You’re listening to Busy Body Podcast! a podcast about … being alive and having a body. Every episode I’ll be discussing topics such as climate change, menopause, meditation, the ozempic fad… and how it affects our bodies.
Today I’m talking with Christina Chaey!
Christina and I co-host the Nourish Yourself program together! We discuss how she got into food, why it matters to her to be part of a program like Nourish Yourself and how her relationship to her body and food has changed as she has learned more about truly listening to, and taking care of herself.
Christina Chaey is a recipe developer, home cook, writer, and editor. She writes a newsletter called Gentle Foods on Substack, where she shares original recipes and writes essays that explore the intersection of food, mental health, community, and the continual pursuit of joy. She loves helping people to connect with (and over) food in new ways. Previously, she was a senior food editor at Bon Appétit, where she spent her days in the BA Test Kitchen dreaming up recipes for home cooks and oversaw the brand’s digital recipe content. She worked with freelancers and test kitchen editors to publish hundreds of home cook-friendly recipes on bonappetit.com every year. While at Bon Appétit, she also starred in popular video series on the brand’s YouTube channel such as “From the Test Kitchen” and “Making Perfect: Thanksgiving”, wrote and edited features for the magazine, and was a guest star on the podcast.
Christina developed a deep respect for sustainably farmed, local, and seasonal produce during her time as a line cook at the now-closed Untitled at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she worked for executive chef Suzanne Cupps.
When Christina isn’t developing recipes, she's riding all around NYC on her bike, experimenting with sourdough, or arms-deep in seasonal produce at the greenmarket. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their very loud cat, Sunday.
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Edited Transcript:
Christina
you know, I grew up, I grew up watching Martha, I grew up watching Ina Garten and Giada De Laurentiis and, you know, like all those people.
And they were and they had such an effect, I think, in particular, like Martha and Ina had such an effect on this early kind of vision I had for myself when I was grown up, like I very much was so enthralled with
the Little Appetizers and like, you know, the gay best friends with fresh flowers.
Cadence
Yeah, totally.
Ina Garten, she really curated a lifestyle that we were all like, wait, I want the absent husband and all my gay best friends that come by all the time.
Christina
The husband who's like low key in the CIA.
Cadence
Yeah, exactly.
Christina
Um, but and so, you know, I watched voraciously, I consumed, you know, that sort of food content as a kid, and like as a teenager, but it didn't really translate into what I was doing at home, you know, I would make like the random cake for someone's birthday or something, but it like didn't occur to me that you could make a cake that didn't come out of a box until, until college, I think.
I, I remember my sister and I were talking about this recently, this, the most impressive dessert that I would make when we were kids that everyone, like all the adults would be like, oh my God, that's so gourmand, was Duncan Hines devil food cake with, um, sliced strawberries and a Martha Stewart ganache, which is just cream and chocolate melted together.
Oh yeah, oh and the sides were covered in like flaked almonds.
Cadence
Oh my god, it's so beautiful!
Christina
It was the pinnacle of chicness in our household.
But anyway, so then I think when I really started cooking for myself and then started realizing that it was something I was interested in was when I was in college, like in the second half of college, when I was living off campus and with friends, and we were all just responsible for feeding ourselves.
And that was, that was just a time of I think experimenting with no money.
So there were a lot of survival kind of bag of frozen vegetable stir fries with like tofu or whatever.
But there was also, you know, the first turkey that I ever roasted for a Friendsgiving that we hosted and, you know, things like that. And then from there, I think it just became this really beloved hobby.
And I found a lot of my energy outside of work.
When I was first working out of college, at a desk job was spent like making all kinds of elaborate things, either just for fun or for friends.
And I was so far away from where I am now in terms of understanding, like, the science or the chemistry or the methods or whatever, you know, I was just making things because I was excited about them.
And, and, and yeah, it really, I think, was kind of a hobby slash anxiety management tool. More than anything, because it was just a space to clear your head of anything besides just following a recipe. And that required total focus. And there wasn't really room for any of the other stuff. And at the time, you like just as a highly anxious young adult, like it was it was a very effective coping mechanism.
Cadence
Yeah, that is something I love about cooking. My boyfriend cooks a lot and I've actually noticed the absence of having the need to cook. Because it's a really great way for me to end my day and just, yeah, not think about anything, just kind of fall into the rhythm of doing that. It's like a little project that is very short. You just start and finish in a couple of hours and it, or obviously a lot less than that.
