The Sunday Daily: To Save His Life, Our Food Critic Reset His Appetite

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At NYTimes.com/gift. Hello, Pete. Hi, Michael. Take a seat. Make yourself comfortable.

A former restaurant critic bearing gifts. I've brought you a present. Tell me about this, President. It's a six pack of little mini boxes of California raisins. And I thought we could each eat one, written.

“Just one. One raisin. What do we up to here?”

This is something that's called the raisin exercise. Sometimes it's called the raisin meditation,

because it comes ultimately from a Zen Buddhist perspective on eating.

OK. And the world of mindfulness. So I hadn't anticipated that that could ever revolve around a raisin. It can revolve around anything. OK, we could be doing this with an M&M.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is the daily on Sunday. I'm going to open this box of raisins. Recently, I sat down with former times restaurant critic, Pete Wells, for a very small meal.

Can I eat it? You cannot eat it. It consisted of one raisin.

“You can have more later, but we'll start with one.”

First, we looked at this raisin.

Lots of veins and ridges. Then we smelled the raisin. Let's give it a sniff. Then we took one tiny bite of the raisin. I want to keep chewing so badly.

And then finally, and more softly, we ate it. What changed? Everything. I mean, it's unlocked as flavor. All in all, it took us 25 minutes to eat one raisin.

Everything about this violates my sense of how food is to be consumed. Right. If it's not already abundantly clear, my colleague, Pete Wells, who was the restaurant critic here at the Times for 12 celebrated years. He has been on a mission to completely transform his relationship with eating.

And this exercise, the reason meditation, was one way that he learned had a slow down. He really paid attention to the food that he was consuming and why he was consuming it. But for Pete, this larger mission, this resetting of his relationship with food, it wasn't about a trendy diet and it wasn't about losing weight to look better. It was a matter of life or death.

Today, my conversation with Pete Wells about how and why he went from being the king of indulgence to a model of austerity. It's Sunday, March 15th. Thank you. I just have to say that this single raisin routine, this exercise you put us through,

it feels very far from the relationship with food that defined the last decade of your life and your career as the restaurant critic for the Times. And it seems like you're changed. Well, I used to eat a lot more than one raisin. And I didn't think particularly about whether I wanted that raisin or needed that raisin

or whether that raisin was going to fill me up. I used to ignore a lot of messages that I was getting from my body and those messages might have told me to slow down, might have told me to eat less, but I couldn't afford to listen to them. And if I had continued that way, it would have been a disaster for me.

It was in so much trouble from basically pretending that I could eat and eat and eat with

no consequence. So that's really what I wanted you to come here and talk about. Those consequences and what you have done to address them. So I wonder if you could go back to the beginning of all of this.

Well, on New Year's Day, 2024, I was sitting in a sauna with a doctor.

I was at a party. The doctor was at the party and the host of the party has a sauna in back of his house. So I was sitting there in my bathing suit chatting with this guy about how the health industry is changing and how journalism is changing. And I thought we were having a perfectly pleasant conversation and I had charmed him.

And no doubt.

“Two days later, my phone rang and the host of the party said, "You remember that doctor”

you were talking to? The one you charmed?" Hmm. I said, "Yeah, sure."

Well, he's very concerned about you and he's looked at you and thought there was a possibility

that you might have something and if you do have it, you could drop dead at any minute. Oh, my God. Well, he's done simply being in a sauna with you. Looking at my stomach, this doctor had determined. Looking at my God, which had just gotten bigger and bigger and I had a hernia just above

my belly button. And I knew I heard you thought he'd been looking in your eyes the whole time. I was not the encounter that I thought I was having. But he looked at that and he knew there was a chance it was a hernia, but he also thought there was a chance that it was cirrhosis that my liver was so disease that it was starting

to manifest in my external appearance.

And so I had a couple weeks later, I was sitting in a doctor's office for the first time

in a few years. Hmm. You hadn't been getting annual physicals. No, I mean, you know, COVID happened and I couldn't get into see my doctor when I really wanted to.

And then after that, I just kind of got it and that was feeling relatively okay. And, you know, years ago, when I first started reviewing restaurants, I went to my doctor and I needed a colonoscopy, so I went in and just as the anesthesiologist was about to put me under my doctor says to him, you know what this guy does for a living? He's the restaurant critic of the New York Times.

