LET'S TALK ABOUT FOOD
Julie Van Rosendaal has been contributing recipes and meal-planning ideas to this magazine for many years now. I love that we can drop her a line and say, “We’re thinking something like, ‘upping your game at Christmas brunch,’” and she’ll enthusiastically fire back so many recipes and concepts (she’s not shy on exclamation marks when she thinks of a great new combo) that it’s all I can do to not dedicate every page to her ideas.
You’ll see in this issue that she’s been named to our 2020 Foodies of the Year list ( page 57), not for the work she does with us—though I’d celebrate her heaps for that alone if I could—but for a much more personal project that’s created what feels like the start of a movement. For years, she’s been frustrated by the food shaming that seems to come along with the “clean eating” crusade. “The dangerous part of it,” she told me, “is that when you label some foods as clean and virtual or morally superior, it’s not just the foods themselves but the people eating them. We’re teaching not only kids but also each other to think about food in this way. And it’s really damaging.”
Julie released her bestselling cookbook Dirty Food this past fall, and over the holiday season it rose to number two on the Bookmanager National Bestseller List for cookbooks (only Jamie Oliver’s Ultimate Veg managed to sneak ahead of her to the top spot). The book isn’t full of junk food—that’s not the message she’s trying to spread—but instead you’ll find recipes she wants us to stop feeling guilty about. It’s gooey, sticky, messy food, and it’s great. “These are the things you tend to share—you don’t make sticky buns for yourself,” she says. “It’s more the experience than just feeding yourself to stay alive.”
Julie’s book goes beyond giving us permission to embrace our love of food: it’s a call to start a conversation about our relationship with what we eat—and that’s a very good thing. I can’t wait to see what she’s got cooking for us in future issues of WL.