And it's great. It's a great way to relax. And in the past couple of weeks, I've been like, I need to reclaim some of our dinner nights because I'm, it's not, it's no fun to go from work to bed without that little moment.
Christina
Totally. Conversely, it's no fun to cook when you don't feel like cooking. You just have to. That's the worst.
Cadence
Topically relevant to our Nourish Yourself collab.
Christina
Just trying to make that less of an annoying, dreary thing.
Cadence
That's really a skill that gets developed over time.
Christina
Totally.
Cadence
And probably somewhat in those early college days.
Yeah, yeah, I lived on a lot of beans in my college.
Christina
I didn't really know about beans in my college time to be totally honest.
Cadence
Like, I did because my dad's from the south.
Yeah, he's from the south that we used to make red beans and rice growing up.
And that was like, I mean, it cost’s like 30 cents. So I made a lot of red beans in college, black eyed peas. Yeah, I'm grateful for that. I literally had a random bean cookbook that was just like a zillion bean recipes.
Christina
That's amazing. I mean, now, now I feel like I get it. But yeah, at the time, like, we didn't we didn't have that. No, I think beans are pretty important. Koreans just don't like eating beans. Yeah, Koreans don't really eat beans in the same way that Western people eat them.
So, you know, if we were primarily eating, like, a mix of Korean food and, you know, sort of a lot of Western staples like spaghetti and meat sauce and, like, some salmon with some rice and broccoli or, you know, things like that.
But maybe, maybe the one time we would eat beans actually was sometimes my mom would make chili.
Cadence
Yeah, I think beans as a center of the plate is actually not, I don't, I think I'm kind of unique in that way as a northerner for sure.
Did you grow up eating like primarily eating Korean food?
Christina
I would say it was maybe 50-50. Where you know a lot of the times it was just Korean food is so can be so fast to put together that you know it makes like boiling a pot of water for pasta look like it's just like taking forever.
So I think a lot of the times, you know, with my mom being like the primary cook for me and my sister and my dad, it was just about like, what's easy and what's fast and, you know, while still being like helpful.
So there were a lot of like Korean stews with some rice and some sort of banchan or vegetables on the side. And that would be dinner.
But you know, the banchan would already be made, you just pull them out of the fridge.
The stew is like, you know instant Dashi and a jar of kimchi or something and a pack of tofu and then you cook some rice and that is still like that that is still a really um kind of uh like primal place in my like food life it is something I deeply connect to and need when I haven't had that for a while you start to really just be like
This doesn't feel right.
I need, I need the stew.
Cadence
That makes so much sense.
When you were first starting to cook, were you like, were you guided at all by those flavors and, and were you branching into like more, um, complex Korean recipes or were you completely just like seeing something at a restaurant and trying to recreate that or, you know, whatever, something in a magazine?
Christina
You know, I actually for a long time had no interest in learning how to cook Korean food, especially when I was first just picking up cooking as a sort of hobby thing.
I really, it was so divorced from the kind of table food that we would eat growing up and it is just kind of interesting because I think that has really intersected with times when I've been sort of more in a place of discomfort or denial about, you know, aspects of my heritage and my identity that, you know, just didn't really resonate with me so much back then as they do now, if that makes sense.
So, you know, a lot of times it was more like, no, I want to learn how to make a gougere, I don't know. Or like cinnamon rolls.
Cadence
Yeah, nothing wrong with gougeres or cinnamon rolls.
Christina
But yeah, there was a very clear, there was a very clear and obvious direction for the kind of food that I was interested in learning how to make.
And it was very influenced by that sort of like, Ina Martha era.
Cadence
Well, I think from what I understand, just sort of in the history of American, you know, food culture, Food Network brought the idea of making things that are more complex into the average American household.
Like, people got excited about cooking and having more flourish than in the TV dinner
or like whatever just kind of American food culture from what I've the things that I've sort of read and studied for people who are really excited about that is basically that we just prioritize speed and efficiency and so we we are the inventors of the
TV dinner and the meal bar and the, you know, all these things that you can just like store in your car.
Basically, it's not exactly an engagement with like, where the food is coming from and taste and texture.
And food culture kind of brought that back into American consciousness, just somewhat.
