How Pete Wells, Former New York Times Restaurant Critic, Made His Kitchen Healthier

In the second part of the month-long series, Pete Wells and experts say that the easiest way to have a better diet is to equip yourself with the right foods.

Reset Your Appetite This is the second of Pete Wells’ four articles about how he developed healthier eating habits, published every Monday in January. First focused on reducing sugar.

In 1976, David Bowie moved to West Berlin. He would make some of the most original music of his career there, but that wasn’t the reason he went. He was in Los Angeles trying to kick the cocaine that had taken over his life, destroying his memory and creating hallucinations day and night. “I felt like I had fallen into the depths of the earth,” he later said.

Frankly, there are big differences between the struggles of a life-threatening drug addiction and an overfed restaurant critic, but my former life can be downright hallucinatory at times. But one of the ways I nursed myself back to health was the same method used by Bowie and countless others who decided to get clean: I changed my environment.

I needed to eat most of my meals in a place where there were no temptations and no one said no, least of all me. I had to replace all the habits that were slowly killing me with new ones that would allow me to survive. I knew the only way to do this was to stay home while I taught myself to eat again.

If I was going to clean, I had to start where I lived. My apartment became my Berlin.

Master the Market

Lisa R. Young, a nutritional consultant and assistant professor of nutrition at New York University, tells clients that the success or failure of any diet is largely determined by what’s in the kitchen.

Dr. “Willpower is overrated,” Young said. “There’s really no such thing. You’ll eat whatever you have at home. When you focus on healthy foods you can add to your plate, you’ll start eating more, and naturally, you’ll cut out the cookies, too.”

To turn my Brooklyn home into a sanctuary from my self-sabotaging behaviors, I needed to look at the stores I shop for groceries a few blocks away.

I became a regular at the food cooperative that I joined for trial purposes during the pandemic. The store was small and sparsely stocked; It was mainly brown rice and beans. The refrigerated cases were so weak they could barely keep the lettuce and herbs cool. Each week, a different section of the floor looked ready to collapse. But the prices were much lower than at the corner grocery store, and that made a difference since I now ate at home most nights.

This small co-op, with a faint whiff of a 1970s commune, turned out to be ideal for someone trying to reform their diet. It’s full of things I want to eat more of. The overworked produce section is filled like a Tetris grid with interlocking bundles of greens and baskets of roots. An entire wall is covered in plastic bins filled with almonds, unsweetened papaya and other dried fruits, lentils in a surprising array of colors, and grains that invite me to take my cooking in new directions: fonio, millet, amaranth.

Reset Your Shopping List

• whole grains, such as brown and black rice, millet, fonio, and farro

• beans, including colorful ones like red lentils and cranberry beans

• Canned beans and fish, such as canned sardines and mackerel

• Vegetables for salads and snacks, such as cucumber, carrot, radish and cherry tomato

• Long-lasting vegetables for cooked dishes, such as winter squash, kohlrabi, and broccoli

• Fruits for salads and snacks, such as apples, mangoes, strawberries and citrus fruits

• Other essential ingredients for easy meals and snacks, such as eggs, hazelnut butter, unsalted hazelnuts and hummus

Things that are not as important as the products my cooperative has in stock are also important. There is no room for chocolate cake or cupcakes. There’s no cereal aisle, just a few boxes of whole wheat flour and oat biscuits sandwiched between them. In front of the checkout counter where most supermarkets sell candy and gum, the cooperative has a table full of wilted cabbage and slightly rotten fruit for half the price.

It’s easier for me to pass by a basket full of free kittens than to miss a bargain on perfectly good items. Wilted kale is as close as I come to an impulse buy at the co-op. I try not to shop hungry, which as history has shown will result in a basket full of cider donuts. No, I wander the halls like a cold-blooded assassin whose targets are dates and ginger tea. I go in with a list in hand and try to stick to it, although I may work into my plans an attractive pumpkin that catches my eye.

Now, after hauling out dinner ingredients from this store a hundred times, I can walk into a bigger, fancier supermarket and see the bones of my food co-op hidden inside. I can head straight for canned white beans, bags of barley, graphic fractals of Romanesco. (And right there, I have the makings of Friuli, a soup made to withstand the cold Northern Italian winters.)

And I know which corridors to avoid. It’s a strategy known as shopping around, as most supermarkets display minimally processed foods (vegetables, dairy, meat and seafood) on exterior walls while stacking Cinnamon Toast Crunch in interior aisles. By staying true to the environment, I can bring the good out of a food scene full of bad ideas.

Program Your Kitchen

When I get home with my chia seeds in hand, I have another dining environment to clean: my kitchen. I don’t have any radical new ideas about eliminating food, but I do have some tricks.

• Berries that will quickly collapse in a puddle of wet mold, like raspberries, should be stored at eye level, on the counter or in the refrigerator, so I can come back in an hour or two and say, “Ooh, berries!” I will think. (This is what magicians call forcing a card.)

• Items that need to last a few days are written down on a list I stick on the refrigerator door, where I’ll see them every time I think about my next meal. Radishes, cucumbers and small carrots that will be stored for a while are placed in a small, transparent bag in the crisper drawer to be turned into a salad or appetizer plate.

• Millet, popcorn, red lentils and other bulk ingredients are stacked on a shelf in the freezer door so they don’t get lost in the tundra. Pistachios, sardines and dates are stuffed into a crowded cupboard. (Sardines and radishes with a hard-cooked egg make a handy lunch.)

The point of all this strategic resource allocation is to surround myself with non-sabotaging snacks and a few simple, smart meals before I get really hungry.

Recipes You Can Make While Resetting Your Kitchen

Roasted Broccoli Grain Bowl with Nooch Sauce | Saland-e Nakhod (Chickpea Yogurt Stew) | Daily Branch | White Bean, Tuna and Kale Salad | Ginger Juice and Crispy Ginger Soba Noodles | Frijoles de la Olla | Maraq Misir (Red Lentil Soup) | Toasted Millet Salad with Cucumber, Avocado and Lemon | See all recipes in this series

Executive Director Corby Kummer Food and Society program at the Aspen Institutea nonprofit effort to make food systems healthier and more equitable, said that what I’ve done so far has been good to me but will be extremely challenging for many people. If supermarkets offered a wider variety of foods that were healthier, less processed, easier to prepare and more affordable, it would be easier for the average American to eat sensibly, he said. Like other nutritionists, he believes the best way to help large numbers of people eat better would be government action to control the products food manufacturers are allowed to sell.

In the meantime, any effort you can make will be worth it, he added. “Changing your dining environment is the most important thing you can do for yourself.”

More From This Series

Read the first of Pete Wells’ four articles on how to reset your appetite.

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