Eat a Little Better

The Secret Service hates it when you run in the White House. Sudden movement isn’t exactly their thing. But the agents stationed inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue soon got used to the sight of me sprinting down the corridors, past portraits of ex-presidents and toward the kitchen.

I can’t count the times that I was ab-sorbed in some important meeting and glanced at my watch, only to realize it was almost 6 p.m., and I had just half an hour to get dinner on the table for a family of four, including a man who didn’t exactly have time to wait. Despite his busy schedule, President Obama almost always made it back to the Residence by 6:30 to eat with Michelle and their two girls. It was an inspiring sight—the busiest man in the world carving out time for this daily ritual. I’d excuse myself from the meeting and just start booking it through the West Wing.

At the White House, I had two jobs: to work on food and nutrition policy and to cook dinner for the president and his family. I spent an hour or so a day making nutritious, delicious food for the First Family, but worked most of my waking hours to help families around the country do the same in their homes.

A job at the White House comes with no blueprint. The learning curve is steep for anyone, and especially for a guy who hadn’t spent a day in politics. Before I came to the White House, I was a cook moonlighting as a food-policy geek. But I quickly became a food-policy guy who knew how to cook. I traded chef whites for suits and sweaty restaurant kitchens for the conference rooms in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (or the EEOB, one of the thousands of mind-numbing acronyms you learn when working in government). Instead of searing fish against hot iron, I was steering meetings with the First Lady, senior staffers, public health experts, and economists. And with the First Lady leading the charge, we launched the biggest public health campaign to come out of the White House in American history.

But this book isn’t the story of that campaign—not exactly. It’s about the lessons I learned fighting for change in D.C. that can change the way you eat at home. It’s about learning the little choices that add up to make you happier and the planet healthier—and your dinners more delicious—without stressing about the big, life-changing choices that just aren’t realistic. It’s about how to stop worrying about eating “right” and just start eating a little better.

A decade before I fell into politics, I was a college kid who fell in love with the culture of the restaurant kitchen.

I was twenty when I left junior college, where I’d been playing baseball and hoping to get drafted into the majors. Once I realized I was good but not good enough, I enrolled at the University of Chicago and studied history. I spent my final semester in Vienna. I didn’t care where I went. I just wanted to see the world.

When I arrived, I told the director of the program that I was interested in food and cooking. (Vienna, after all, is the pastry capital of the world.) In one of many ridiculous bits of good luck that got me where I am today, the director had a connection—I kid you not, her husband’s uncle’s friend from college had a son who rode bicycles with the sous chef at Moerwald, one of the best restaurants in the city.

She arranged for me to meet the sous chef, so the next afternoon, I found myself navigating the narrow streets in the old part of the city until I reached the corner where we were supposed to meet. Across the street, I saw a man pushing a fancy racing bike. He was decked out in cycling spandex, a black bandanna, and large Prada sunglasses. His arms were covered with homemade brandings. He looked like the kind of guy you should slowly back away from. Both of us stood there, waiting, for five minutes, until to my surprise he started walking across the street in my direction. I looked away as he got closer. I didn’t want him to catch me staring. When I looked up again, I was face to face with those sunglasses. “So,” he said. “You’re the Yankee who wants to cook.”

This was Alois Traint, my new boss and soon-to-be mentor. From day one, I was in awe of Alois. As the sous chef at the Michelin-starred Moerwald, he cut a different figure than he did on the street. He traded his wacky gear for a spotless white chef’s coat and an array of razor-sharp, wildly expensive knives. He called out orders from his spotless station, oversaw the cooks, and plated every single dish with dozens of sauces and garnishes, all fastidiously labeled. He was a machine and, to this day, the best cook I’ve ever worked with.

My plan was to cook occasionally and study often. What actually happened was the opposite. By the end of my first shift, a brutal but invigorating ten-hour tryout, I was hooked. Everyone in the small kitchen—just four cooks and Alois—worked with a controlled ferocity at a breakneck pace but with striking skill. While on the other side of the doors the dining room hummed quietly, the kitchen was alive with clanking pans, whirring blenders, hissing fat, and the rat-a-tat of knives reducing vegetables to tiny, perfect pieces. It was thunderous, but not noise. The sound had order to it, like an orchestra playing a strange, exhilarating piece of music. And Alois was the conductor. His players presented him with the elements of each dish and he united them on the plate with a workman’s skill and an artist’s eye.

At the end of dinner service, Alois called me over to meet Christian Domschitz, the restaurant’s head chef. Christian handed me a fat, raw scallop on a half-inch-wide spatula and told me to bring this to a cook on the other side of the kitchen. I was confused—he didn’t have a plate to put the scallop on?—but with the kitchen staff all watching me, I made like I was playing center field again, shutting out the distractions that turned a simple task into a difficult one. Scallop safely delivered, Christian said, “You’re welcome back in my kitchen any time.” (Only a year later did he explain that it was a test: You can teach a cook to make anything, he said, but you can’t teach a steady hand.)

After just a few days in the kitchen, school became my last concern. I came to love cooking for many of the same reasons I had loved baseball—the nonstop learning, the challenge of performing every day, and the particular kind of pressure. Unlike basketball and football, baseball is both a team sport and an individual one. Cooking, too, is a group struggle where an individual can ruin everything with one mistake. And in the beginning, I made many.

One night early on in my time there, I was working as garde manger, the lowest rung of the kitchen stations. For the most part, I made salads. Occasionally I made a simple component of an elaborate cooked dish. That night, a table of ten people had ordered—for the kitchen, that kicked off the task of preparing all ten dishes so they’d be ready at the same time. The task was complicated, but not difficult, at least not for cooks as skilled as those at Moerwald. Seeing them reminded me of watching a top infield turn a double play—it appears effortless only because the players are so damn good at it. I wanted to be that good at cooking.

With just a few words quietly spoken, the cooks deftly coordinated their searing, sautéing, and roasting, even as Alois called out orders from other tables. Soon Alois had all ten dishes in front of him, nearly ready to be served. Just one of those dishes was missing something. “Yankee!” he yelled. “I need the crostini.” And of course, even though all I had to do was fry bread in butter and slather on saffron aïoli, I’d forgotten the crostini. Rather than sacrifice perfection by letting the food languish for the five minutes it would’ve taken me to fix my mistake, Alois dumped it all in the trash. All that work had been for nothing, and every cook in that kitchen knew who was to blame. Fortunately, baseball also prepares you to handle failure well; it’s a sport in which failing to get a hit seven out of ten times earns you a .300 batting average and a pretty good shot at the Hall of Fame.

I learned from these mistakes. (I certainly never forgot another crostini.) In fact, learning was the primary currency I accepted in exchange for my labor. Alois and Christian also fed me breakfast, lunch, and dinner and sometimes slipped me pocket money. Alois even started staying at his girlfriend’s place so I could crash at his apartment and not have to pay rent. Almost every day, I woke up, met Christian for breakfast, prepped and cooked lunch, raced to class, and returned to the restaurant to prep and cook dinner. Afterwards, I went out with Alois and Christian, who were treated like culinary royalty wherever they went. I was a broke, rookie cook who spent his off-hours drinking fancy Austrian white wines and smoking cigars. I like to think they admired my hustle, but I suspect they also got a kick out of the American kid who chose to cube carrots all day.

When I graduated from college, I came right back to Vienna and Moerwald, lack of work permit be damned. I even got promoted, albeit inadvertently. The saucier had just left to have surgery, and Christian had to fill in. He was not happy about it. As head chef, he had toiled for many years to break free from kitchen drudgery, yet now here he was, back to chopping vegetables, making stocks, and filleting fish. So he enlisted me, the kitchen’s lowliest cook, to do his grunt work. Suddenly, I had a highly motivated mentor giving me a crash course in one of the kitchen’s top jobs. The faster I learned, the less work he had to do. In a matter of weeks, I learned how to prepare every meat, fish, and sauce they served. That’s when my perspective changed forever.

One day, we were prepping for dinner service. Alois had told me to make the rhubarb sauce for a dish of seared foie gras. His initial instructions, delivered in his thick Viennese accent, were to cook the rhubarb, then mix in plenty of butter—and let’s just say he used much more colorful language than that. But I didn’t know how much butter he meant. So after cooking the rhubarb, I put a fist-sized knob of it into the saucepan. As I whisked, he stared at me with his piercing eyes and a look of such contempt that you’d think I’d just poured the sauce onto the floor. “Yankee,” he said.

He repeated his command, and eager to please him, I added another giant chunk, but no dice. He moved me aside and deposited a slab of butter so large that my heart hurt just looking at it. He whisked furiously as he dressed me down. “It’s not my problem if customers walk out of here and drop dead of a heart attack!” he said. “They ask us to make food that tastes good, not food that’s good for them.” And you know what? He was right.

Still, that moment rocked me. Not because I had let Alois down, but because I suddenly saw the disturbing truth in what he said. We were cooking without regard for the consequences of what we served, and people were eating without regard for the consequences of what they ate.

