An Action Plan for Your Pantry
Stefanie Sacks of Montauk, a chef and nutritionist who has dished far and wide about how the food we eat affects our health — she has a weekly WPPB radio show, “Stirring the Pot,” does a weekly blog, “What the Fork,” and has contributed to three books on the subject, not to mention appearing recently on “The Dr. Oz Show” — has now put her sage advice and considerable knowledge into a new book, “What the Fork Are You Eating?” to be published next month by Tarcher/Penguin.
Ms. Sacks will be at BookHampton in East Hampton on Saturday at 5 p.m. to read from and sign copies of the book.
Subtitled “An Action Plan for Your Pantry and Your Plate,” it aims, Ms. Sacks writes, to give readers enough information to question what they’re eating and “the tools to start doing something about it.”
Technically, Ms. Sacks is what’s called a culinary nutritionist, but her clients, she says, think of her as a “food therapist.”
She considers herself a “moderationist,” not wedded to any particular fad, not dogmatic about going 100-percent organic, but emphatic about the importance of understanding what goes into your food and how that might help or harm you. Ultimately, the message is that good choices equal better health. Buying all organic foods would be great, she writes in a chapter called “Meal Rehab,” but “that’s not my reality all the time. And quite honestly, it is not many people’s reality. So my job is to teach people how to work with what they have, what they can do, what they are willing to do, and what makes sense for them, while at the same time helping them do a little better. . . .”
She’s a big advocate of label-reading as a way of learning what’s really in those canned tomatoes that seem so virtuous, or that supposedly healthy granola bar, and a great proponent of eating what she calls “real food.”
The book goes into good detail about the culprits in our pantries — chemical preservatives, artificial sweeteners, genetically modified organisms, and the like — and offers strategies for making smarter choices and even tips for how to tackle the weekly grocery shopping, then wraps up with dozens of recipes so that readers can put all they’ve learned into practice.