Christina
And of course, like those things don't, of course, those things happen in such a specific context, right, of, you know, capitalism.
And just that sort of really settling in of the modern, I think, kind of overwork culture.
But yeah, but then it's no wonder that you see the rise of that kind of really leaning into self-care and wellness and how that industry has now sort of peaked and I think right now kind of starting to hover in the
I don't know zone where like everything is so hyper fixated on wellness to the point where it just like doesn't really have meaning anymore, at least to me.
Cadence
Yeah, no, I think you're right.
And I think that is really what's so interesting about food.
It's what interests me about people in the food industry is that we all need food, like you can't ignore that.
So you can be a person who can't cook at all, and you still have to eat.
And you can be someone who never grocery shops and you still have to eat.
And you can be someone who, you know, has the most refined of tastes and, you know, passes their nose over everything else, you know, and is ordering them imported this or that.
And you still have to eat like the, you know, there's or you can have all kinds of restrictions or, you know, cultural things.
And you still have to find something to eat when you're at the airport or whatever, you know, like there's
It's so fascinating to me where all these things intersect.
And that eating because we have to in order to live is a very primary way to take care of ourselves.
It's it's like the first way we you know, what does the baby do when it comes out of the human?
It has to eat pretty much right away.
My hope is that people are doing that for themselves every morning, but I think it's because of so much capitalism, production, production, production, people are like, oh, I have emails to finish, I have to get to work on time, I don't have time to butter a piece of toast, I don't have time to, you know, whatever.
Christina
And we haven't even gotten into the whole like,
uh deprivation mindset and diet culture aspect of it where you're just like oh i don't i can't eat toast or i can't eat peanut butter on my toaster or whatever yeah yeah exactly and and there's a huge intersection there of also capitalism and production and we have to present a body that patriarchy
Cadence
Yeah, that's just like, look at my body, it's proving that I'm a productive person because I'm so lean and clearly disciplined and all of these things.
I would never have the pleasure of a buttery scone for breakfast, not me.
Christina
Yeah, that's for lazy people.
Cadence
What came next?
22:14
How did you turn this hobby into a career?
Christina
You know, it's funny.
I don't think it occurred to me that food could be a career. Before I ended up kind of by chance getting this what was supposed to be a temporary, I think like six week job at Bon Appétit, where I ended up working for like seven years after that.
And it's funny, because years later, I remembered that in college, I wrote a paper for journalism class, because I was a journalism major. And it was a paper interviewing someone who had a job you thought was cool in the industry.
And the person I chose to interview is someone who at the time happened to be a food editor at Bon Appétit.
And I just had no memory of that when I first got that job.
And so it's just kind of funny the ways in which these things just sort of feel like they end up happening, but then they clearly did have some sort of string or emotional pull like at an earlier time. And so, so yeah, I started this temporary job at Bon Appétit.
My job was to like, basically, you know, when recipes would come out in the magazine, we would want to put them on the website, someone has to manually enter those recipes into the CMS, so that they can be available on the website.
So I did stuff like that.
And at the time, I can't even remember what I was making.
I think I was making something like $31,000 or something like that.
And so I had this job Monday through Friday working at Bon Appétit.
I eventually got hired there full time, but I was still making somewhere in that range.
And so I would work Monday through Friday at my job and then Friday through Sunday I would work waiting tables at this restaurant in Brooklyn.
And so that was also another dimension too of like, you know, do I wish that I could have not worked seven days a week during that time?
It's kind of like different work, you know, it stimulates the brain and the body in different ways, especially if most of your time is spent like at a desk.
And it just was an important emotional reminder for me that this is work that resonates with me and with who I am.
And so I think, from there, I realized that after a couple years of working up on Appetite, what I what I wanted was to be doing more of the stuff like in the trenches, you know, I was like, I want to learn how to cook.
Um, and I don't want to, I don't want to be the person who interviews people who know how to cook.
I want to be the person who knows how to cook.
And so then I made the decision to leave the magazine and I went to go work at this restaurant called Untitled, which no longer exists sadly, but for a while it was the restaurant on the ground floor of the Whiting Museum of American Art.
And I was very lucky that they took me in with no experience.
And you know, I like sliced my finger open on the first week and all this stuff, you know.
But, um, but I spent maybe like a year and a half there.
And I'm so I'm so grateful for I'm grateful to myself for making the decision to do something like that.