People’s personal indulgences are all well and good, but what I couldn’t get behind was that I shouldn’t care about these consequences. And so I began to wonder: What exactly were those consequences? As I got back to work, distracted by this question, I saw the kitchen’s back door swing open and watched one of our purveyors enter, pushing a hand truck stacked with birds—five crates of chickens, ducks, and eggs. Now my mind was really churning. If what I put on the plate had consequences for the people eating it, surely it also had consequences for the people who raised the animals and farmed the vegetables, and for the land they used. Once I had asked myself these questions, there was no going back.

In my spare time, I put down cookbooks and picked up books about the American food system (shipped to me by my patient mother), entering a wonkish world of anthropology and history, science and policy. It quickly became apparent that the consequences of our diet were more serious than I had ever imagined.

I gaped at statistics on the surging rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in the United States, rereading them and thinking they couldn’t possibly be right. I learned that slabs of goose liver and buttery sauces, however, were not the heart of the problem. Those chilling stats were clearly linked not to the rarefied world of fine dining, but to the modern transformation of how we produce the vast majority of our food. I pored over tomes on the history of agriculture, tracing the creeping dominion of massive farms growing primarily three crops—wheat, soy, and corn—which in turn fueled a mammoth processed-food industry.

Along with the effects on our health, the environmental repercussions came into focus. Yet only years later would I come to understand that our food system’s reliance on synthetic fertilizers, its lack of crop diversity, and its prolific meat production took a toll beyond polluted rivers and damaged soil. They were also contributing to a perilous change in the climate.

Back then, the notion of climate change had just started to enter the mainstream. When I began my research, I thought the culprit was fossil fuels, not food—belching smokestacks and highways clogged with cars, not belching cows and vast fields clogged with corn. Yet I learned that while energy is still the leading driver of greenhouse gas emissions, the production of food is a close second. Today, it accounts for somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The direct impact seemed abstract—invisible gases causing a slight increase in global temperatures—but the consequences did not. A global increase of only a few degrees wouldn’t just melt glaciers and raise sea levels, flooding countless low-lying cities around the world, but would also threaten the global food supply. The way we eat today, I realized, can play an important role in whether or not future generations will have enough to eat.

Suddenly, in a blur of books, bones, and butter, a year had passed since I had returned to work illegally in Vienna. Christian and Alois were as eager to keep me on as I was eager to stay—Alois even suggested that I marry his girlfriend—so they went to the restaurant’s owner for help getting me the necessary work papers. The owner waved away our concerns—he was close friends, he claimed, with Austria’s minister of the interior. Email him, he told me, and everything will be taken care of. So I did, not realizing that this was the equivalent of emailing the vice president of the United States and expecting him to help me secure a worker’s permit as an illegal line cook. Surprisingly, the minister actually did read my email…which he immediately forwarded to the authorities. Soon I got word that if I didn’t leave the country within a few days, they would make sure to provide an escort.

Although I was sad to leave, I was happy to have the time to step up my research. For the next five years, I traveled on the cheap, turning my adventures into a sort of independent study of some of the world’s great food cultures.

I became friends with a winemaker in Italy and joined him and his family for the harvest, hauling grapes, learning their process, and taking part in the family’s annual slaughter of a pig, whose every part became food. I ate my way through Southeast Asia, watching street vendors stir-fry with the same rapt attention I’d devoted to watching Alois sauté. I traversed Peru, then canoed deep into the Amazon rain forest. I spent a week with a local guide who lived off the forest and knew every edible bark and vine; one pitch-black night he showed me how to kill, gut, and cook a caiman, cousin of the alligator.

I journeyed through Mexico to explore corn, one of the world’s most important crops, in its birthplace. I shadowed a seed dealer in the north, where industrial agriculture reigned. I planted ancient varieties of corn with small farmers in Chiapas, who I only later found out were Zapatista rebels. For the Day of the Dead holiday, I joined grandmothers in Tlaxcala to help them make and hand out thousands of tamales—considered gifts from those who had passed on—by folding banana leaves around masa, dough made from field corn that’s been soaked in alkaline water and then ground.

Everywhere I went, I saw food as the deepest expression of people’s identities. In the Piedmont region of Italy, I watched a husband and wife who had grown up in neighboring towns argue with passion over the proper way to seal ravioli. (“You press it!” he said, endorsing his town’s method. “No, you pinch it, you idiot!” she said, championing hers.) In Mexico, I learned corn was so vital to Mayans that it entered their religious origin story, in which gods ground it into masa and molded the first humans out of it. Alongside meals made with masa, a sort of preindustrial processed food that some say enabled the cultural sophistication of Mesoamerican peoples, I also saw the complicated meaning of modern food. In rural Mexico, the presence of bottles of Coke on the table, proudly placed there by my hosts, was a sign of newfound prosperity…and possibly a symbol of the coming obesity epidemic. In Rio de Janeiro, a friend’s father—a legendary Brazilian jazz musician we called Leo the Lion—took me around, introducing me as a great chef, even though I was just a young cook. People responded with such reverence that it made me think about pursuing cooking as a career in a way I hadn’t before. I wanted to do something that inspired such respect.

When I ran out of money, I went back to my hometown of Chicago and scored a job as a line cook at Paul Kahan’s incredible restaurant Avec, helmed at the time by chef Koren Grieveson. She schooled me in a new style of cooking. Instead of the elaborate, laborious dishes Alois and Christian favored, her food was unfussy and bold, with big flavors and great ingredients.

Then, about a year into my tenure, Carroll Joynes and Abby O’Neil, parents of a good friend, came in to the restaurant for dinner and we got to talking. They were building a vacation home in New Zealand and asked if I’d be willing to come cook for them for a few months. While I loved working at Avec, I hesitated for approximately one second before accepting the job. Soon I was living near Queenstown, and for the first time, no one was telling me what to cook.

Adventurous and thoughtful eaters, Carroll and Abby gave me only one instruction: Make simple, healthy food. At the time, this struck me as unusual and auspicious. Most people still subscribed to Alois’s theory of eating—that flavor trumps all else. But I lucked out with a family whose desires coincided with my developing passion. They helped solidify my identity.

This was when I first put into practice some of the abstract notions I’d been reading about. To be successful, I knew I had to keep things simple. I’d ignore the conflicting science around which nutrients did what, and just buy vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean but tasty proteins. I’d focus on making them as delicious as I could, using some of the tricks I’d learned at restaurants. Sure, cooking in professional kitchens showed me the pleasures of potatoes mixed with their weight in butter, but it had also taught me the other elements of deliciousness—building flavor through basic cooking techniques, varying textures, and seasoning with acid and salt. Soon I was hooked on the challenge of cooking delicious food without resorting to butter and cream. My dream was to someday get involved in food politics and make major change, but for now, I was happy helping one family make progress.

After two New Zealand summers (bonus: skipping two Windy City winters), I moved back to chilly Chicago to pursue that dream of working in food politics and organizing chefs. I just didn’t know how. Fortunately, luck intervened yet again.

The week I arrived, Carroll and Abby just happened to bump into an acquaintance of theirs who needed some help in the kitchen—a woman named Michelle Obama. It was the spring of 2007. Barack had announced his candidacy a few months earlier and was often on the road. Michelle was getting pulled into the campaign, while caring for Malia and Sasha and holding down a demanding job. The family’s diet was suffering. Michelle wanted to make sure her kids ate good, healthy food.

I knew her from the small village–like world of Hyde Park, the neighborhood where Barack had taught at the University of Chicago. So Carroll and Abby put us in touch. Michelle and I agreed on a tryout.

Barack was on the road, so my audition would be cooking for Michelle and the girls. My culinary strategy was to let the market determine the menu. Peas had come into season. I bought a pound and then the chef part of my brain kicked in. I’d make fresh fettucine (kids like pasta, right?) with a vibrant, velvety sauce made from those sweet peas, some basil, a little lemon zest, and Parmesan. I made this meal in the Obamas’ modest kitchen, rolling out pasta dough, seasoning and reseasoning the sauce until it was perfect. I plated it prettily and brought it to their dining room table, sure that I had killed my audition.

Well, it turns out that kids like spaghetti-and-meatballs pasta, not fancy pea-sauce pasta. Malia and Sasha were polite, but they clearly weren’t feeling it. I spent that night bracing for rejection, replaying my decision over and over.

Fortunately, Michelle liked it, and after a few more meals, she told me she was eager to hire me. Barack, on the other hand, was not. Before he was a senator, he was a community organizer and a professor. At the time, he was a successful author, too, but he still balked at the idea of a private chef, even if I’d be cooking for them only three or four times a week. It just wasn't who he was. Michelle was frank with me about his reservations, but said she’d take care of it. And a few days later, she called me with an answer. “I told Barack he had two choices,” she said. Either she would hire me to make sure the girls were getting good, healthy food and she would campaign for him, or she would do the cooking instead of campaigning. “Well,” I asked, “what did he say?” And she replied, “He didn’t say a thing.”

