IN MY YEARS as a chef, I’ve made dirty rice for the Dalai Lama, Hummingbird cake for Lady Gaga, chicken with pomegranate sauce for the first George Bush, and a Valentine’s Day dinner for Barack and Michelle Obama. I prepared countless meals for Oprah Winfrey as her personal chef and served my fried chicken to ballrooms full of Hollywood luminaries—and let me tell you, I’m not being proud when I say that they loved me for it. Everybody loves a chef, because everybody loves food.
But the most important meal I ever cooked wasn’t for any of these big names. It was for just me.
It was a bowl of oatmeal with berries, and some egg whites scrambled with zucchini. The first time I ate that breakfast I weighed 325 pounds and had recently been given a diagnosis of diabetes, the disease that would take my father from me too soon. I knew I had to make changes, but even though I’d expertly prepared thousands of meals for other people—many tailored to their diet specifications—I had never given much thought to how to feed myself in a healthful way. If the boss said, “Art, I need steamed vegetables; I need a grilled piece of fish,” that’s what I gave them. But I never actually connected the good choices I was helping them make, with how I could improve my own poor habits. I knew other chefs who struggled with their weight, and some chefs who stayed fit—I just didn’t know how the second group managed it, since all the chefs I knew seemed just as passionate about great food as I was, and still am.
Someone, in my case a health coach, needed to say, “Art, eat oatmeal. Eat berries. Eat egg whites and vegetables.” So I did. Now, more than one hundred pounds lighter, I still have that same breakfast virtually every day. I’ve run marathons and in 2010 married my love, Jesus Salgueiro, wearing a suit that was smaller than the one I wore for my high school graduation.
The moral of the story is that while the motivation had to come from within, I still needed some inspiration from outside. That’s what I hope this book will do: inspire you. When I heard that Allison planned to tackle the very question I once puzzled over, I decided right away I wanted to be part of this project, and share what I now know to be true: that you can be fit and enjoy wonderful food.
Maybe you want to lose a lot of weight and get healthy, and my story will speak to you. Maybe you’re already on a path of eating well, but want to know how to do it with more flavor and flair. You might just be curious how some really fine chefs who are surrounded by food all day manage to make any peace with it at all. It isn’t easy, and the way I went about it might not be for everybody. But what about the way Eric Ripert keeps fit by walking? Or how Michelle Bernstein finds ways to eat her vegetables while working long hours at Michy’s? Or how Jacques Torres keeps off the weight he lost, and still eats a little bit of chocolate each day? When it comes to eating, I think Allison hit it right when she noticed people would rather take advice from folks who wear chef whites than white lab coats.
At this moment chefs in America, particularly those fortunate enough to be embraced by the public as celebrities, have enormous influence. I’ve tried to use mine responsibly, cofounding a charity, Common Threads, to teach kids from low-income families how to cook wholesome meals, with the goal of preventing childhood obesity.
But there’s also a much louder message coming from the food media, celebrating butter and bacon and excess. This book represents an opportunity to say, “Hey, we don’t all eat like that!”
There’s a lot of collected wisdom here from my colleagues, who are among the best chefs cooking today. As I told Allison over a long-ago lunch at Art and Soul, in the end, it’s about finding your happy—the thing that works best for you. It might be preparing a beautiful, healthful meal that you share with loved ones. It could be making smarter choices when you go to your favorite restaurant. Or it might be starting your day with a bowl of oatmeal and berries that you make just for yourself.
I hope that in these pages you find your happy.
Art Smith