Especially during a time in my life where I had, on the one hand, nothing to lose and on the other hand, no fallback plan or no security.
I was making $30,000 a year.
I didn't have anything in the bank.
I had negative money in the bank.
And even during that time, I worked another job too.
I worked as a copywriter for like 15-20 hours a week on top of this like, whatever, 50 hour a week job.
And anyway, long story short, did that, realized I didn't want to be a chef.
26:39
I was like, this will destroy me mentally and bodily.
Just kind of by coincidence, I ended up going back to Bon Appétit, but this time as this kind of hybrid editor slash sometimes recipe developer if I wanted slash the things I was in charge of were a lot more like making decisions about the kinds of recipes of the kind of cooking stories that we would eventually publish.
And then, you know, after a few years of that, I ended up becoming like an actual recipe developer, which is to say I sort of crossed over into the realm of the test kitchen, where my job became like developing recipes full time.
Cadence
That sounds very fun.
Christina
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's been a long, it's been a long adventure.
Cadence
Part of our collaboration is also we started having conversations just about your changing relationship with your own body and your own relationship to food.
And I'm interested in, you know, to have a career in food,
is actually not that different in some ways as having a career in fitness, right?
Like, I could sort of tell a similar story of being really interested in anatomy and like, you know, drawn to this and that, almost as separate from myself and my own body, you know, just kind of like, oh, I'm I have this aptitude for this, I'm getting excited about this, and like trying different things and doing different things and finding your way.
And at the same time, you're like a developing adult, you know, you're in your 20s, you're growing through all kinds of things and your own identity.
How did those things intersect for you, like your relationship with your own body?
You know, I'm even just imagining working all those hours, all those different kinds of jobs.
I remember that crazy exhaustion and crazy energy I had when I was hustling like a lunatic in my early New York days.
Christina
Surprisingly often, I find in my industry that people end up there out of some desire to control their own relationships with food.
Like, it's not necessarily coincidence as much as you would think, or just like, you know, this, like, pure, sort of, I just love food kind of thing.
Very rarely do I find that that actually ends up being the case because people in food and people in fitness and people in the medical community and you know wherever like we're all people who live in this society and we have all been socialized with the same um you know messaging around um you know weight shaming and body shaming and fat shaming and um you know oftentimes I think we end up being
the perpetuators of more harm.
And so that has been a journey that I've been on for a long time at this point where I've really just been looking back at the kinds of messages I used to eat up and the kinds of things I used to just spout back out that felt like totally normal at the time.
And now in retrospect, I'm like, no, there was something really wrong going on there.
Like, this is not this is not how I want to be living my life.
But um, I mean, I, I have, I have always loved food.
I've always loved eating and I find it to be so pleasurable.
But I also have a long history of turning to food to fill some other sort of void.
And I think for a while when I was in high school, and it took me a long time to realize this, but I was engaged in this cycle of, like, I wouldn't sleep.
I would sleep maybe like four hours a night.
I would barely eat anything during the day because I would wake up too late.
I would barely get to school on time, so I wouldn't eat breakfast.
Sometimes I would eat lunch, but sometimes I would just eat, like, we used to have these giant, like, cookies the size of your face.
They were, like, warm Otis Spunkmeyer cookies for $1.10.
And so sometimes that would just be lunch.
And then you know just imagine you're a teenager you're running on no breakfast and a cookie the size of your face and then you know I would have sports or extracurriculars or something and it's and then I would have dinner and then I wouldn't sleep again but
But then I would get hungry.
And it's kind of like, no wonder I would get hungry in retrospect, I didn't eat anything all day.
But so then I would start binge eating at night, like when no one was awake.
And I would, I got in a really sort of good system where I had, you know, places around the house where I would hide my wrappers because I knew that someone would find them in the trash if I threw them out in the trash.
I knew the things that would make the least amount of noise like anything that would use the microwave or use the stove with the ignition clicker like that was off limits because someone would hear that and wake up.
So I would literally eat like cold cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli, which is so disgusting, like disgusting, at like two in the morning, three in the morning.
And I look back on that time with so much, like so many complicated feelings.
I still haven't really come to fully process what that period was all about for me.
But I do, I do know that it was not, it was not good.
Cadence
Yeah, it's wild too, because you were also feeding yourself.
You were a growing teenager.