While Barack and Michelle campaigned, her mother, Marian, held down the household and I held down the kitchen. A few weeks in, at Michelle’s request, I gave their pantry a makeover, enlisting Sasha and Malia to help. To make it easier to eat well, we replaced the junk and put the real food front and center. (You can see the methods we used to do this on this page.) In the kitchen, I quickly got to know my audience. In other words, I didn’t cook any more pea-sauce pasta. Instead I channeled the same principles I had followed with Carroll and Abby. While what I cooked certainly represented change, the food wasn’t puritanical, or even unfamiliar. There wasn’t a sudden influx of spelt and flaxseeds, but I made brown rice instead of white and I scaled back on the beef and pasta. There was still the occasional burger and bowl of spaghetti. The girls embraced it. Sasha especially loved to help me cook and became my little sous chef, pulling a chair up to the stove so she could watch and stir. I’d let her taste whatever I was making and ask her what it needed. “More lemon!” she’d say. “More salt!” And she was always right.

It didn’t take long before Michelle understood the impact of these small changes. Not only did she feel great herself, but she also felt great about the health of her girls. Right around the time I started working for the Obamas, Michelle had taken the girls to their pediatrician. He had expressed concern over their test results. Those numbers, like those of so many kids he saw, were headed in a worrying direction. Over time, he told them, this could spell trouble. But when they returned, just a few months later, the doctor couldn’t believe how quickly those numbers had improved.

Moved by the dramatic results that had come from such simple changes, we began to discuss the challenges American families faced when they tried to feed their kids good food and how we could help. At her kitchen table, we would talk for hours. We dreamed of planting a garden on the South Lawn to make a statement about the importance of fresh, healthy food. We brainstormed how to make it easier for families to eat that food. We envisioned a national campaign to improve the health of kids. And then we laughed at ourselves, because at the time Barack was down thirty points in the polls, and winning seemed like the longest of long shots.

On January 19, 2009, I went to sleep as the guy who makes dinner for the Obamas. The next morning, I woke up as the chef to the First Family. Turns out cooking for the First Family is a lot like cooking for any family, just with some unusual challenges. I learned this on my first day.

I scored a seat at the inauguration, tearing up as I took in the 1.8 million people who lined Pennsylvania Avenue and watched Justice John Roberts swear in our first African-American president. Then I raced to the White House to prepare dinner. This trip, just two miles from the Capitol, was complicated by perhaps the largest crowd ever to descend on Washington, D.C., and a security presence like you wouldn’t believe.

When I finally got to the White House, only my second time there, I had barely any time to cook. It was a chaotic scene. That day, the Bushes were moving out, the Obamas were moving in, and couches, tables, and sprinting aides were everywhere. And then I showed up, the new guy, asking where the fridge was.

I was led to the small kitchen on the second floor of the the Residence. On the way, I met some of the ushers, butlers, cooks, and other members of the approximately hundred-person residential staff, some of whom had worked at the White House for thirty, forty, even fifty years. I was a strange sight—a nontraditional addition to the longtime kitchen team and a friend of the new president—so more than a dozen people crowded the little kitchen as I started prepping for dinner. They were eager to see what the fancy chef would come up with, and they were about to be thoroughly disappointed.

That night, the president and his family had about ten minutes to eat before they were whisked off to the many inauguration balls. So I put together a pared-down version of the kind of food I would cook for them for the next six years—food that occupied the place where good flavor overlaps with good-for-you. By the time I had prepared four plates of roasted chicken brushed with barbecue sauce, broccoli with garlic, and brown rice, the onlookers had gone in search of something, anything, more interesting. That was OK by me. I left the White House both excited and wary, because I knew that after the celebration, the time for dreaming was done. What mattered now was making change.

The political climate wasn’t exactly favorable to our plans. Despite the president’s decisive electoral victory, his antagonists in Congress had all but promised to oppose any measure he supported. Not to mention that he took office in the midst of a recession, when slowing the economic freefall seemed more pressing than improving school lunches. Yet the First Lady and I knew that halting the escalating epidemics of diabetes and childhood obesity was just as essential for the success of the nation.

From day one until she left the White House, Michelle’s sleeves were rolled up and she was absolutely determined to figure out how to improve the health of kids. For the next six years, we would work side by side, and for six years, she would be my daily inspiration. She taught me to ignore the spotlight of Washington and focus on the humbling opportunity we had to help families feed their kids better food, to never get lost in the abstraction of stats, large numbers, and ideology, and to always remember the people affected by policy. Working with her is the greatest honor I’ve had and probably ever will have.

The first thing we did was plant a vegetable garden. Today, almost a decade later, the garden seems like no big deal. But when we suggested tearing up a thousand or so square feet of the South Lawn of the White House to make way for plots of broccoli, sugar snap peas, and parsley, we were uprooting more than just pristine grass. We were taking radical action and breaking new ground—literally—to make a statement. We got a lot of flak and pushback for it. But we knew how important it was to start a national conversation about the way we eat.

We also set out to understand the issues most important to families as well as identify the areas where we could have the most impact. To do this, we hit upon a simple solution: Listen to what families are saying. Michelle hosted roundtables with parents. She spoke to kids during our many school visits. We dug into opinion polls and consumer behavior reports. We spoke to parents, teachers, community leaders, kids themselves, and every expert we could find to identify the greatest needs and the biggest opportunities for real change. Then we laid out the strategy for how we thought we could help families raise healthier kids. The first major opportunity was in schools. We learned that parents—close to 90 percent of them, according to polls—wanted to improve the nutrition in lunches provided by public schools across the country. Here, in a single piece of legislation, was a chance to affect the health of 31 million children.

The politics weren’t pretty—they never are—but we worked out a bill that, among other things, empowered the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to set new standards for the food that our schools feed our children. These standards effectively lowered lunches’ sodium and saturated fat content and increased the amount of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. They also removed junk foods like candy and soda from cafeterias and vending machines. A lot of people deserve credit for passing the bill: Advocacy groups helped organize and pressure Congress. The First Lady, in an historically bold effort, worked the phones to convince legislators, one by one, to make this bill a priority at a time when there were so many other priorities. She convinced the president, too. As he said at the bill’s signing, “Not only am I very proud of the bill, but had I not been able to get this passed, I would be sleeping on the couch.” And of course the president deserves credit for risking precious political capital to support the bill. There’s a great photo of the president with his hand on the shoulder of Eric Cantor, then the Republican majority whip. At the time they were in the middle of budget negotiations, and looking at the picture, you’d think they were discussing the prospect of a government shutdown. But really, the president was talking to him about our bill. And Cantor ultimately let the bill come up for a vote, enabling it to pass. But without the guidance of the American people, none of it would have happened. Not only did they inform the legislation, but their support was the reason politicians could prioritize it even in the midst of economic turmoil.

Next, we expanded our mission to help all Americans eat better. And once again, I stood in awe of the power of regular people. I met with the biggest players in the food industry, whom most food activists had written off as villains. It’s true that many companies had put profits ahead of the well-being of Americans and gravely undermined our health in the process. And we confronted and battled many food companies whose practices were hurting the health of families. But like it or not, you can’t fix the food system without engaging those responsible for producing the vast majority of the food we eat. After all, businesses, not governments, feed people. What I learned through this was that the choices we make really do matter, even though it can be easy to imagine they don’t.

The idea of regular people swaying companies like Walmart might seem impossible. Yet make no mistake: These companies are listening to us. Each purchase we make is captured, aggregated, and studied in a relentless effort to determine what we want. And during the past decade, we’ve told them—and they’ve been scrambling. As Americans bought much less soda and juice, cereal, fast food, and frozen dinners, these big companies became increasingly desperate to figure out what people want instead, which is better access to healthy, convenient food at better prices.

So at the White House, we pressured and prodded food-sector giants to help them make the right changes, changes that would truly improve the health and well-being of Americans. Ultimately, we were more successful than we could’ve imagined. Walmart was just one example. When the company agreed to lower the price of the fruits and vegetables it sold, to cut the sugar and sodium content of its packaged foods, and to open hundreds of locations in food deserts around the country, we knew that we’d helped make eating better a little easier for nearly half the country.

Victories like these taught me an important lesson that I carried with me throughout my six years at the White House. For the most part, both government and businesses are followers, not leaders. What I came to understand, both in the halls of political power and at the negotiating table with billion-dollar companies, was not the awesome authority of the executive branch or the eternal dominance of McDonald’s, but the surprising power of the choices we make.

Working on the front lines of food politics, I came to an important conclusion about how to make real progress on the challenges facing our health and our planet. And it’s probably not what you think.

Whether you live in Des Moines or San Francisco, I bet you’re familiar with the prescriptions tossed around by certain advocates for healthy, sustainable eating. For these diehards, the only solution to our woes is nothing short of a revolution in the way we eat. “To change food, we must change everything!” many cry. Everyone must eat seasonal, local, organic, biodynamic, and GMO-free heirloom foods, and anything short is a cardinal sin. If they’re right, we’re screwed. So it’s a good thing they’re not.