Can you believe that? And then they proceeded to, you know, go and look around my guts. But, you know, that doctor said, your colon's fine, your a little bit overweight, but hey, given what you do, that's to be expected. And I kind of took that as a green light to just do what I needed to do and do what I wanted

to do. Right. And now suddenly, a different doctor, a few years later, has rendered a rather different verdict. Yeah.

“And he says, you need to stop what you're doing right now.”

So when I got my blood work back, the lab results from the hospital are sort of laid out in, like, green, yellow and red for data, fine, borderline and bad, bad. And there was a lot of red on that page in cholesterol and triglycerides and blood sugar and even I, who know nothing about health and diet knew that this was bad. It was a couple of days before I got the blood work back, but there was a note of concern

in what he wrote, the commentary on it. And he said, you're pretty diabetic. And that totally are my attention because I thought, red diabetic sounds bad, but like, diabetic that sounds even worse, and I didn't really want to find out what would be entailed because I knew it wasn't good.

And just to be clear on the chronology, at this point, you're still the restaurant critic at the times, you're reading out what, four or five nights plus a week. At this point that we're talking about even more than that because I was working on a list of the hundred greatest restaurants in New York, and that was my idea.

“I thought it was important to do it, but it was so much more punishing than I expected”

because I would say, well, if I wanted to say that somebody had the best cheese perugies, I would probably at that time have gone around and tried 10 cheese perugies around the city because it led me into much more eating than I had anticipated so that I could really feel like I could stand behind my choices. So at this point, I was probably eating more than in a short period of time than I ever

had in my life.

kind of in crisis, you realize that you have to keep slogging through these 100 restaurants

I slogged.

“The only thing I could do at that moment was to change how I ate at home.”

But I wasn't eating at home very much because I was just out around the city all five boroughs trying to cover it all. But by the time I was done with that, it was clear that I needed to change more than just what I ate at home, I really needed to change my job and give up a job. You presumably love not to mention one of the most prestigious jobs in journalism, let

alone food journalism. How do you make that decision? Oh, it was a great job. And I don't think I could have made that decision without being scared for my life. The only way that I was ever going to leave there was if I got fired or dropped dead.

I thought for about five minutes about whether I could really make the changes I needed to make while continuing to do the job and it just didn't make any sense, it didn't make any sense at all.

“How do I go into a restaurant and avoid carbohydrates?”

How do I avoid bread? How do I avoid sugar? I thought about it and I thought, I don't see how I can do it and part of the way I used to do the job and I think anybody doing the job would agree with us is you do need to have yourself over to the joy of the food.

Right. I mean, beyond the need to taste everything, what you do, you have a professional obligation as restaurant critic to do right by the menu. You can't suddenly become the guy ordering vegan ordering just to healthy foods. Right.

Exactly.

My philosophy about restaurant criticism was always that I should be a reporter on the

frontiers of pleasure and here's what's out there and whether that's good for me or not doesn't come into the picture. So a lot of times, you know, I would usually bring people along with me not to help me eat, but to make it look less crazy when I was sitting there at a table full of food, half the menu rate in front of me.

I didn't need the other people to eat it, but they were covered, yeah, they were covered, right? So, and occasionally I would go with a new person who didn't know the drill and they would

“look at the menu and say, you know, I think I'm going to have this.”

The salad, I'm going to have the salad and I say, okay, you can have the salad, but you're also getting the pork chop and you're getting the connolly, you're on a Simon here. Right. I sometimes be there with civilians who are trying to eat in a normal way and I was like, what are you doing?

That is not what happens here. So you decide, you've got to walk away from this job and I have to imagine that that's hard, it's hard because what else am I ever going to do that'll be as good as that? I met a lot, went with it to this sort of my entire social life and migrated into my job. Probably people came out and spent time with me who would not have come to my apartment, you

know, you've become like the one kid in high school who has a car.

Like you can never quite tell am I really this popular or is it just the car or is it

my four tempo? So all of a sudden, you're, I presume, at home every night, yes, every night cooking, cooking, making whatever, which is the right thing for me to be eating and I had to figure out what that was and how to do it. Right, well that is what we're going to explore right after a quick break exactly how you

reset your entire relationship to food, we're going back. I'm Julian Barnes, I'm an intelligence reporter at the New York Times. I try to find out what the US government is keeping secret. Governments keep secrets for all kinds of reasons. They might be embarrassed by the information.