Like, in so many ways, thank God you were eating in the night.
Otherwise, you would have like stunted your growth or something.
But what an un-happy and stressful way to accomplish that.
Christina
Yeah, and, um, you know, that's kicked off like a long, I think, at the time I was to date, I'm just always like a pretty athletic, I was really lean, I was a really skinny kid for my whole life until I was around like 15, 16.
You know there wasn't there there's not really talk ever there's still not really enough talk about how we're not meant to have the body as we had as teenagers and how fetishizing that is fucking weird yeah and um and yet here i was as a teenager whose body was rapidly changing away from a body that had been given so much audible praise and um you know just like
I was just like almost being like congratulated for something that I had no control of and I wasn't doing anything about.
It's not like I was restricting calories and exercise.
I was a kid.
Cadence
Yeah, you were a child.
Christina
And and and then yeah, I think
It just, it's so disorienting when you don't have language, you don't have support to talk about how it's normal for bodies to change.
So I think, you know, for me in terms of my own sort of food and body journey, like the priority has just become supporting my body and feeling good.
And so much of that involves not turning away from signals that it's trying to send about hunger, about exhaustion, about, you know, just all these little cries for help that can become so well muted, especially as people who have like busy city lives.
Cadence
Absolutely.
Christina
And also something I think about a lot that I think you taught me is about when anxiety is actually just hunger.
And like how, for so much of my 20s, I think I might have just been not eating enough.
Cadence
100%.
I got into nutrition because I fainted in my 20s.
And I always thought of myself as...
I mean, boy, is it a 20s story.
And that was because I was running around hustling.
I taught at three different Pilates studios.
I literally would just be teaching shifts, on the subway, teaching shifts, on the subway.
I would have an apple.
I would have some nuts.
I would grab, I remember I used to have soy milk hot chocolates from Starbucks.
That was like my lunch without thinking about it because I was in my 20s, didn't think about it.
So I didn't notice that I was hungry, I'm sure.
But I wasn't thinking about the fact that it was hours since breakfast.
I'm sure I was hungry.
We walk all the way back.
I realized I'm starving.
I ate two cookies, again, straight sugar.
And he's literally ordering us food.
37:14
I remember because he had like a old, it was like long enough ago that he had like a laptop, an old like desktop in the kitchen that was shared between him and his roommate.
That was like the computer that they used.
And he said that I said to him, I think I'm going to faint.
37:29
I don't remember speaking.
I remember suddenly feeling really hot and thinking, oh my God, I have food poisoning or something.
But he said he heard me say, I think I'm going to faint and he turned around and my eyes had rolled up in my head and I just went straight over like a tree and he actually caught me to his credit.
He's very athletic first of all.
He caught me because I would have fallen head first on the tile floor, you know.
He thought I had a stroke.
He like, when I woke up, he was like, who's the president?
Raise your arms, like all this stuff.
But I have naturally like pretty low blood pressure.
And basically I just kept spiking my blood pressure all day with the sugar and all this stuff.
And so then my blood sugar was like plummeting and my body was just like, goodbye.
And after that, I was like, yeah.
And then what was crazy is I realized that I had been having the pre feeling of fainting regularly.
I was like, I've had this standing on the subway platform.
I felt that weird heat feeling.
And I was like, oh my God, I've been almost fainting all the time.
I would have, I remembered like I would come home from a whole day and I would feel so nauseous that I had to lay down.
And I would kind of know that I was hungry, but I literally felt so ill that I had to lay down for like 20 minutes before I could eat something.
That was just like normal life in my 20s.
And I went to a nutritionist and she was like, you need to be eating like five times a day.
38:55
She was just like, what is wrong with you?
And she got me just like packing meals for myself and like my life was changed.
I was like, oh my god, energy.
I feel so much better.
I'm not weirdly nauseous all of a sudden.
39:08
I'm not almost fainting into the subway tracks anymore, you know, like, yeah.
And I think a lot of people experience that waves of nausea.
I literally had a client who would have that heat thing when she would get in a subway car.
and she associated it with it. She was like, oh, the subway car is crowded.
I must be panicking. And she was like taking Xanax.
And then we realized looking at her food diary, I was like, you ate at six in the morning and now it's two and you've been doing very physical work and biking around the city, like you're starving.
You're starving at this point.