I’ll admit that before I got to the White House, I had some similar utopian fantasies. But actually doing the work of policy making—where solutions must work for the many, not the few—quickly forced me out of the bubble of idealism. I came to see that my fellow advocates and I had failed by promoting an impossible standard. We set the bar so high that not even we could reach it. Not too long ago I had lunch with a crusader who had advocated far and wide for avoiding meat and dairy in all meals but dinner. He ordered a pastrami sandwich—with a shmear of chopped chicken liver. If perfection is the enemy of progress, then so is pretense.

So let’s ditch both. No one—and definitely not me—eats only healthy, sustainable meals. And that’s OK. And not all companies that produce a lot of food are bad—it takes an enormous amount of food to feed our country and the world. Yes, we have to make some changes to eat our way toward a food system that’s not degrading our health and the environment—but if there’s one thing I can say to you, it’s that it’s vital to think of this goal as a process, a road we travel step by step, meal by meal. If we only look to make dramatic change, we’ll find ourselves standing still forever. So let’s redefine what it looks like to move forward.

Here’s what we know about the challenges we face. After decades of faulty advice on nutrition—the notion that fat was the sole culprit of our health woes, for instance, or more generally, the misguided emphasis on individual nutrients rather than the foods that contain them—we finally have a clear consensus on what makes a healthy diet. Essentially, eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, beans and whole grains, and not a lot of meat or processed foods. I bet you’ve heard that before. Many people have said it in many ways. And while what’s optimal for each person can vary depending on his or her body, in general, this issue truly is as settled as the science on global warming.

Following more or less that same advice will also help our planet. When you eat a lot of vegetables and fruits, you support crops that release far fewer greenhouse gases during production than animal proteins, which we produce far too much of. When you eat a lot of different whole grains and beans, you support crops that repair our soil, giving us vegetables that grow better, taste better, and are better for us. (And this kind of progress propels itself: The more we demand these foods, the cheaper they get and the easier it is to buy even more of them.) When you swap just a little bit of your beef intake for fish, chicken, or even pork, you’re helping to rein in the biggest contributor to carbon emissions in the entire food system.

The data shows that, as a society, we’ve definitely started to follow this advice, but we need to step up our game. As climate change accelerates, we’re going to see harder storms, longer droughts, summer cold streaks, and warmer winters. This is making growing good stuff like produce more difficult and therefore more expensive—and these foods are already out of reach for too many. In other words, unless we do something, it’s going to get much harder to eat nutritious food. So if you still need a reason to care about climate change, here it is: It’s going to impact your health.

Luckily, “doing something” is possible—and effective. Take a look at what’s happened in the past few years when regular people made a few new choices at the store. One day, a soda company drops aspartame from its diet soda. The next, a cereal brand stops using artificial colors and flavors. The next, fast-food chains start reducing sodium content. These might not be the most important changes—artificial colors were never the worst thing about breakfast cereals—but they represent a move in the right direction and should be seen as evidence of your power.

This cookbook is my idea for what the next level of change looks like and how we can achieve it. In this vision, all steps in the right direction are meaningful, and there’s a place for everyone. You won’t find screeds against government subsidies or dissections of industrial agriculture. (I have plenty to say on the subject of food policy, but that’s for another, much less tasty book than this one!) Instead, you’ll find practical, pretense-free ideas for what we can all do, buy, cook, and eat right now. I’ll also offer straightforward explanations of how those choices connect to some of the broader issues we face.

The truth is, you’re already having an impact on food policy and our food system. Because whether you know it or not, your choices are already influencing businesses’ decisions and government policy. With just a little information and some simple strategies, you can ensure the difference you make is a positive one. If you decide to plant a garden, start composting, or read a food policy book, that’s awesome. If you bake spelt bread, make pickles, and shop at farmer’s markets, that’s awesome, too. But know that even if you don’t do any of these things, you can still be part of making change just by putting that box of sugary cereal on a higher shelf and setting a bowl of fruit on your counter.

Since we have a pretty good idea of what we need to do, this book sets out to tackle the real challenge: how we actually do it. It begins with a simple idea: To improve our health and help preserve our planet, we don’t have to eat “healthy.” We don’t have to eat sustainably. We don’t have to eat “right.” But we do have to eat a little better.

Eating better is this cookbook’s guiding philosophy. Eating better means making small changes that have a real impact. Eating better means taking a few steps forward without stressing too much about getting all the way there. Eating better means setting reasonable expectations and meeting them. Eating better means that all of us—no matter your starting point—can take this journey together. After all, if we hope to make real progress, we all have a part to play.

So how do you eat better? Well, here’s my take: Eat one more vegetable a day. Just one. Eat whole grains and beans once more a week. Eat beef just one fewer time this week. When this becomes your new normal—in two weeks, ten weeks, or a year—you raise the bar again. Even if you close this book right now, you already have all the information you need to improve your health. And if enough people follow suit, we’ll see a measurable effect on our planet.

But if you do read on, you’ll find a book full of strategies meant to help you take these steps forward. First, I guide you through the same pantry makeover I gave the Obamas, and provide tips on navigating the supermarket and other simple, effective strategies designed to make it easier to eat better.

Next, I share my take on the most common choices we confront as eaters. Do you prioritize buying organic produce, local produce, or simply more produce? Should you buy farmed or wild fish? What concessions can you make to convenience while still joining the march forward? You won’t get any lecturing or shaming. Just my no-bull take, plus advice that’ll cut through the information clutter that has complicated our relatively simple task.

Finally, there are the recipes. They’ll disappoint anyone expecting tips on making flaxseed smoothies or dishes fit for a state dinner. I’m not a health nut or a great chef. I’m a good cook. All I promise is the kind of simple, delicious food I made for the president and his family—the same food I make for mine. Not only will the recipes give you food that tastes great and reflects smart choices—ones that will improve your health and the environment—but they also provide tools, tips, and techniques you can use whenever you cook, whether it’s one of my recipes or a dish you’re just throwing together from whatever you have on hand.

My hope is that you cook some of these recipes. But I’d be as happy if you just embrace the spirit of this book: that we all can and should do a little better. You might not always succeed; you might eat a Twinkie or a pile of chicken wings. If you do, it’s all right. I fall off the wagon plenty. Occasionally, I eat corn-fed steak, which represents just about everything I stand against. I know it’s not a great decision. I also know it’s delicious. I do eat it, but sparingly. And the next day, I just try to eat a little better than I did the day before.

Ten years or so ago, we seemed to be on the verge of a new era of smarter eating. The country learned we were all eating too much processed food and too few real foods. To be sure, there have been real signs of progress—for instance, we’re drinking much less soda and sugar-laden fruit juice than we did a decade ago. But we have a long long way to go. Our consumption of hyper-processed foods has held more or less steady over the past decade. We still eat only about 40 percent of the fruit and 60 percent of the vegetables that we should be. While calorie consumption has finally dipped after a forty-year surge (or more—that’s only as far back as the federal government has been tracking the data), we’re still eating way too much.

So we need to focus on how to eat more of what we want and less of what we don’t. And we need to focus on the simple, easy practices that work, rather than outdated notions that don’t—like the idea that eating well is really just all about willpower. Unhealthy eating, the thinking goes, is for the weak who can’t resist the chips on the counter. Well, it turns out none of us can, really.

Our fridges and pantries are ground zero for the simple changes that can make a major impact—even when you’re hoping to move into the most famous home in America.

When Michelle Obama asked me to give her pantry a makeover during her husband’s campaign in 2007, I undertook the mission with her daughters, Sasha and Malia. At the time, their shelves looked like those in most American homes. There was good food and then there were the typical convenience foods we all know and love: salty snacks, sweets, and so-called fruit juice packed with sugar. They had been trying to eat well, but with all of those unhealthy options nearby, the task was virtually impossible. We went through it all, inspecting the ingredients. We set aside any package that listed sugar in any of its many forms—high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice concentrate, cane sugar, and so on—as one of the first few ingredients, or that contained a bunch of stuff they couldn’t pronounce. We were going to pare down and focus on the real food. Real food has nutrition. Fake food doesn’t. I wanted them to know what to eat, not just what to avoid.

For the most part, they had fun with the task, reading the ingredients out loud—“Hydrodextromal…nope!” (They especially liked when they got to axe some of Mom’s favorite foods.)

The foods we kept, we reorganized. We took the fruit out of the bin at the bottom of the fridge and put it in a bowl on the counter. I bought some glass jars, filled them with healthy snacks like almonds, cashews, peanuts, dried cranberries, and dried mango, and put them where the girls could see them. I lined the fridge with clear, easy-to-see containers of carrot sticks, sliced cucumbers, celery, and hummus. We put cookies and brownies—yes, some treats absolutely survived our purge—on the cabinet’s top shelf. They might not have been healthy, but at least they were real food, with ingredients limited to things like butter, flour, and chocolate.

