Plant-centered recipe resources for a healthy lifestyle

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EWG presents the last in a series of guest articles by Culinary Nutritionist and Author of “What the Fork Are You Eating?” Stefanie Sacks, exploring the link between a healthier diet and a healthier environment while offering straightforward advice and encouragement to anyone looking to improve their nutrition and protect the planet.

Asking you to consider shifting what and how you eat is the goal of my recent series of blogs on how to embrace a more plant-centered food lifestyle. I hope you now have just enough tools to begin to reshape your choices, including a small repertoire of meatless recipes.

Adopting new habits, particularly around nourishment, is a big ask. But after over 20 years of guiding people towards healthier food choices, I know it’s doable with a little inspiration, the right information, and engaging activities that are accessible, simple and fun. 

That’s why I cook! And teach others to do the same. It has been my passion since I was very young – a place where I could be free to create, exploring the many colors, textures and flavors of food. I rarely use recipes to guide me, but always seek inspiration from other culinarians.

As you embark on your journey, here are some plant-rich resources that have either been my go-to choices, or that pique my interest. I’ve woven them in with highlights from my blog series on cooking with plant-based foods.

Sometimes, just getting in the kitchen with a recipe that resonates is a great start. Remember, the slower you go, the faster you get there. So bite off only what you feel you can chew!

As I wrote in my first blog, food behavior is highly emotional, and having a conversation about nourishment – particularly during a crisis that impacts everyone – can be a trigger for many. That’s where I can help as a conduit.

Even if a plant-centered food lifestyle, with most or all your calories coming from minimally processed plant foods, seems daunting, it’s easy to start. In my second blog, I outlined the 101 on how to get started with such a diet at home.

EWG’s Food Scores, the subject of my third blog, can be a great resource as you pursue a plant-based diet. It has details onmore than 80,000 products from high to low on nutrition (sodium, cholesterol and simple carbs), ingredients (pesticides, food additives and more) and processing (how food production affects human and environmental health).

We need to see eating healthfully on a spectrum. And my job is to cater to everyone’s beginning, always celebrating what they can do and honoring what they can’t. In my fourth blog, you’ll get some help stocking your plant-powered kitchen.

Diving into creative ways to cook all plant foods, rather than just one type, can be an ideal start. But years of teaching people how to cook made me realize: Most people struggle with plant protein. That’s why I packed the fifth blog with recipes and other ideas for helping you launch into legumes – simply, nutritiously and deliciously. 

Food isn’t a difficult topic, but for many people, it can still be highly emotional. The suggestion of changes may be triggering. My aim with the sixth blog is to walk you through a process that could very well make the small changes in your everyday eating digestible and actionable. My style is systematic and efficient but always with flexibility and adaptability.

And in my seventh blog,I talked about how I could have offered onboarding tactics to enlighten kids on the impacts of overconsumption of animal protein, both for human and environmental health. But that kind of dogmatic approach rarely works with children. The solution is talking about the issues while engaging in fun food-related activities. Transitioning what, and how, we eat must be about gently facilitating behavior change, not constantly drilling down on science and food politics.

If there is any take-away from these resources, it’s that you don’t have to be a chef to cook. Just get in the kitchen and start to play with plants.