Redefining Healthy Cooking with Julia Turshen

May 9, 2022

Anna Lutz and Elizabeth Davenport chat with Julia Turshen about the process of researching and writing a cookbook, and how it felt to include an essay on breaking up with diet culture in her latest cookbook, Simply Julia. She also talks about how disconnection is inherent in diet culture; in families, or among friends, having weight loss as a common goal can feel temporarily good, but ultimately creates a deficit of joy around food.

We discuss:

• How isolating it can be to grow up in a family that is immersed in diet culture, but also how connecting with people and having conversations about the impacts of diet culture is incredibly healing.
• How cookbooks are so often welcomed into peoples homes, but the contents are often not questioned.
• Examples of diet culture’s trickery and disconnection when it appears in cooking and cookbooks.
• The over abundance of images of thin, white, cis-gendered women in food-related social media posts is detrimental and is largely what has lead us to equate that type of body with “healthy”.
• How forms of oppression tend to be best countered as a community.
• Julia’s go-to meals.

Links: 

• About Julia Turshen
• Simply Julia
• Keep Calm and Cook On
• Live cooking classes every Sunday afternoon
• Equity At The Table (EATT)
• God’s Love We Deliver’s Culinary Council
• Kitchen Cabinet Advisory Board for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History
• Sunny Side Up Nutrition Podcast 
• Lutz, Alexander & Associates Nutrition Therapy
• Pinney Davenport Nutrition

Julia Turshen is a New York Times bestselling cookbook author. Her latest cookbook, Simply Julia, a National Bestseller, is available wherever books are sold. Julia is also the author of Now & Again (named the Best Cookbook of 2018 by Amazon and an NPR ‘Great Read’), Feed the Resistance (named the Best Cookbook of 2017 by Eater), and Small Victories (named one of the Best Cookbooks of 2016 by the New York Times and NPR). She also hosts and produces the IACP-nominated podcast called ‘Keep Calm & Cook On.’ Julia lives in the Hudson Valley with her wife and their pets. She teaches cooking classes most Sunday afternoons.