Common Ground: A Perfect Heirloom

August 2005

A Perfect Heirloom

by Andrea Blum

In nearly three million American kitchens, there is a tan cover cookbook marked with stickies and folded corners. Favorite pages are scribbled over and stained from years of use. With its hand-written prose, ink-drawn leaves, trees and vegetables, it resembles a culinary version of the medieval Book of Hours and has guided devout eaters looking for tasty, healthy, and affordable meals. twenty eight years ago, Berkeley’s Ten-Speed Press first published the now ubiquitous Moosewood Cookbook. And within that time, Mollie Katzen changed the way we eat our vegetables.

Will Schwalbe, an editor at Hyperion Press, has known Katzen for years and is publishing two more of her books. “She really did change the way we eat,” he says. “Her love affair with the vegetable, and the idea that a vegetable could be your favorite food, is really Mollie.”

On a recent spring day, a broadly smiling Katzen, now 54, strolled into a local Berkeley coffee shop wearing a pink shirt over her gymnast-like frame. Her smooth, perfect skin was barely lined. Having just finished her leftover lunch of roasted asparagus, beet greens and sweet 100’s (cherry tomatoes) from a container in the car, Katzen tells me that she walks her talk of healthy eating, even if she is on the run. She spoke intensely and passionately, changing from one subject to another with equal ardor. Katzen wants to do more pro bono community work, read and spend more time with those she loves, but her days are full and the opportunities too interesting to turn down. Clearly enthralled with the many projects she has on her plate, Katzen confides that she is working on three books at once.

There’s a new vegetable cookbook, Dreaming in Green, a children’s cookbook, Salad People, and a diet book she is developing with Dr. Walter Willet, who heads the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health (established in 1941, the HSPH was the nation’s first academic institution devoted to the study of nutrition). Even though she’s sold almost five million cookbooks, Katzen still works for a living. “I’ve been working non-stop since I was 22,” she said.

In 1998, Willet, who like many others, met Katzen through the Moosewood Cookbook, invited her to be part of the HSPH’s nutritional roundtable. The roundtable meets several times a year bringing together health professionals, scientists, food industry CEOs, chefs, and food writers like Katzen to discuss the school’s nutritional and health discoveries. Katzen is the creator and advisor of a food literacy project for Harvard’s dining services, crafting healthy recipes and meatless offerings on the Harvard campus. Working with Willet, Katzen has invested years of research to create a new diet regimen, a healthy alternative that challenges the USDA’s latest food pyramid. It was Katzen who came up with the idea to link the HSPH’s nutritional expertise with Harvard’s health services and the dining facilities.

“It was a brilliant idea,” said Willet. “Mollie has had a tremendous influence. She’s been an icon for 30 years. She takes people by the hand into healthy eating — and it’s a long trip for many people.”

After finding out that my own kitchen was under construction, Katzen darts out of the café, hustles me to my car and directs me to Andronico’s supermarket. Inside, she leads the way through the cheese section and past the bread shelves to the refrigerated corner where her new line of six different organic, vegetarian soups are stacked. Delighted that the carrot ginger soup was almost sold out, she is clearly excited by her new product line. Katzen asks me if I like lentil soup, carrots, ginger and Hungarian mushroom. Would I eat black bean? She grabs two of everything and heads to the cashier where she purchases enough soup to feed me for a week

The Birth of Moosewood

In the early 1970’s, one of Katzen’s brothers decided to open a business in Ithaca, New York. “It was either going to be an antique store or restaurant,” Mollie told me. As it turned out, the Moosewood restaurant opened in 1973, and Katzen moved east to help. She cooked the very first meal and intended to stay only for a few months. But it turned into five years (the restaurant was sold to the current collective in 1979) and during that time, Katzen amassed recipes and filled her private notebooks with the drawings that would one day illustrate the best-selling vegetarian cookbook of all time.

The 1970s saw the birth of the ecology movement, food collectives and funky restaurants that served brown rice and vegetables. Berkeley and the Bay Area became the food magnet for the country. Francis Moore Lappé wrote Diet for a Small Planet, Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse, Kermit Lynch uncorked his boutique wine shop, Peet’s Coffee roasted gourmet beans on Vine Street, Niman Ranch cows started eating grass in the Bolinas hills, and the Cheeseboard collective introduced more varieties of world cheeses than any place on the West Coast.

In those pre-Moosewood days, Katzen was working toward her BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute by day and cooking at Shandygaff, a chic vegetarian restaurant on Polk Street, by night. It was here that she first encountered fresh pesto on pasta, extra virgin olive oil, and the most colorful selection of seasonal vegetables that she’d ever seen served in a restaurant.

