“I can just eat
all day long.
I don’t gain
weight—that’s
my favorite
part of being
vegan.”
Coscarelli’s exercise routine includes yoga, dance and core fusion in addition to her vegan diet.
York City and worked as a pastry chef at New York’s Counter
restaurant before enrolling in
the Plant-Based Nutrition program at Cornell. There, she got
an overview of the entire body
of research on the benefits of
a diet of vegetables and whole
foods. The program is based on
T. Colin Campbell’s famed book
The China Study, which draws
from findings in rural China on
the connection between nutrition, heart disease, diabetes
and cancer. It made Coscarelli
not just a chef but also a passionate advocate for transformative
nutrition.
Coscarelli’s first cookbook,
Chloe’s Kitchen, hit bookstores in
March, and she’s already at work
on a follow-up book of dessert
recipes, which means she spends
her days eating what comes out
of her baking pans.
“I have to remind myself to
eat lunch,” she says. “I’ll get so caught up in the work that
I’ll be eating sweets all day.”
It helps that Coscarelli starts every day—or almost every
day, she admits—with yoga, dance or a core fusion program.
If it doesn’t happen early in the morning, she says, she’ll never
pull herself away from the kitchen long enough to exercise.
Not that she’s doing it to fit into her skinny jeans.
“I can just eat all day long. I don’t gain weight—that’s my
favorite part of being vegan,” she says. Her mother likes to
scold her: “Chefs are supposed to taste! You don’t have to
have the whole plateful!” But Coscarelli says she can’t help
herself—and that she doesn’t need to.
“I’m not doing this to restrict myself,” she says. “If this
diet felt restrictive, I wouldn’t be doing it.”
wATers: PAuL sAkuMA/APIMAGes
The Legacy of
Alice’s Restaurant
Forty years ago at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.,
chef Alice Waters threw off the heavy mantle of our
national devotion to gluttony. Ours was a schizophrenic commitment to unhealthful indulgence: processed, soulless, previously frozen fast food on one
end of the spectrum and fine dining dedicated to
cream and butter and imported goods on the other.
Waters saw another way, a way to indulge and to
promote health—the health of our bodies and our
planet alike.
The Alice Waters approach is familiar to most
anyone who cares about food. Cook fresh, seasonal, preferably local, preferably organic. But make
it exquisite. It’s a philosophy to live by, and Waters
has spread this gospel not only in her own cooking
and in a deep shelf of her own books, which are
laden with both recipes and habits of mind, but also
by creating the Edible Schoolyard program.
ESY began in 1995, with a garden in a vacant lot
next to graffiti-scrawled Martin Luther King Jr. Middle
School in Berkeley. The garden is now an acre overflowing with student-grown fruits and vegetables,
which are prepared by pupils in the school’s kitchen
classroom. The ESY idea was to take to students
the simple idea of growing and preparing food,
and its kitchen and garden now host more than
1,000 visitors each year—educators, international
delegates and chefs alike. In addition, the program
has spawned both affiliates and emulators across
the country.
“All those generations of students have since
nourished themselves on food they’ve grown and
harvested and cooked precisely to share with one
another,” Waters writes in her book The Edible
Schoolyard, which chronicles the origins and ideas
of this endeavor.
It’s fair to say that
nearly every chef
working in America
has inherited the
concepts of sustain-
ability, seasonality and
health—whether from
a farming and home-
cooking parent or from
Waters herself. It’s not
just a source of food,
or even a collaboration
of action and mind-set
among a small group
of people. It’s a larger
ethic of possibility, of
connecting our bodies
to the earth, of squeez-
ing health and pleasure
and optimism out of
what we eat. —L.S.