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Repeat, you're trying to figure out how to change your diet. So what do you tackle first? Because I was so concerned about blood sugar, I went for the simple carbohydrates first. By which we mean sugar, obviously, white flour, especially white rice, I was concerned about all these foods that release energy really, really quickly, cause blood sugar,

spikes, and then ultimately make you hungry or like pasta. Pasta, love pasta. It was gone.

Well, a lot of things that I love, a great loaf of bread, you know, there's mediocre bread,

and there's great bread. When you get the great bread, it's like, "Oh, thank you, thank you for doing this. A cookie, a good cookie, you know?" So all of that, all of it, I just kicked it out of the kitchen.

“Beyond pasta, what was the hardest of these to give up on?”

Sugar, I mean sugar is so delicious, right? And every morning I was wake up and I would drink five or six cups of coffee and each one would get a teaspoon of sugar, the teaspoon's got a little more rounded as done on. And I was drinking.

So you're having essentially five or six teaspoons of sugar a morning. Yep. What is it like just to use this microcosm? When that coffee is sugar-less, and when there is no pasta and no cookie? What I discovered giving them up was I gave them up because of the blood sugar, right?

It's almost literal, like your blood sugar is too high, eat less sugar, right? But I discovered, as I gave it up, was that my mind cleared.

“I didn't even understand what was happening for a while, but my mind was clearing.”

I didn't have all these voices shouting at me like, "Hey, it's cookie time. Hey, it's time for another spoonful of sugar in the coffee." What people now call food noise, I was surrounded by it and a lot of it just cleared up. Went away as I ate fewer simple carbs.

I didn't understand how much the things I was eating were contributing to my cravings for more and more and more. That's just a vast hunger that I felt almost all the time was being produced by food. By what you were putting in your system. Talk about what you were starting to eat instead, what you were supplanting, all of these

simple sugars these carbohydrates with. Right. So I'm drinking my coffee black and kind of liking it more and more as time goes on. I was eating a lot of fruit, ripe fruit in the summer, and then the rest of the year, dried fruit.

I love dates and they have so much sugar in them, but it was an okay form of sugar for me because it wasn't the kind that was going to spike my blood sugar right away and make me run like a rat in a wheel. I was figuring out without exactly understanding why that fruits in their natural state before they've been reduced to sugar are actually food and that food satisfies you and in a way

that all this extracted sugar just never did.

What up meat? How will meat? I had to bring down the cholesterol, you know what we're talking about the bad cholesterol whatever that is, you know, I had to bring that down. So I threw almost all animal products overboard, even chicken which isn't that bad, you

know one of the hardest things to give up was chicken skin, chicken skin on a roast chicken. It's so good, but apparently there's cholesterol in there I never knew this and I had to put something in the place of all this meat I wasn't eating anymore and that turns

meal, stuff that I liked already but I had never really made it the focus of my meal.

Right.

“So as vegetables especially became so much more central to my diet I was no longer really”

happy going to the grocery store on my corner which is very convenient and not all that expensive but the produce section it's it's not why anyone's going there and so you know in search of better fresher brighter more colorful taste your vegetables I ended up spending a lot more time at my food come up than I ever had before which is full of great vegetables, full of dried beans, full of dried grains, full of most of the stuff that I want to

be eating it essentially doesn't have a lot of the stuff that I'm not going to be eating anyway that I don't even want to think about right so you go into a typical American supermarket

“there are so many things in the aisles and these bright packages like a dietary casino right”

cereal boxes stacked up to the sky but you couldn't possibly miss it it's just all in your face trying to get your attention it's it's just like walking through the slum machines like thing being being being being being being being being being being and like I don't know how prison art like it is how I'm much more it is much more somber experience I mean they're friendly but it's not a pinball machine of joy you know so among the many changes you're

making here is where and how you shop for groceries it starts to fit together then if I you

know shop in a place in an manner that's sort of geared toward like what I ultimately want to eat

and if I walk in there with a plan and a list and an idea of like here are the things that I want to eat this week it becomes different a different approach to a shop in which we're like you know I might have in the old days waited until it was like 730 and the supermarket was about to close and then I'd run in there and I was sort of in a panic and I was already like getting really really hungry and I would just start grabbing stuff like what's quick what's easy what's

what can I get on the table and buy those cookies or stuff like that and some a ice cream for later just in case just in case right and it's different when you go into it with cold blood with a plan and what's all this food comes home with you from the co-op what are you doing differently with it I'm I'm partly to put things and I want to eat more of right in front of me like where I'll see them so so if I have raspberries then I've just brought home they go and they're

refrigerator right at eye level so I remember to eat them before they go moldy and squishy and you know

it's turning to raspberry soup and then there's a I've got basically one cabinet my kitchen where