Christina
um oh gosh it just makes me i mean you know god bless our 20 something selves but i just i look back and i'm like it's crazy it's crazy yeah the kinds of things we were doing yeah oh i used to also inhale an entire pizza at least once a week which was again clearly because i was in some kind of deficit like i would be so insanely hungry um and i yeah i think back on that and it was just like that was just so
Cadence
When you're in your 20s, there's all there's giant enormous red flags of like, this seems kind of extreme.
And you're just like, I don't know.
Christina
Yeah, I mean, and I also think I don't know if this happened.
This would happen to you when you were in the pizza inhalation phases where there's just all kinds of associated feelings of like, guilt, shame, confusion, like, yeah, disorientation.
It's just like, who is this person living inside of me? Yeah, I was just aware that I was out of, like, it wasn't, it just seemed beyond my capabilities.
It was just like, it's Thursday night, pizza inhalation night.
There's no way around it, just has to happen.
Like, maybe I could be making food.
Christina
And then would you feel sick?
Cadence
No, I was hungry enough that I would just feel like that was enough food.
Christina
Actually, I have to tell you something, which is like tangentially related, but you might be horrified.
Basically, like for years and years of my life, I was wearing pants that were too small.
No surprise.
And, you know, obviously, you know this, but you know, the kind of the unnatural pressure that you're putting around your waistline, and I have a naturally like larger waistline.
Or whatever, like the
So I would buy pants that fit my legs, but that would really not fit my waistline, and I would just be like, like, this works.
And so then of course, like, you're being squeezed, you know, like, I don't even know what the metaphor is, but you're being squeezed so tight, and then you eat something.
And it was so uncomfortable, I would get, I always was just like,
I thought it was normal to have to unbutton your pants and lay down after every meal.
Like my friends would just be like, that's Christina's couch, like wherever we were, it was just known the couch would be for me, like after we had a meal.
Like when I was at home, I just immediately had to lay down.
And I just, it's so funny thinking about it now, because I just thought that that was what happened to everyone.
Cadence
Exactly.
Yeah, and I want to make it clear at that time, I was not skinny.
I mean, I've basically always looked the way that I look.
So even though I was not eating enough, I really didn't look very different from now.
You know, I certainly wasn't a twig.
So it wasn't intentional.
I wasn't trying to diet.
I just really was a numbskull.
I just, just, I didn't know how to plan meals.
I just was like, Oh, I eat breakfast.
I eat dinner.
I eat nothing in between.
That seems fine.
I don't know.
How do people make lunch?
I can't figure it out.
How do I put stuff in my bag?
Can't, can't do it.
Christina
Yeah.
And which speaks to, I think really the need that I saw to create the Nourish program
Cadence
You know, in my opinion, there are a lot of resources out there.
I don't know if they're good, but there seems to be a lot of resources out there for people who are really, really struggling in the midst of like a serious eating disorder, you know, where there really needs to be a lot of counseling or even like hospitalization or like an outpatient program.
And there are certainly lots of resources out there if you're like, quote unquote, trying to lose weight or something.
But there is not very much out there.
If you were kind of just still in that 20s phase to some degree, where you're like, okay, I cook sometimes I know that I like, you know, I'm not going to do the restrictive or like binging necessarily behaviors that I did in my 20s.
I've healed some parts of myself in that way, but I don't really have the next step.
Like, I've literally had clients be like, I don't really know just like, what does a healthy plate look like?
Because they're like, I'm not dieting anymore, but I don't know what's supposed to be on my plate anymore.
And the way that diet culture has co-opted just like vegetables and things like that, like people so associate now fruits and vegetables with their dieting self and like,
like not engaging with food at all is my freedom.
Like that's my healing.
I'm not obsessing at all.
I just do whatever I want, anything that flies past me.
And that's also a kind of non-awareness and like a way of also being out of control.
If you're just like, I don't even think about breakfast.
So whatever comes across my desk in the morning is just what I'm going to eat.
Like, oh, my coworker's like, I got a muffin.
You want one?
And you're just like, sure.
when maybe you're like, oh, I wish I'd had scrambled eggs this morning, I'm starving actually, you know?
So that's a hole that I hope that this program falls into.
And I think that your style of cooking in particular, which is accessible, but also really engaged and interesting.
And it's not, you know, the point of it is not just like, three step casserole or something.
