I serve on the Awards committee fo the James Beard Awards.  This year our theme for the May 4 Gala is Women in Food. Amazing, that after all these years, this is the first time that women will be honored.  We will have women chefs, women wine makers, women sommeliers  and mixologists featured as well as women charcutieres, cheese makers, and bakers. It is about time.

This is not to say that women chefs have not cooked at the awards events but they were always in the minority. One year honoring French chefs, they had to wear can can outfits while the French male chefs wore their whites!!  It was because of this that the organization  Women Chefs and Restaurateurs WCR was formed.   So it will be a proud moment in our culinary history to watch all those women serve their delicious  food. It will be a don’t miss event. The Media dinner the night before will also feature women chefs and sommeliers.  I am so looking forward to this. The late Barbara Tropp would be smiling.

Just returned from an excellent conference at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in the Napa Valley.   It was consponsored by Harvard  Medical School and the CIA. The attendees were chefs from most of the major chain restaurants in the US and some manufacturers of food products. The topic of discussion and the many cooking demos  was to show how  to get more healthy items on the menu: vegetables, fruits, beans and whole grains, without the public recognizing that these foods are healthy.  Can you imagine. We have a nation of big babies who love junk and they have to be tricked into eating healthful food. If the food tastes good, they will eat it and be none the wiser that it is good for them.. that is stealth health.  Part of me is disgusted that we have to use subterfuge to get people to amend their dining habits. 

Reducing portion size was also a topic of discussion. Everyone knew it was the right thing to do. Switching over to smaller plates was deemed difficult, risky from the point of customner perception, and expensive for the restaurant chains to change their dishes. But it is  necessary before all of their clientele suffers from obesity or develops diabetes.  Old habits die hard and so will many of their customers. Alas.

I did a number of cooking demos showing that vegetables, legumes and grains were yummy( no big secret) and had low food costs. All to the good.  Progress will be slow but it is inevitable.

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