on
we’re bushwhacking through brambles
there’s poison oak everywhere you can
see the look on my face I’m not too
convinced by all of this and I
definitely don’t think we’re gonna find
dinner here but Eve is also a
mindfulness expert she’s worked with the
Dalai Lama she’s taught meditation
workshops around the world so my fantasy
of this extreme experience is that she
is going to use all those Jedi
mindfulness skills on me that I’m gonna
become enlightened about food I’m gonna
lose my attachment to cheese and salami
I am going to eat slowly and
deliberately I’m going to be happy with
a small bowl of raw native plants
nope didn’t quite happen I did it was so
exciting it was a super thrill we did
come back with some really cool plants I
didn’t know you could eat and trust me
don’t just go out and eat stuff now to
go with someone who knows what they’re
doing but we came home with a basket
full of miner’s lettuce delicious
peppery garlic flowers and stinging
nettles
so stinging nettles literally if like
any of it touches even the tiniest bit
of your skin you have like a burning
sting for hours it’s terrible so anyway
this is me going off the deep end I’m
cooking in my gardening gloves because I
have my stinging nettles to work with I
decided to make fresh pasta to go with
the stinging nettles this was like hours
and hours in the kitchen by the time I
served my family it was ten o’clock at
night I was exhausted they thought it
was awesome I was totally exhausted and
the interesting thing was that the big
learning I took away from it is that
grocery stores are awesome
grocery stores could take some
inspiration from foraging because you
know it gets a little boring in there
but really they’re good stuff my next
adventure was with this guy this is chef
Danny Brooks he is a real chef he’s
worked at three-star Michelin
restaurants in Spain he has all kinds of
horror stories from the kitchen you guys
probably can imagine one of one chef he
worked with burned him with a pan on
purpose like who does that right other
other bosses were very patient and kind
but anyway I I wanted to work with Danny
because now he has a regular
nine-to-five job he’s married kids you
know just like the rest of us and I
thought if anybody can inspire my day to
day cooking it it’s gonna be Danny but I
wanted to set it up as like a kind of
real-life experiment so we went to the
grocery store together plan the meal and
then would bring it home and cook at
home while the kids were running around
and all that so we go to the grocery
store and I’m so excited because my
three-star Michelin chefs was gonna go
to the grocery store with me right but
and I think he’s gonna plan the menu but
he doesn’t plan the menu he goes into
the produce section and talks to the guy
in the produce section it says hey what
should we eat tonight I was like what
that’s not how it’s supposed to work but
it turns out the produce guy he knows
everything right he’s tried everything
in there he has relationships with the
growers if he hasn’t tried it
he knows what when it’s come in at least
so he knows what’s fresh and he told us
asparagus green onions
avocados they’re on sale oranges
delicious so we’re done with that and we
get home and I learned a couple more
things from Danny I want to share with
you so when you’re doing a vegetable
forward meal do one hot vegetable dish
and one cold and let the ingredients
determine what those are the other thing
you should know about vegetables this is
Danny’s advice is you have to cook them
separately so when I grew
you know was when you cooked vegetables
it was like stir-fry just throw it all
in a pot that’s not how you’re supposed
to cook vegetables you’re supposed to
cook each one individually the each one
needs a slightly different cook time and
Danny told me this and I thought this is
ridiculous this is way too much time but
the flavor convinced me otherwise so
each one we cooked individually put it
together and they all had a slightly
different texture it was great
Danny is also showing you his favorite
kitchen tools his hands his fingers have
no nerve endings in them because he’s
dipped in and out of so many hot pans
but don’t forget your hands they’re
really great kitchen tools and as far as
fancy chef stuff I would say that the
fanciest thing we did was our pursuit of
great ingredients and you can do that
easily at your own farmers market where
they will have the best flavors and the
best prices my last stop on this journey
was to get informed to really get up to
speed on nutrition the latest in
nutrition science and I did it with dr.
David Ison Berg he’s the associate
professor of nutrition at Harvard and he
is a founder of something called healthy
kitchens healthy lives which is a
conference up in Napa and it’s not a
typical medical conference it’s at the
Culinary Institute of America which is a
very nice cooking school and the
vineyards of Napa and dr. Eisenberg
brings chefs and doctors together and
health care providers and they learn
about nutrition science share papers but
they also take cooking classes together
and they also eat together fascinating
it’s really his ideas to sort of build
on the success story of smoking
cessation so I don’t know if you’ve seen
those graphs but at the point where
doctors started to quit smoking their
patients followed suit so the idea here
is to if you educate and and get health
care providers and doctors to love
healthy food and know how to cook it
that maybe then they can talk to their
patients a little more
wincing Lee and then it was dr.
Eisenberg Stern to get up on the stage a
cooking doctor he got up on the stage
there was a demonstration kitchen
he had an apron on and he told us a
story he told us a story about how his
father his grandfather was a baker and
how he grew up loving baked goods and
that led him on his own path towards
healthy eating and then he told us how
just like everyone else he rushes home
to cook a wholesome meal for his family
and he shared a recipe it was a couscous
salad with roasted or toasted nuts and
herbs and dried fruit and he explained
how toasting the nuts released the
flavor a little bit how you have to
fluff the couscous
how the dried fruit was just a little
bit of sweetness but didn’t matter what
kind of dried fruit and he took a pan
down and he put it on the demonstration
stove and he started to cook and I
started to cry it was it was I was being
cared for not treated it was something
that my mom would have done and it was
about food and cooking as self-care and
I needed to hear this message and I
needed to hear it from a doctor and dr.
Eisenberg truly changed my life that day
so why cook so it turns out that people
who cook fresh ingredients are healthier
okay that is a widely accepted fact by
health care professionals so I heard
that and I thought it’s got to be
correlational like what else are they
doing you know are they exercising are
they wealthier so they have more access
to healthy food what
going on but I have to say through my
own journey that if you cook you do
start to do other things I really
started to care about the ingredients I
was using and if I was gonna be in the
kitchen they were gonna be great
fresh ingredients and I was going to
bother going to the farmers market I got
more efficient in the kitchen and loved
the creativity and fun of being in there
and seeing dr. Eisenberg walk the walk
was just that right amount of motivation
for me and to think about cooking a
self-care right I had been told to
exercise I went and did that
I didn’t outsource that why would I go
outsource my the food I was gonna put in
my body so cooking does require a deeper
level of engagement in how you care for
yourself and it really does matter to
your family’s health cooking makes
health possible and that’s why cooking
might save your life thank you
you
Please follow and like us: