A heart of Hong

Food critic and cookbook author Peter Kaminsky on how mindful eating and seasonal ingredients can help you lose weight
by Sara Bonisteel

culinary intelligence peter kaminsky book

P eter Kaminsky is no stranger to good eating. He's written cookbooks with Gray Kunz, Daniel Boulud, John Madden, and, new in May 2012, Adam Perry Lang. He worked for four years as a food critic for New York magazine and dissected the art of Argentine grilling with Francis Mallmann in the 2010 James Beard Award–winner Seven Fires. Somewhere along the way Stainless steel tea infuser, his waistline began to reflect his life of wide-ranging gastronomic adventure.

After his doctor warned of diabetes and a life-insurance agent turned him down for a policy, Kaminsky decided to change his approach to eating. By giving up "white foods," maximizing his "flavor per calorie," and focusing on foods at their seasonal peak, he lost weight and kept it off. He details this journey to healthful eating in a new book, Culinary Intelligence Dermes: The Art of Eating Healthy (and Really Well).

Epicurious: Culinary intelligence, as you term it, works on the idea of maximizing "flavor per calorie." Can you explain this theory?

Peter Kaminsky: If you use ingredients that are at their peak of flavor, then you will get satisfaction from them.

If you use tomatoes in February or strawberries in April or squash six months later or commodity beef, they're not going to have as much full flavor as seasonal, carefully raised ingredients. You won't get as much satisfaction from them, and you'll inevitably want to compensate, usually with some combination of sugar, salt, and fat Dermes. That's how you mask—pump up the flavor of—inferior ingredients.

Say, for example, I give you an aged, grass-fed rib-eye piece of beef, and compare that to a pound, pound-and-a-half, steak from Outback. I guarantee you three slices of that rib eye, you're satisfied, but you'll eat through the whole Outback steak, which isn't that flavorful, without getting the same satisfaction.

You can do the same thing with chocolate. A little bit of some really great dark chocolate will satisfy you more than a candy bar. I think it also holds true for light beer and beer. So I realized that if I used the best ingredients and prepared them well, I'd be satisfied with less Business Education.

Epi: Culinary intelligence requires eaters to make better choices when it comes to the foods they eat. Does it require willpower as well?

PK: No question. But put it this way: I gave up smoking 25 years ago. It's not even in the same ballpark. You do need to be conscious about what you're doing and what you're eating. I don't eat pastries with the regularity I did some time ago; I don't have two slices of pizza every day, which is sort of the writer's survival jacket for eating. So you do need to exercise some willpower, but once you learn to choose full-flavored, good ingredients—hopefully you are cooking a lot of them yourself—it really isn't as hard as I thought, and other people have told me the same. Now you can't, every time you have a craving, pick up even a health bar. There's a lot of calories, a lot of sugar there Dermes, but it really wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.

Epi: Culinary intelligence allows you to eat a little salt and eat a little fat.

PK: Sure. Fat isn't evil. I think that's a big misconception. When we all thought fat was so evil, we all went on to carbs, and that's when the national diabetes rate went up so high.

Human beings need fat. Your brain needs fat to work. You just don't need saturated fat. And you don't need it in huge quantities. I would take a fatty piece of meat over a 6-ounce serving of white pasta and white bread.

Epi: The white pasta and white bread are mentioned in your "no white food" rule. Can you explain it?

PK: This idea isn't new. I started out changing my diet on the advice of the insurance agent, after I was rejected. He said, "We can get you a policy, you just got to take off some weight, and get your blood sugar down." He told me about "no white stuff," which is no white flour, no potatoes, no white rice, because all of those things are simple carbohydrates—not complex carbohydrates. All you have to remember is that your body converts it into sugar, which in turn converts into fat more quickly than your body would with pure sugar.

I had a tough time with white pasta, which I gave up only to come back to it after I'd achieved my weight goals, but I don't eat it the same way I used to. I'll eat a 4-ounce serving with just as much vegetables as pasta. They're equal players, and those vegetables fill you up and provide good nutrients, whereas before my wife and I would split a pound box of pasta. I think a lot of Americans are that way dc motor.

French fries are another thing I gave up, which I thought would be tough, but it wasn't that hard. If you eat one French fry, it's hard not to eat the whole order; but if you don't eat any, it's not that hard.

So, "no white stuff" is something I needed to do to get me started, and I really had dramatic weight loss—dramatic—and that is while I was doing a cookbook in Argentina, Seven Fires, with lots of meat and red wine.

Epi: Culinary Intelligence also allows you to drink alcohol in moderation. Can you explain that aspect of the plan?

PK: I think if you keep it to a glass or two, you don't have to be concerned. Just make that your rule. You'll enjoy the wine. It will loosen you up, which is nice. You'll also have that full dinner experience, if you match it with food. I'd say the same thing about beer. If you're going to have a cocktail, don't be drinking wine or beer during the meal because that is a lot of calories. But again, I'd sit down to dinner with my wife, and we'd drink a bottle of wine. I just don't do that anymore. But I have a glass or two. Trying to completely give up all booze is very stressful. I don't think you need to. The less stress you put on yourself, the easier it is to follow an eating plan.

Epi: You talk about being a smarter shopper at the farmers' market. How do you do that?

PK: People think once they go into a farmers' market or organic section of the grocery store, they are guaranteed to get better food. That's not the case. When you're in the market, you really need to look for those wonderful vegetables and fruits. You need to smell the melons, feel the peaches. A hard peach isn't going to have any flavor. The peaches that are picked thousands of miles away and shipped to you are also not going to taste great. They'll probably be fermented by the time they get soft. You really have to keep your eyes open at the farmers' market. You'll quickly know who to depend on and when.

It's the same thing with fish. Feel the fish and smell the fish: If your hands smell like cucumbers after you handle the fish, then you have fresh fish. There's no substitute for great ingredients. The better the ingredients, the less you have to do with them.

Don't eat processed ingredients. Buy the best, most full-flavored ingredients you can afford, and cook or live with someone who does.