To me, these changes were common sense. If you’re hungry and you see a banana, that’s what you’ll grab. If you have to get a stool to reach the brownies, you’ll be less likely to indulge—you’ll eat it when you want it, rather than when you see it. And I saw this in action whenever the girls came home from school and rushed into the kitchen while I was prepping dinner. As they rumbled through—“Hi, Sam!”—they grabbed whatever I’d put in the bowl of fruit. And then—“Bye, Sam!”—they rushed off. They wanted a quick snack. Any snack, not specifically fruit or cookies. They grabbed what they saw.

I’d figured those small changes I’d suggested for the Obamas might help a little. But once Michelle and I began to dig into the data in the run-up to her Let’s Move campaign, it was clear I’d stumbled upon advice with powerful effects. To understand why, consider the incredibly well-funded research that enables supermarkets to so effectively sell us their products. While the marketing strategies vary—displaying products in end-of-aisles; flaunting impulse items near checkout counters; sticking milk at the back of the store so you have to walk down other aisles to find it—they pretty much all rely on a fundamental principle of what behavioral scientists call “choice architecture.” Basically: You buy what you see. This might sound obvious. But the effects are significant. In one well-regarded study, simply moving soda from the center of an aisle to the end, where it was more visible, increased sales by more than 50 percent. As numerous studies show, the same is true at home—where you place food has a major impact on how much of it you eat.

We considered, too, our evolving understanding of willpower. Back in the day, we thought strong willpower was what separated the healthy eaters from the rest of us. But, today psychologists and researchers understand that willpower is actually more like a muscle that can get fatigued than a permanent character trait. Because we make so many decisions each day, we make most of them in a flash, almost automatically. Putting thought into each one just isn’t possible. Nor is fighting yourself every time you’re hungry, which is what relying on willpower alone requires. That’s why, when it comes to eating, “we eat what we see” is the principle that governs many of our decisions. Just like what Malia and Sasha did when they zipped in and out of the kitchen. This simple truth might be the most important lesson in this book. If you want to eat better, the key isn’t trying to be mindful about every decision you make. It’s acknowledging that you can’t be. Instead, it’s about setting yourself up for success. You want to do a little planning that allows you to eat well without working for it. It’s making sure the stuff you see is good stuff.

If the only action you take is swapping the cookies on your counter for something better, then you will make progress. Realizing that we eat what we see has other implications too. How many times have you actually been full, but kept staring at the platter of fried chicken on the table until you just went for that last piece, and regretted it later? (I’m speaking from experience.)

Well, the same effect happens to some degree every time we set food out in front of us. So there’s an easy way to combat that: just keep the food somewhere else. At dinner at home, you can bring the platter of food back to the counter after everyone’s served themselves, and encourage them to go get seconds there if they want.

Or go even one level further, and use smaller plates or bowls when eating. You’ll naturally take smaller portions to fit on a smaller plate. And you certainly don’t have to deny yourself seconds. It’s just that those seconds (or thirds) aren’t already on your plate to begin with, so you’re less likely to eat them just because they’re there.

The takeaway is this: Our food environment plays a major role in the decisions we make. If we improve that environment, we improve those decisions. Make the better choice the easiest choice.

STEP 1: PURGE YOUR PANTRY AND FRIDGE Grab a big bag, go through the food in your kitchen, and toss in any canned, jarred, or boxed products that list any form of sugar—from cane sugar to fruit concentrate to corn syrup—as the first or second ingredient (especially if it’s in food where you don’t expect to see it, like peanut butter or salad dressing). Bag any product with a long list of ingredients that a sixth grader couldn’t pronounce. It’s not that some sugar or food additives here and there will kill you. It’s that products loaded with them tend to lack nutritional value. The purpose isn’t necessarily figuring out what to avoid so much as making sure your home is filled with nutritious food. In the past, I would have then recommended you throw that bag out, but as I’ve grown to see the huge problems with food waste, I now suggest you put that bag in a corner of your pantry, eat what’s in it, and just replace each thing with a better option…or not at all.

But wait! Don’t go too crazy. You have to keep a few treats. If you ask me, it’s healthy to have some unhealthy food around. The whole idea behind the pantry purge is to set up a zone in your home where you can eat without worry and guilt. Chips might not be good for you, but neither is stressing out about every bite of food. So make some progress, and indulge once in a while—just make sure it’s actually once in a while. Just choose treats you really, really like so that the splurge is worth it, and make sure they don’t contain lots of junk.

STEP 2: REORGANIZE YOUR PANTRY Now that you’ve cleaned house, rearrange what you’ve kept. Remember, you eat what you see. So first, take those treats you saved and put them on the top shelf (and even better, in a paper bag or another container you can’t see through). Put smarter options front and center on shelves at eye level.

Now, put a big bowl of fruit on your counter. Fill large, clear containers with roasted nuts (salted or not) and dried fruit, and keep them on the counter, too. These are real foods that you can feel good about eating. Fresh and dried fruit satisfies sweet cravings without added sugar. Nuts taste rich from good fats and have satisfying protein. They satiate you in a way junk foods don’t. And you’ll eat them more often when they’re on display.

STEP 3: REORGANIZE YOUR FRIDGE Now apply the eat-what-you-see principle to your fridge. The bottom bin might be called the crisper, but it’s really more like a cave where fruits and vegetables go to die. I say use it to store condiments, and put those good-for-you foods where you can see them—at eye level if possible. Not only does this improve our eating habits, but it also reduces waste, as anyone who has discovered a forgotten, melting bag of spinach or fuzzy bunch of fruit knows too well.

Even better, make these wholesome foods easier to eat. Take the time to wash and cut ready-to-eat vegetables, like carrots, cucumber, celery, bell peppers, and radishes—and fruit that requires prep, like melon and pineapple—and keep them in clear containers in your fridge. If necessary, stock some dips to make the vegetables more enticing, whether you make Chipotle-Lime Aïoli (this page) or another recipe from this book (beginning on this page), or buy a dip that would survive the pantry purge.

My plan to help you eat better is all about surrounding your family with food you can feel good about eating. When it comes to food, your home should be a stress-free place, a sanctuary where you can pretty much eat whatever you want, because you’ve stocked your cabinet and fridge with good stuff. Again, you shouldn’t have to rely on willpower and live in a war zone where you wage daily combat against temptation. Don’t get me wrong, there is a battle to be fought. But it should go down at the supermarket.

Moving the frontline to the supermarket means you’re not under siege in your home. Instead of an endless struggle, you spend only an hour or two per week on guard. I’ve spent my fair share of time wandering the aisles, making decisions on the fly and filling up my place with unhealthy foods (my weaknesses include ice cream and tortilla chips) that I’d later find myself struggling to resist after a long day. Once I delved into the research on consumer behavior, I saw that I was entering a battle I was sure to lose. You know how I said before that, at home, we eat what we see? Well, at the supermarket, we buy what we see.

Big companies know this. In fact, it’s essential to their business model. Between supermarket chains and food manufacturers, hundreds of millions of dollars every year fund research and technology devoted to decoding your buying habits. It might seem like something from a movie about a dystopian future, but it’s real: Cameras throughout each store track your path through the aisles and connect these movements to what you buy at checkout. With this kind of data for tens of thousands of people, patterns emerge that reveal how to arrange the products on shelves to maximize what you buy.

It’s no accident that sugary drinks and chips are often located at eye level or on endcaps (industry lingo for the highly noticeable front-facing shelves at the end of each aisle). It’s no mistake that kids’ cereals are placed low so their target audience has a convenient view of the cartoon characters on the boxes. The companies that make these products actually pay a premium to stores for prime shelf space, because they know they’ll sell more of their high-profit items. Everyone wins—except the customer. Higher-profit items tend to be made with the cheapest ingredients, and the cheapest ingredients (like sugar, salt, oil) tend to be the least nutritious. The effectiveness of these tactics is one of the reasons we all eat so much of this stuff.

The good news is that savvy marketing is no match for a knowledgeable customer. Just knowing their tricks helps you withstand them. Here’s what I suggest (and do):

★ Before you even get to the grocery store, make a plan. Spending just ten minutes writing a list of what you need makes you less likely to wander and make the sort of impulse purchases that marketing strategies rely on. Of course, you can be flexible—if a vegetable or cut of meat looks great or is on sale, give yourself leeway to ponder and get inspired for dinner. But for the most part, stick to your plan and push your cart purposefully through the aisles.

★ Have a snack. Really! Eating a satisfying snack before shopping means you won’t hit the store hungry, which makes the task of resisting temptation easier.

★ Don’t linger in the aisles full of the least healthy options like cereal, chips, and cookies. I don’t know about you, but the more time I spend bombarded by sweet, salty, crunchy snacks, the more likely I am to crack.