I can keep food and I would put all the almonds and the peanuts and the pistachios and the dried fruit right at eye level and there's so when I open it up there it is right overhand full of almonds you know you're saying kind of geography is destiny in your kitchen well I think most people eat what's right in front of them I mean my I keep going back to the box of raisins right I don't know

“about yours but like I'm sort of like oh there's raisins here if they were cookies that's what”

I'd be staring at and if they're almonds that's where else I'll stare at there when the almonds aren't quite as enticing but they become enticing whether the only thing around right for those who are curious what is a typical dinner plate looking like in this new regime oh well the other day I made us a salad so I had some lentils that I had already cooked and I didn't want to eat just eat lentils because you know it's a little penitential it's a little

bit like whatever I've done wrong to disperse this so I dressed them up with some lemon juice and olive oil and then I shaved some carrots into these thin little coins and chuck some redicchio into like ribbons and mixed and all up and then the lemon and olive oil just gave it some

eating a lot of meat I would have wanted some sausages to go with that I was going to say you know

“it would go really well with that oh of course to chicken with skin anything you know I've been”

needing the lentils with smoked trout and that's great you know smoked trout maybe with like a horseradish mayonnaise or a mustard and then the lentils underneath there's something so nice about

that combination I mean you're resetting your pleasure sensors well although sensors they were always

working and they were always sending messages but you know like the the raisins you were probably getting all of that data from the raisin in the past but when you slowed down and you registered those impressions it like actually take in the data that you're being given and I was finding this as I changed where I ate that like the lentils if they have the right partner they are enough and not just enough but actually kind of wonderful okay we're going to take another

quick break and when we come back I want to talk about something we haven't yet covered

something I'm very invested in understanding your changing relationship alcohol

this break brought to you by the lentil council well we're right back so Pete this entire conversation I have related to a lot of the things that you have been talking about but none more so than when you said that your doctor told you that your triglycerides were on the higher end because I just got that

“information oh you did myself from my doctor not super high but higher than they want I think”

to use the metaphor you did the yellow zone and I am pretty sure I know precisely why that is and it's because of my affection for cocktails cocktails are great and I have to imagine that changing your relationship to booze to wine has been a relatively important part of this experience for you oh it's been a major change major change because I have a rarely drink now and in the old days I drank almost every night

and a lot a lot like what's a lot more than I realized well you know cocktail when you sit down and then a bottle of wine usually if I'm with other people sometimes it would be two bottles sometimes three I don't know really yeah it's up and I think I was probably a little bit hungover every single morning without quite registering what it was I didn't feel great I woke up feeling unrested headaches part of the reason I wanted that sugar in the coffee

so bad like the dessert at the end of a disappointing meal the alcohol can also help smooth over edge a lot of mediocrity you know there's some restaurants that I would go into to review

and I would know almost after the first bite that it wasn't going to be a review which was

that you just and the alcohol just is your companion and those lonely situations where you're going through the rest of the meal knowing that nothing's going to come out of it while the martini is there to hold your hand and in so many other situations too it is just a companion when you need one and so what was it like to give that up surprisingly because I had made this major shift from eating out almost all the time to eating at home all

the time it wasn't as traumatic as I would have thought because the way drinking restaurants came from being in restaurants so when you're at home you might have a glass of wine but the Somalia is not refilling it while you're not even paying attention so you have the experience of getting to the bottom of your glass of wine and having to think should I have another glass in right at the restaurant you don't have to make those decisions right at home and without other

“people around too and there's a big part of what makes drinking I think the value of drinking”

is that it's it's great to share with your friends it's great to raise a glass with people you like or strangers become a little less strange or sometimes they get more strange after a couple of drinks but you know and I don't so much have that going on for me at home I'm mostly alone

with not drinking at home so when do you give yourself permission to drink with other people

“if I have people over if on the rare occasions I'm invited to someone else's home and in restaurants”

because it's something they do so well right so now if I go to a restaurant there's a chance I'll get a martini especially at a place that I know does them well which to me just means making them really cold that's basically all the matters as far as I'm concerned to you right about martini is in a way that I find to be poetic you describe the way that first sip of a cold

martini makes the hairs on the back of your neck stick up oh it's incredible it's just like

getting an injection in your veins of some some like the experimental drugs that hits all your pleasure centers right it's got to be I don't know what it is but I don't want to mess with it

“and I don't want it to go away I just don't need it every night of my life and I find now”

you know anything that becomes habit becomes routine your brains sort of says like I don't need to be fully engaged here I know what that's going to be I know I know what a reason tastes like I don't need to pay attention to all the sensory data coming off that reason I don't need to pay

attention this more teenagers will be another one tomorrow there was one last night

when you haven't seen a martini for a month or two oh you can really focus on it this is really good oh gosh look at that look at the surface on the little advice floating on there mindful martini I don't know maybe that's blasphemy but for me I do think if you bring this mindfulness approach to your life you don't only apply it to healthy things you apply it to everything you know I'm trying to maintain and maintaining means that I don't go back to my old way of living but it

does mean I allow myself a lot of stuff that I just cut out in the very beginning I'll have a pastry sometimes I will have a martini sometimes I'll have a steak once in a while you know but for me it's nice to give myself all those indulgences in a restaurant setting so when I go out it I feel a little bit like okay we're not gonna like break all the rules at once right but we'll break some of the rules and that'll be part of the experience so you are now

eating occasionally back at a restaurant and you are enjoying some booze

and is that because you've reached a certain point of turning your health around or you basically

out of the red zone I am not in crisis anymore Mazeltoff thank you thank you are you still pre-diabetic I am not I've been told I mean I could go back there but I'm not there right now you taking yourself out of that category I've been told and other evidence suggests that I am no longer obese I mean it's really impressive that you did all of this by your own design right you didn't join any formal program and you didn't I didn't use the drugs I didn't use the drugs I didn't get there

I didn't get to the point no is that no jail fuel no right so a lot of times when people go on those drugs they've tried to die at and sometimes they have not been able to stick to the diet sometimes they've successfully died and then game of the weight back that's super common right that might happen to me you know I'm very aware of the possibility that I will gain the weight back I do feel like I've learned a lot of stuff about not just managing weight diet but managing

myself managing weight behavior and managing my attitudes about food that I feel like long-term changes it feels like knowledge that I know how that's changed the way I live and if all goes well I should be able to just continue to approach food in this in this new way that I've come to

“and you feel better well that's to me which is the most important thing way more”

way more important than how I look and I said that my mind is just brightened like my mind was so heavy and underslapped confused and just perpetually kind of groggy and grumpy and it's it's wild actually like I sometimes you don't realize how bad you felt until you feel better

philosophical about what you've been through your relationship with food was always going to be a little

“bit different than the rest of us to some degree because of your job. I mean I'm still a curious person”

and I'm still a curious eater what I have done is like hoard a lot of what I know about food and flavor and spices and different cuisines into making chickpeas interesting right one thing I

really appreciated about this sort of new chapter as a dedicated home cook is that it takes me out of my

“head it's like physical activity that I live in while I'm working it's all verbal it's like”

deas and words and moving the words around and kind of logical language based thinking and then when I'm in the kitchen I'm like chopping and oh don't get your finger too close to the edge

of knife and how should I say what's the most comfortable posture here and oh that's about to burn

“I can't see it but I can start to smell the scorching on the stove and it's time to turn that”

over all of this thing or you're just you're existing through your senses and through your your body I find it like such a great relief from what I do in my job and that as you're sitting in the restaurant it's not the same as it's so passive right when I'm cooking now and even when I'm eating I feel like I'm doing something which is it somehow like really satisfying just really appreciating how I can just feel like here I am here I am right here right now feet planted on the ground feet

planted on the ground single reason then front of me what will I do with it well I am extremely happy for you feet and I want to thank you so much for being here today well thank you yeah I wasn't expecting any of us but it's I'm glad to be here Today's episode was produced by Tina Antelini with help from Alex Baron and Luke Vanderplug It was edited by Wendy Dorr and engineer by Rowan Nymisto it contains music by Dan Powell

Mary Lazano and Rowan Nymisto our production manager is Franny Kartoth that's it for the Sunday Daily I'm Micah Babaro see you tomorrow [BLANK_AUDIO]