But it's like, look at these delicious flavors, you know, and yet also this didn't take me three days to prep and put together.
You can find these, you can make these on your own.
Christina
Well, I mean, something about what you were talking about just made me think about like, I think in the last year or so I've been on my own little journey to start to reclaim some foods that I had, you know, in various times knowingly or unknowingly restricted from my life and took like weird, I remember I would talk about it and I would take this like weird pride and be like, oh, I don't keep pasta in the house.
And, you know, now just trying to shift to a like,
How amazing is it that pasta can be this like incredible sort of like canvas for all these things that maybe I wouldn't have like been so excited to eat otherwise, like these vegetables or whatever.
But because they're with pasta, I'm like, I'm so much more into this.
Like my whole being is like, I'm so excited to eat this.
And, you know, just stepping back and being like, why did I think that was such a bad thing?
Cadence
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I've newly discovered grains, you know, in the last couple of years, mainly in some ways, just because I didn't feel like I really knew an interesting way to make grains.
But also there was some leftover just like, that's a lot of carbs, like in my brain.
And so it wasn't, I didn't always have like a lot of grains available in my pantry.
And now I do.
And yeah, similarly, it's like have some random leftover chicken,
make some grains and mix that together with some herbs and it's delicious.
Christina
You know, I mean, it's just like... And I think too, I think there's something else that has been helpful for me and my own sort of food and cooking stuff has just been to be like, not everything you eat is going to be the most amazing thing you've ever tasted.
But it's still going to do the job you need it to do.
There are some meals where I'm just like, the priority of this meal, like the goal of this meal is for me to be energized and not have to think about food for the next three hours because I have a lot of work to do.
I have a packed schedule, I'm traveling, like whatever.
And so now to feel like I know what those things are and what things will make me feel a certain way is hugely powerful.
Yeah, but also it turns out like, not always gonna be 100% excited to eat those things.
And like, that's fine.
Cadence
I think that's a like a wonderful nuance for people to understand.
I think so many people have this real pass fail perspective on their own cooking and what they're making at home.
And I hope that people get from us that they can really develop their own food culture, kind of their own recipe bank, and their own things that they can
you know, whatever thing that they've tried in the past, but that you just know that there is something that does exactly what you said, makes you energized, makes you feel good, makes you just like not have to think about being hungry for the next couple of hours.
But yeah, are you inviting all your friends over to have this thing that you made?
Probably not, no.
Christina
No.
Although I do, I want to do this again this next cycle, but something I really liked that we did in our you know, I just talked about how not everything I eat is going to be the most amazing thing in the world.
But I think there's another kind of flip side to that where people are, are often afraid of food tasting like too good.
Cadence
The connotation being like, you're going to lose control, you're going to end up overeating, whatever, whatever.
And that also makes me sad, too.
Because that comes back to our first thought about our first point just about capitalism and production and pleasure just gets ripped out of that picture so early.
And I think that becomes so many people's perspective of food.
I remember a participant of ours in this past group in the fall, when we asked what she's eating every day, she was making these really sad muffins that were like flourless muffins from some diet recipe thing that she had.
And I just was like, are they good?
And she was like, not really.
And I was like, can we find something that you Want to Eat?
And I was like, so clearly you're like, I'm not going to eat peanut butter and this other person's miserable muffin situation.
It's not, quote unquote, working, right?
Like you haven't achieved what you, whatever it is.
So you might as well eat the peanut butter and have a better muffin.
Cause I really doubt, like it's, you're not going to just suddenly be like unable to fit through your front door, you know?
Christina
If I recall correctly,
Yeah, if I recall correctly, that person had this kind of like peanut butter liberation.
Cadence
Yeah, totally.
Christina
And was like so happy.
Cadence
Yeah, found that when they allowed themselves to just have peanut butter toast in the morning, they were not snacking through their whole workday on like crap that people are bringing into the office.
They felt better.
They were more balanced.
They were like, I have better hunger cues.
Christina
Oh my God, breakfast is so helpful.
Cadence
So yeah, and I think finding that pleasure can be really the key in so many ways to engaging with our food.
Christina
Yeah, agreed.
Cadence
Well, thank you so much, Christina.
Christina
Thank you.
Cadence
I'm so excited for our next group.
Christina
Me too.
Cadence
And we'll put in links where people can find you.
Nourish Yourself with food and recipe writer Christina Chaey