For many people, buying something as basic as tomatoes has become an exercise in self-doubt. The organic beauties are tempting, but they’re twice the price of conventional tomatoes and have been shipped in from Mexico. Plus, it’s February—isn’t it some sort of culinary sin to eat a tomato in the winter? Virtually every purchase is full of contradictions. Is cheese a great source of protein or a worrisome source of fat? Is fruit full of vitamins or full of sugar? Is bread vital sustenance or the root of all evil? It’s enough to make you throw up your hands and eat a cheeseburger.

When you’re the public face of the White House’s food and nutrition policy, you get these kinds of questions from everyone from college buddies to congressmen. (You hear a lot of confessions, too. “I was really bad last night,” some TV pundit or senior staffer would whisper, telling me of tubs of ice cream consumed, fast food ordered, and diets broken.) At parties and meetings, people would ask me about their shopping decisions, looking for my thumbs-up in the same way you’d ask a doctor friend about the mole on your left calf.

I want to share with you what I did with them, beginning now with perhaps the most important piece of advice: Take a deep breath. Let’s stop trying to making perfect choices and focus on making good ones. Let’s be conscious of, but not obsessed with, what we eat. Then the stress will melt away, like butter on hot toast.

Ideally we’d all shop at the edges of the store, where the fresh produce lives, and never buy food in a box. We’d bake our own bread, make our own pickles, and mix up our own granola. But everyone has to go down the center aisles for staples like cooking oil and canned tomatoes. The truth is, we’re going to buy some food that’s been processed, either highly or mildly. When you do, you just want to be able to choose the better option. How to do it can seem overwhelming, unless you focus your energy on what matters.

Take the Food and Drug Administration’s Nutrition Facts label, which you see on the back of every jar, box, and bag at the grocery store. This tidy black-and-white rectangle tells you a lot: the serving size, servings per container, calories, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates, fiber, and protein, as well as the amount of various vitamins and minerals. At first glance, it seems like a good thing to know so much about the food you eat. Yet when we reached out to regular Americans—in other words, those who didn’t think about protein and fiber for a living—we learned that all this information wasn’t empowering. It was confusing. The sheer amount of data obscured the stuff that really told you whether a particular product was good for you. We fought with some success to change the label. Yet if it were up to me alone, I would’ve scrapped 75 percent of it. Fortunately, this book doesn’t require congressional approval.

The same glut of information that afflicts the Nutrition Facts label has complicated the straightforward task of eating well, and it’s keeping us all stuck in place. In theory, the more information we have, the more informed our choices should be. But in reality, too much can cause a sort of paralysis. Psychologists call the phenomenon “information overload”—perhaps more appropriate for this book, it sometimes goes by the term “infobesity”—and research shows that it causes poor decision making and anxiety. No wonder that even though more of us than ever report that we’re trying to eat healthy, for the most part, despite some encouraging signs of progress, we’re not.

In the interest of simplifying the task of eating better than you did yesterday, let’s cut through the information clutter to focus on the stuff that deserves your attention and to provide clear-cut answers to common questions that come up as you shop.

We’ve all heard it before—we’re eating way too much sugar and it’s literally killing us. But before you get caught up in “good sugar” versus “bad sugar,” think of it this way: Consider the source of the sugar. By that, I mean that the culprit is not the sugar that occurs naturally in whole vegetables and fruits. These foods come bearing nutrients. They also contain fiber (note that fruit juice, however, does not), which among other things helps slow the rate at which your body absorbs their sugar. And yep, that’s good! Fruits and vegetables are foods you want to eat more of, not less. And they’ll generally fill you up before you overdo it. The problem is added sugar, which is why, at the White House, we included it as a new category on the Nutrition Facts label. Added sugar will appear where you’d expect it—at least you know what you’re getting with cookies and cake—and also where you might not, like bread, tomato sauce, and salad dressing. So eat fewer sweet treats, and avoid products that contain added sugars. This advice holds no matter what form the added sugar takes, whether it’s high-fructose corn syrup (the villain of the moment) or one of the dozens of other sugar synonyms—yes, including virtuous-sounding ones like cane sugar, fruit concentrate, agave syrup, and honey.

The best you can do is choose drinks like water and unsweetened tea over sugar-laden ones. That’s the easy answer, because, of course, we don’t always make the best choice. There are a lot of questions surrounding artificial sweeteners. Despite what you might have heard, they’re not really unsafe—you’d have to drink many cases of diet soda a day to approach toxic levels of saccharine, aspartame, or sucralose. I don’t advise doing that, just as I’d suggest you avoid eating a hundred gallons of rice for dinner (about the amount necessary for trace amounts of arsenic in the grain to hurt you). If you’re struggling to kick a sweet-drink habit, switching to low- or no-calorie drinks beats guzzling those sweetened with lots of sugar. But here’s where things admittedly get a little tricky: Emerging evidence suggests that synthetic sweeteners could actually increase your sugar cravings, since they trick your brain into thinking you’re getting sugar, but when your body realizes it doesn’t have those ready calories, it may want them more. The science is still new, but it’s something to be conscious of. Still, if you go from sugar soda to diet soda as a bridge to unsweetened drinks, that’s progress in my book.

The issue of fats can be a bit confusing. Not long ago, fat was enemy number one—the (faulty) advice was to count fat grams, and everyone worried about it constantly. Now we know there are good fats and not-so-good ones, and even those keep changing, adding another layer of confusion. So instead of worrying about which fats are which, I say butter your bread, spike your coffee with half-and-half, eat nuts, gobble avocado, and drizzle as much olive oil as you want. In other words, cross fat off your list of obsessions, especially if that fat comes from plants or fish. Instead, focus on limiting those mega-calorie meals—you know, the obvious ones: pizza parties, burgers, deep-fried foods, huge portions of greasy stuff. The calories here are typically driven by massive amounts of fat, and typically the “bad” saturated kind.

Consuming too much sodium (or for all practical purposes, “salt”) has a serious effect on our health, mainly by causing high blood pressure and heart disease. That case is closed. And we are eating way too much salt; the average American consumes about 50 percent more than what’s recommended. But there’s an important distinction to be made: The problem isn’t the generous pinch you use to season the chicken you grill or the broccoli you roast. The real problem is the salt content of hyper-processed food, or in chain restaurants, where it’s used in amounts you’d never use at home. Exactly how much salt is too much is still debated. But this book is about just doing better. And reducing your consumption of hyper-processed foods will reduce the sodium in your diet. When you can’t avoid them, choose those with the lowest sodium content.

EAT FIBER, BE HAPPY

Vitamins and minerals get all the credit. But the other big reason fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, and legumes are good for you is that they contain the misunderstood, underestimated, decidedly unromantic component known as fiber.

I know, hearing about vitamin A and iron is dull enough, but evoking fiber in a cookbook is the ultimate buzzkill, the equivalent of devoting a spread in an architectural magazine to plumbing. But the truth remains: Eating more fiber should be one of your top priorities.

I don’t make this sort of recommendation lightly. For the most part, reducing nutrition to food’s individual components is misguided. Virtually every time we’ve tried to isolate the enemy (fat!) or savior (antioxidants!) of our health, we’ve been off base. The focus on a single trendy fruit or vitamin or mineral has confused the otherwise straightforward task of eating well. If you eat a good variety of nutrient-dense foods, you don’t have to pay attention to the whats or the whys.

But if there’s any exception to this rule, it’s fiber. It’s one of the few cases where the benefits are clear. Still, fewer than 3 percent of Americans get as much of it as they should. Perhaps that’s because the role of fiber is so widely misunderstood. While fiber is probably most commonly associated with, well, “regularity,” its benefits go way beyond that.

I could go on and on about why. I could talk about how fiber is good for us in a totally different way than other nutrients, how nutrients are absorbed by specialized cells in our gut, how the fiber that’s left inside us actually feeds the trillions of friendly bacteria that reside there, known collectively as the microbiome. We’re still learning about all the ways a happy microbiome keeps us happy, but already there is a compelling correlation between gut health and better outcomes for asthma, allergies, inflammation, and obesity, to name a few.

Recently, these little friends have received some attention. It’s why yogurt brands tout their probiotic qualities and people have been popping probiotic pills and embracing unpasteurized fermented foods like sauerkraut. But if you really want to treat your microscopic buddies nice, my prescription is a familiar one: Eat more fruits and vegetables, which have lots of fiber, and eat more whole grains and legumes, which tend to have even more.

In the quest to eat less, keeping tabs on every bite in order to track progress is a reasonable strategy. The problem is, it’s stressful and next to impossible to accomplish. A better strategy to reduce calorie consumption is to focus on the quality, not the quantity, of your calories. In other words, don’t count calories—make calories count. Empty calories—that is, calories that don’t have nutritional value—are the main culprit of our woes. Make sure the food you eat is full of nutrients, and number crunching becomes unnecessary. When your body gets what it needs, you feel satiated and you’ll be less likely to overeat.

