Ever since she first bid Americans a hearty ‘Bon appitit!" on public television nearly three decades ago, Julia Child has been our leading national symbol of gustatory pleasure. Recently Child, nibbling on Goldfish crackers, talked with NEWSWEEK’S Boston bureau chief Mark Starr in her Cambridge, Mass., kitchen:
I think it’s horrible. I think we’re definitely running amok here. I believe in the traditional four food groups. It wouldn’t be any fun to live without meat because I’m a carnivore. I do not believe in this meatless, dairyless, butterless society. To me that would not be enjoyable life.
To try and stay healthy and to have a good time eating. Moderation in all things, a great variety of all foods and exercising moderately. The most important thing is to pick your antecedents. If you have a bad family history, you’re really in trouble. But say that you have a decent family history, and you don’t smoke and you control your blood pressure, then you ought to be able to eat perfectly sensibly.
I think that there was a lot of overloading on heavy foods and fats. Judging from the fact that we have enormously fat people in this country, we’re probably eating far too much. One reason why we might have been eating too much is that if you don’t have adequate home cooking and you’re eating processed food, you’re probably never quite satisfied and you keep snacking and it’s the snacking that makes fat. If you have good home cooking, you’re not anxious to snack and that would keep your weight down.
I hope not. I’m hoping that people will take an adult approach to food. Why do people prefer to believe the latest television ad or the latest scare in the newspapers? It’s a childlike approach. Why not take food as an adult and enjoy the pleasures of food because it’s certainly one of our most innocent pleasures?
It’s very discouraging. A lot of restaurateurs have been scared by these nutritionist people. You go and there’s no sauce on anything. I went to a banquet and I had to pay $35 for my meal and we started out with some kind of a first course of nuts and berries with some kind of a health-food sauce on it. Then we had a great big piece of steamed smoked fish, steamed potatoes and steamed vegetables-not even a piece of lemon. No sauce, no butter, nothing! And dessert was very much the same kind of thing with sherbet and some kind of fruit with no, no fat whatsoever. Oh! That’s very bad. I don’t want to have a diet meal when I go out to have fun. When I go out to dinner, I want to have a sort of a semibinge. If I know I’m going to go out for what I hope is a good meal, I will prepare for it by eating very little for lunch and very little for breakfast.
I’m 78 years old. I work hard. I’m up at 6 every morning and I need my strength. I feel psychologically and spiritually that I need meat. There’s no bad food. There are just bad ways of using it. I think you can eat anything-but eat a small amount. Like a beautiful chocolate cake with a butter-cream filling. You can certainly eat that, but you’ll just eat a little piece. In America we’re used to getting these great big pieces of things. Wonder why the French don’t have all of this heart trouble that we do? They don’t eat those great big helpings.
I blame a lot of those dietitians and scientists for putting [information] in language that people don’t understand. They talk about grams-we’re not in the metric system. Nobody knows what they’re talking about. As a result, people haven’t really digested what the guidelines are. You can have 30 percent fat in an 1,800-calorie diet. One hundred calories is one tablespoon [of fat]. That means that you can have five or six tablespoons of fat or oil per day, two of which can be butter. That’s a lot. Have them and enjoy them. There’s even room to binge. Dietitians admit that you can binge on one day and be very careful the next.
I’m very conscious that people don’t want to gain weight. I’m trying to show people the way to cook. If you know the basics of cooking, then you can do anything that you want. There’s no excuse for people to say, “I don’t have the time to cook.“If you learn how to cook you can do things very, very simply. It doesn’t have to be fancy. The main thing is to get everybody together and have a wonderful, warm, happy time with friends and family.
I want to be healthy and well fed up to the end, What will prolong my life is eating well and enjoying it.
