Ep. 54: Redefining Healthy Cooking with Julia Turshen

Photo Credit: Melina Hammer

Anna Lutz and Elizabeth Davenport chat with Julia Turshen about the process of researching and writing a cookbook, and how it felt to include an essay on breaking up with diet culture in her latest cookbook, Simply Julia. She also talks about how disconnection is inherent in diet culture; in families, or among friends, having weight loss as a common goal can feel temporarily good, but ultimately creates a deficit of joy around food.

We discuss:

  • How isolating it can be to grow up in a family that is immersed in diet culture, but also how connecting with people and having conversations about the impacts of diet culture is incredibly healing.
  • How cookbooks are so often welcomed into peoples homes, but the contents are often not questioned.
  • Examples of diet culture’s trickery and disconnection when it appears in cooking and cookbooks.
  • The over abundance of images of thin, white, cis-gendered women in food-related social media posts is detrimental and is largely what has lead us to equate that type of body with “healthy”.
  • How forms of oppression tend to be best countered as a community.
  • Julia’s go-to meals.

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Julia Turshen is a New York Times bestselling cookbook author. Her latest book Simply Julia is a National Bestseller. She has written for multiple publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, and more. She is the founder of Equity At The Table (EATT), an inclusive digital directory of women/non-binary individuals in food, and the host and producer of the podcast Keep Calm and Cook On. She sits on the Kitchen Cabinet Advisory Board for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and is a member of God’s Love We Deliver’s Culinary Council. Julia lives in the Hudson Valley with her wife and their dogs and teaches live cooking classes every Sunday afternoon.