Of course, this is a strategy, not a guarantee. So while you don’t have to count every calorie, you do want to have a basic awareness to help you look for, and help you avoid, extremes. Adults need somewhere around two thousand calories a day, depending on how active they are. So whenever a snack takes up a quarter of that recommended daily intake or a single meal approaches half, think twice about it. Otherwise, relax, enjoy yourself, and don’t worry about every bite.

Don’t treat the word “natural” on a product’s label as a beacon of health; treat it as marketing gibberish and a big, waving red flag. The minimally regulated term (often confused with the far-better-policed “organic”) generally indicates the absence of artificial flavors and synthetic substances in a product, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you want to feed that product to your family. Think of it this way: A carrot doesn’t have to boast that it’s natural. Products that do tend to have something to prove. They’re often highly processed and too far removed from whole foods to contain much nutrient value, so take an especially close look at the list of ingredients to make sure you’re not buying just another snack loaded with some version of sugar. (And looking for fiber on the nutrition label isn’t a bad idea—see this page.)

There’s good reason to avoid products with a bunch of additives—the often unpronounceable ingredients added to preserve, color, thicken, or otherwise alter a food’s natural state—but not because they’re radioactive. While it’s true that additives don’t receive the long-term study they should, what additive-packed products contain is less important than what they don’t. Whether you’re talking about sugar, soy lecithin, or FD&C Blue No. 1, the presence of additives often indicates food without much nutritional value—the very definition of “not good for you.” But let’s be realistic. We’re going to buy some jarred, boxed, or canned food that contains additives. Canned tomatoes, for instance, usually contain ascorbic acid, a preservative that keeps them from turning brown. Would it be better to use fresh tomatoes in season or preserve your own? Sure. Can you eat store-bought canned tomatoes? Absolutely. So let’s set a more reasonable goal. Eat as little processed food as you can. When you do eat it, though, try to choose products whose labels don’t list more than a couple of words a sixth grader couldn’t pronounce.

You’ve probably heard versions of both of these takes on GMOs (genetically modified organisms). Yet as is so often the case, the issue isn’t black or white. It’s gray. Here’s what I know: Although the technology—altering the genetic makeup of plants by implanting genes from other living things—sounds like the plot of a sci-fi thriller, there isn’t a single credible study that shows that GMOs are dangerous to eat. And while genetic modification shows promise as a way to address the challenges of feeding a growing population on a rapidly warming planet, GMOs are no magic bullet. So far, their primary application has been to grow corn and soy more efficiently. These crops mainly end up as feed for livestock and fodder for processed foods, so in that way GMOs reinforce a food system that’s not working for us or the environment. And while new gene-editing technologies have the potential to reduce the use of herbicides and fertilizers, and make plants more nutritious and taste better, we are still years off from those foods showing up on shelves.

The problem, then, isn’t the tool, but how it’s used. As climate change accelerates, food will become much more difficult to grow. Gene-editing technology might help with that, so I think it’s wise to keep it as a tool in our toolbox. The topic of GMOs takes up valuable space in the conversation around our food system. We need to keep the fundamental goal of ensuring that all families have access to healthy, affordable, sustainably produced food as the top priority. For now, the best way for you to help to support a more sustainable, diverse food system is by eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. By doing so, you’ll largely avoid GMOs. But when you do consume products made with GMOs—and we all do, whether we realize it or not—the sun will still rise the next morning.

To figure out whether a product like bread or cereal is worth the stomach space, I take a look at the Nutrition Facts label and zoom in on fiber. Spotting more than 3 grams per serving of bread and 6 grams per serving of cereal is a solid, if imperfect, indicator that the food is good for you. Because while fiber isn’t sexy, it’s vastly more important than its reputation suggests. (See the sidebar “Eat Fiber, Be Happy,” on this page.) Then check the label to see if the serving size and calories are reasonable, and be a little skeptical if there are lots of sodium, sugars, or saturated fat. Or know that this might be an occasional food.

Look, I know it’s hard. Like, really hard. You get home late from work, you’re tired, the kids are hungry. And I know that people in my position throw around the advice (or command) “Cook more!” like it’s easy, as if our lives are set up for spending a couple hours every night cooking.

Still, bear with me here, because cooking at home is one of the best things you can do for your family’s well-being. And to help, most of the recipes in this book are designed to make it easier to do so, whether you cook at home every night, or just once more a week. Now, this is where you might expect me to wax poetic on the ritual of eating together and the importance of spending time with the people you love. And yes, dinner was when my parents bugged me about getting my homework done and talked about politics, culture, and life. And yes, I was especially moved to see the president of the United States make time to eat with his wife and kids practically every night.

Yet it was the measurable effect of eating together as a family—and eating food cooked at home—that grabbed me. Not only is cooking typically less expensive than eating out or ordering in, but virtually every meal you cook at home will be better for you. For the most part, restaurants serve dishes meant to please, not to nourish. And that’s OK. A little indulgence is good, as long as you realize you’re indulging. At home, few of us engage in the eating habits restaurants encourage. I don’t know about you, but I don’t usually deep-fry in my apartment, or eat two courses followed by a slab of chocolate cake. When you’re doing the cooking, you can relax, employing salt and even butter liberally, knowing common sense will act as a guardrail to extreme eating. (Remember when Alois wanted me to hit that sauce with a metric ton of butter? That doesn’t happen at home.)

So cook as much as your life allows. Cook one more meal each week and eat it around the table with your family. Don’t take it from me: The data shows that when families cook and eat together, everything gets better. Everything. Not only do they consume more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and less salt, sugar, and calories, but kids’ behavior improves, grades go up, and even drug use and teen pregnancy dip.

A couple years back, I got together with Dan Barber, the pioneering New York chef behind Blue Hill at Stone Barns, to cook lunch, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so nervous. This was partly because of whom we were cooking for—a collection of more than forty world leaders, mostly heads of state—and partly because of what we were cooking.

The then-secretary general of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, had assembled this formidable bunch about a month before the 2015 Climate Change Conference in Paris as a sort of pregame to the summit ahead. Most chefs in their right mind would take this opportunity to show off their most impressive techniques and the finest ingredients. But we were serving food that had been headed for the garbage.

We served presidents from China to France “landfill salad” (made from produce scraps and rejects) and a burger with a patty fashioned from the pulp left over from juicing vegetables. I admit, for a moment I wondered what the hell we’d been thinking.

Luckily, Dan and his team did the heavy lifting, from dreaming up the dishes to gathering the raw materials, a tough task since there’s still no good system for rescuing useful refuse. In fact, he was the one who gave me the idea in the first place. One of the most articulate and thoughtful chefs on the issue of sustainable agriculture, he’d recently invited fellow chefs to get creative with roots and peels, the leftovers from filleting fish, and other stuff destined for the trash. He was asking us to rethink what we waste. How can it be that we throw away so much that can be made into incredibly delicious food?

Food waste is an area where there’s a big problem but also big potential for progress. In the United States, we waste 40 percent of our food.

All that waste affects our climate, too. Every year, more than 50 million tons of food ends up rotting in landfills and releasing methane, a greenhouse gas that traps heat at a much higher rate than carbon dioxide. All told, food waste alone accounts for a whopping 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. If it were a country, food waste would clock in just behind the U.S. and China as the world’s third-largest emitter.

Here’s another reason to care: Waste affects your bottom line. All the water, fertilizer, and labor that goes into the production and distribution of food that’s never eaten increases the price of the food we buy.

While the majority of food waste takes place before you check out at the grocery store, a remarkable 43 percent happens after. So picture this: Every morning, you wake up, open the fridge, and set four dollar bills on fire.

This is essentially what every American family does, on average throwing out $1,500 worth of food a year. Like everyone else, I know the feeling of discovering a bag of spoiled spinach, a troop of spongy eggplants, or a carton of sour milk. I might’ve forgotten about them. I might even have been off giving a speech about how much food we waste.

But what we throw away often isn’t trash. It’s good, flavorful food that just needs a little love.

No, a head of lettuce sacrificed to the trash isn’t the end of the world. No, I’m not about to insist you start hoarding the liquid in canned chickpeas to make vegan mayonnaise and meringues. (Yup, this is a thing.) Hey, more power to those who do. But a few small changes to your routine can make a big difference, helping the planet and saving you money.

Before you hit the grocery store, take a couple of minutes to make a plan. Even a basic idea of what the week’s worth of meals might be—chicken with roasted broccoli on Monday, dinner out with a friend on Tuesday, salmon with vegetables and rice for Wednesday—will help keep your shopping haul more in line with what you’ll actually eat. And before you head out, take a look at what you already have in the fridge and pantry so you don’t accidentally double up, as I do far too often.

Afterwards, take a minute to jot down a list of what you bought, so good stuff doesn’t get lost to a crowded fridge. Because you eat what you see, keep vegetables, fish, meat, and other foods with short shelf lives in clear containers and in plain sight, preferably at eye level. And plan to eat the things that spoil the quickest first.

