Eating to Enjoy

Instead of Eating to Diet, They’re Eating to Enjoy
By TARA PARKER-POPE

Excerpts:

“If something is high in calories, I try to look at the big picture,” said Ms. McClintock, a photo service account executive. “If you’re going to indulge in something, just try and walk it off or limit it to once a week.”

Some former dieters say they’ve been influenced by the international Slow Food movement, a 10-year-old group that encourages locally grown, unprocessed food. Over the Labor Day weekend an estimated 60,000 people attended the Slow Food Nation festival in San Francisco.

Alice Waters, of the restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and a prominent supporter of the Slow Food movement, said food habits change when a person begins to cook at home more.

Her efforts to encourage home cooking include a new campaign of Internet cooking videos from the Slow Food Nation event, such as one from the chef Bryant Terry, who showed how to strip corn from the cob and sauté it with chili.

“We need to demystify cooking,” Ms. Waters said. “It creates feelings about food that make you feel cared for, and that’s the kind of food that really changes habits.”

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“If everyone ate more plant-based and more whole foods and unprocessed foods, that would be major,”
said Arlene Spark, associate professor of nutrition at Hunter College in New York. “But that would mean people going back to cooking, and what we’ve lost is people’s ability and knowledge of how to cook.”