New! Recipe! Sesame Fish Schnitzel

it's the cabbage salad that steals the show

Hello New You’s!

I worked at Bon Appétit for nine years, where we met every month to pitch new story ideas for upcoming issues, and most of those issues had a theme. June was grilling, October was entertaining, and January was Healthy-ish. It’s been more than five years, but my brain still wants to collate recipe content into buckets; it’s a hard-wired path that fires up every time I sit down to work on recipes. Between that theme-driven mindset and the—I don’t know—entire world signaling that January is when we ought to revamp our existences, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether “health” should influence what I publish this month.

That would first require deciding what “eating healthy” or “healthy eating” means. So many categories to choose from: high protein, high fiber, low carb, low fat, no fat, less meat, no meat, minimally-processed, veg-forward, and my least favorite, clean eating (as if food is dirty—it’s not). Content oriented around shopping lists, menu planning, and meal prepping dominates the bestselling food newsletters on this platform. Buying, unpacking, portioning, planning, prepping, storing, reheating.

To be blunt, none of this turns me on. It’s not what I do, and I don’t want to do it.

As far as a fresh start or a clean slate goes, I owe it to you to restate what Food Processing is about, and what you’ll find here this month, this year, and always:

I believe strongly in celebrating the emotional connections between cooking, eating, and feeding others. I value my healthy relationship with food more than trends in healthy eating.