While the 1960’s had focused on the macrobiotic — a Spartan feast of “plain, brown, monastic asexual flavored food” that Katzen admits she enjoyed for a time — the 1970’s soon embraced a more pleasurable experience of healthy eating. “Healthy eating and sensuous eating was finding its nexus in America,” she said. Of course, “in places like France, that split was never there. Northern California was setting the pace and there I was, right on the scene.”

Katzen’s Kitchen

Thirty years later, Katzen is still on the crest of the Left Coast’s evolving food scene. In a packed auditorium in a Berkeley church after a benefit screening of Deborah Koons Garcia’s film, The Future of Food [ See CG cover story, February, 2005], Katzen participated in a panel with Garcia, Michael Pollan, author of Botany of Desire and professor of environmental journalism at UC Berkeley, and Ignacio Chapela, UC Berkeley professor of Microbial Ecology and an outspoken critic of the university’s ties to the biotech food industry. The audience of parents and children asked the panelists to discuss the dilemma of genetically engineered foods invading the world’s pantries. Chapela discussed the genetic contamination of Mexican indigenous corn and Pollan touched on government policy and its ties to industrial agriculture.

Katzen sat riveted and then asked the assembly if she could say something to bring the talk back to home, family, and the humble kitchen. “My cookbooks are about giving people what they need,” she said. “When I started, cooking used to be so relaxed; nobody was busy. I would put as many ingredients as possible in my recipes. I’d add an onion. But if you didn’t have one, you would plant one and eat it in the recipe next year.

“We had so much time,” she continued. “Now people are always writing me and asking for recipes that take less time. I tell them: Get a perfect tomato. There is no recipe but to eat it. Then, she added in an afterthought: “There is no short cut to what you love.” A man in the fourth row asked if she had that message written on her website. Katzen smiled wryly: “No time.”

After the talk, people flocked around Katzen to chat and to have their cookbooks signed. More than once that night, I heard the mantra: “She taught me how to cook.”Some devotees were amazed to find out that she was no longer at the Moosewood but actually lived in Berkeley.

In fact, Katzen has been back in the Bay Area since 1981. She spends hours testing recipes with children and phoning editors to promote unknown food writers and emerging food artists like Jamie Oliver, star of the TV show “The Naked Chef” and founder of the Fifteen Foundation, which trains homeless and disadvantaged young people to find careers in the restaurant business.

Ironically, Katzen is not a vegetarian. She just loves vegetables. “People assume I am on a crusade against the consumption of meat,” Katzen says as she tries to convince her 14-year-old daughter, Eve, not to become a complete vegetarian. “My thing is… healthy eating. Many children become vegetarians as a negative statement about meat, but it isn’t a positive statement about anything, not even about vegetables. It usually involves a lot of empty carbohydrates. One can eat very well on a veggie diet, but it’s more the exception than the rule.”

Francis Moore Lappé, who propelled mindful, meatless eating into the mainstream, has crossed paths with Katzen for the last 20 years. “Katzen has an absolutely unique place in food history,” Lappé says. “She put healthy, beautiful food at the center of our culture.” Five years ago, Lappé came to Berkeley to research the concept of her latest book, Hope’s Edge. The idea was to travel the globe with her daughter collecting recipes and celebrating the grassroots and community movements sprouting in each country they visited. They gave themselves a one-year deadline. “People thought we were was crazy,” says Lappé, but when she expressed her vision to Katzen over coffee, “Mollie asked how she could help, right away. She volunteered to oversee the recipes and testing. She wanted us to succeed, and she even had a book deadline herself. I was moved.”

The View from Tilden Park

Katzen’s home in the Berkeley hills, surrounded by Tilden Park’s towering trees, is a perfect perch, and Katzen’s key to peace of mind. Huge rosemary bushes climb the hill, flowers glow and nasturtiums go wild in the fading light. Her beekeeping boyfriend recently installed some beehives. Downtime means long walks and daydreaming in the park. She needs to be outside and alone each day. It’s what she calls “shifting grain,” and she admits that it’s difficult to do.

Katzen spends most of the time being her own secretary. Her dining room table has become a desk. Post-its punctuate the room. But the still life compositions and landscapes adorning the walls serve as a reminder of what she loves to do when she has time to paint and draw. And time is precious for her. Katzen offers me a mint tea. A bowl of nuts with dried cranberries and apricots sits on the kitchen table, and word magnets make picture poems on the doors of her retro Hotpoint oven: “Go garden,” “a boy ate,” “whisper color,” and “a dark smart tree.”

Katzen isn’t a food faddist “I don’t care about the latest truffle oil or hazelnut oil used by some famous chef. I am passionate about the issues and the humans on this planet. But I still don’t think I am doing enough. “Easing into a chair, Katzen smiles, closes her eyes and tells me: “Nothing makes me happier than a perfectly crisp heirloom apple.”

Andrea Blum is a frequent contributor to Common Ground.

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