There are some incredibly resourceful cooks out there who use every edible scrap in their homes, pickling watermelon rind and stashing vegetable trimmings to make stock, and ending the week with exactly one cup’s worth of garbage. That’s awesome. I’m not quite so diligent. But I’ve found that one of the easiest ways to reduce waste at my place is by focusing on the stalks, stems, and leaves so many of us toss without much thought. Whenever you find yourself about to trash half of what you bought, ask yourself, What am I doing?!

★ Consider the typical bunch of leafy greens like collards or kale. When you strip the leaves, as so many recipes instruct, you’re left with a heavy handful of stems. Instead of tossing half the money you spent, thinly slice those stems and sauté them for a few minutes, just until they start to soften, before adding the greens. You’re not just doing the planet and your budget a solid, you’ve added an awesome crisp element and doubled the size of your dish.

★ Same goes for vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower. Florets might hog the spotlight, but the thick stalks taste just as good—often sweeter, even. Peel them with a vegetable peeler until there are no more thick white fibers, chop them, and cook them with the florets.

★ While you buy beets (and turnips, radishes, carrots, etc.) for the sweet root, bunches often come with a bonus—the tasty leaves and stems. It’s a vegetable two-for-one deal. Just cut them off, give them a good rinse or soak to clean them, and sauté them with a little garlic or bacon.

★ Some chefs pluck every leaf of parsley or cilantro from the stems. At home, the lazy cook’s path is also the wise one: Chop herb stems along with the leaves, discarding only the thick, woody ones.

If you have a head of lettuce starting to go limp, or your kale conks out, submerge the leaves in a bowl of cold water and add some ice cubes. In fifteen minutes or so, they’ll be back from the brink and great to eat.

We’ve all dumped a jar of tomato sauce after seeing that the stamped-on date has passed. Yet those dates, accompanied by terms like “Sell By” or “Best Before,” are not standardized, regulated, or really even connected to safety. Instead, they typically represent a best guess by a company about when a product’s quality starts to suffer.

OK, so what do you do when you find something that’s probably past its prime? Some, including those who have studied the subject, say they’d eat unopened packaged food years after the sell-by date, but they’re braver than I am. I favor a middle ground. If something in your fridge is a few days or maybe a couple weeks after the date, give it a careful look or a good sniff. If it looks and smells normal, it’s almost certainly fine. Give it a little taste, if you want. And if you still have any doubt, sure, throw it out.

As you measure the ¾ cup of broccoli florets or count out the 6 carrots that this or that recipe calls for, keep in mind that the bits you leave behind could end up lost in the fridge. Instead, just add them to whatever you’re making. No dinner has ever been ruined by an extra quarter cup of chopped onions.

Despite doing my best to follow my own advice, the reality is that by the end of the week, my fridge frequently contains a strange collection of edible matter. There might be half a cabbage, a few celery sticks, and a bell pepper with crow’s feet. Maybe I find a few leftover florets of roasted broccoli or slabs of grilled zucchini. None of it has gone bad but they’re part of the unromantic reality of cooking. Making use of them is a key to cutting down on waste. While they may not be pretty, they’re still totally delicious and can become a great meal. Here’s what I do to make use of these bits:

★ Chop them fairly fine and cook them in a slick of oil or butter with a generous pinch of salt over medium heat until they’re soft and sweet.

☆ Add them to tomatoes and leftover pork shoulder to make ragu for pasta (this page).

☆ Stir the sautéed bits into Farro Risotto (this page) a minute or so before it’s ready.

☆ Blend them with water or stock and use them as the base for bean soup (this page) or lentil soup (this page).

★ Thinly slice the leftovers and cook them in a slick of oil with a generous pinch of salt over high heat until tender with a slight crunch.

☆ Substitute the mixture for the vegetables in fried brown rice (beginnong on this page).

★ Cut leftover raw vegetables into 1-inch pieces, toss them with a splash of oil, and spread them in a roasting pan. Top with a chicken and roast (this page), so the tasty chicken fat and juices soak them.

You’ve got a bowl of fruit and containers of nuts on the counter. You put the chips on a high shelf and chucked the soda. Your fridge and cabinets are full of real food. Already you’ve set yourself up for success. Now it’s time to make dinner. The recipes in this book are here to help. They’re here to tempt you with downright deliciousness to eat more vegetables, whole grains, and beans, and to make smart choices about meat and fish. But the question remains—how do you turn good food into a good meal? In other words, what does a healthier, better plate of food look like? (And how do we get it on the table as conveniently as possible?)

The First Lady had the same question. Over plates of catfish, brown rice, and beans at her Chicago home, we talked a lot about how to support families who wanted to make better choices. And at the time, the advice coming from the government certainly wasn’t helping. I’m talking about the iconic food pyramid.

In 1991, the USDA released the familiar pyramid, which the agency immediately changed after a meat industry freak-out. As documented by Marion Nestle in her excellent book Food Politics, the version released a year later reflected the influence of powerful food interests. It drew deservedly harsh criticism from nutrition advocates who thought that the guidance should perhaps be based on science, not industry lobbying.

Beyond the need for guidance to be science-based, Michelle had an additional, more fundamental objection: The food pyramid just didn’t make sense to most people. By 2005, the pyramid had morphed into a triangle broken into bands of different colors and sizes, the base crammed with images of vegetables and fruits, milk and cheese, meat and pasta and bread. Michelle wondered how she—or anyone, for that matter—could possibly use this information to make a healthful plate of food. I couldn’t figure it out either, and I’ve devoted my life to this stuff. We looked at the research and it backed up her feeling: Other parents didn’t understand the pyramid either. Between the muddled guidance from the government and the marketing from the food industry, parents just weren’t sure what a balanced meal looked like.

So in 2011, we replaced the familiar triangle with MyPlate, an illustration that shows what a healthy plate looks like. The plate is broken into sections—one each for protein, grains, fruits, vegetables, and dairy—whose sizes reflect the ideal proportion. MyPlate is simpler than the food pyramid, and actually communicates less information. But it’s the right information. That’s what matters.

Of course, you shouldn’t take the plate literally. No one’s saying you have to serve a glass of milk alongside dinner, but that the dairy you do use—say, the Parmesan you sprinkle over a salad or the cream you mix into farro risotto—should exist in relatively small proportion to the other food on your plate. No one’s saying that every meal must include both fruits and vegetables. But if you’re making oatmeal (a grain), don’t add just a couple of blueberries—add a big handful. If you’re grilling zucchini or roasting broccoli or baking sweet potatoes, cook enough so these great-for-you foods make up about half the stuff on your plate.

The recipes in this book are delicious ideas for how to fill each section of that plate with food that represents progress for our health and environment. Sure, not everything on your table will come from this book. When you have the time, consider combining two or three recipes to make dinner. But part of that all-important “how” question is how to make the task of composing a balanced meal doable. So when you’re planning a meal but are short on time, I encourage you to pick just one recipe that tempts you and fill in the blanks with dead-simple preparations. If you’re eager to make bulgur salad with pistachios and pomegranate seeds (this page), serve it with simply baked salmon seasoned with nothing but salt and a pile of spinach with your favorite dressing. If you want to braise pork sausages with bitter greens (this page), round it out with a bowl of unadorned cooked grains, leaning on the saucy dish for added flavor.

In addition to specific recipes, you’ll find guidance for making the sort of unglamorous but delicious dishes that we all rely on to get dinner on the table. I’m talking about advice on cooking fillets of fish (this page) and chicken breasts (this page), roasting (this page) or grilling (this page) whatever vegetables you have on hand, or making plain-old quinoa (this page) or bulgur (this page) or brown rice (this page).

Make dinner both easy on yourself and delicious for your family. Take comfort in the fact that, even as talk of dieting fads and trendy cure-alls and conflicting nutritional guidance swirls all around you, you can use the basic advice contained in this simple tool to take a step forward. Because if the plate of food you make looks just a little more like the model, you’re doing better.

A NOTE ABOUT MEASUREMENTS IN THESE RECIPES (don’t sweat them too much)

Most of the food in this book is simple, the kind of stuff I tend to cook at home. But it deserves mentioning that simple food often relies on a little flexibility—something that’s hard to account for in recipes, with their tendency toward precise amounts. Not every head of broccoli is the same size. Not every lemon provides the same acidity. Every tomato tastes a little bit different. Even a teaspoon of kosher salt delivers a different level of saltiness depending on the brand. Add to that the fact that we all have different preferences—what’s too salty for one person might be just right for another—and you’ll see why precision can be, well, a recipe for disappointment. But at the same time, many cooks really like being told to add a precise amount of oil, salt, or lemon juice. So I do that in these recipes, but I also encourage flexibility. Instead of a precise amount of salt, I provide a range meant to lead you to a place that’s tasty no matter what kind of kosher salt you’ve got, but you should use the amount that tastes best to you. Same with lemon and lime juice; squeeze on enough to make the dish taste bright and delicious. After all, the goal is more important than the amount. One piece of advice: While you should always trust your own taste, I’ve found adding a little more acidity—a few drops of vinegar, or a squeeze of citrus—can often lead you to delicious new territory.