Staying healthy can be a challenge. But understanding how nutrition and stress management impact your well-being can have a profoundly positive impact.

 

The providers at One Medical Group, the fastest-growing primary care practice in the country, understand the importance of education, and that’s why we’re proud to feature three members of our New York City team at this year’s Vegetarian Food Festival!

Be sure to catch Seanna Sifflet, LAc, MSW, discuss the ways alternative medicine approaches, including acupuncture and traditional Chinese Medicine can help heal all-too-common ailments such as stress, anxiety, constipation, headaches, and infertility during her presentation from 11:30 AM – 12 PM, Sunday, March 2 on the Banana Stage.

And don’t miss Nora Lansen, MD, and Carrie Bowler, DO, from 12:00 – 12:45 PM on Sunday, March 2 on the Banana Stage. They’ll share tips for getting the optimal amount of protein on a vegetarian diet and reveal which supplements are worth taking.

In the meantime, check out an excerpt from One Medical blog editor Nikki Jong’s exclusive interview with vegetarian cookbook author and James Beard award-winner Mollie Katzen:

The quality of the ingredients–let’s talk about that.
 
Take a simple grated carrot salad. Now consider a carrot that’s been freshly pulled out of the ground, one so fragrant with its own carrot essence, that with your eyes closed, you could take a sniff and know that it’s a carrot. Once upon a time, I would not have paid so much attention to the carrot. And because of that, I probably would have added a little honey to sweeten it, and laced it with a creamy dressing and added something like raisins. But now, paying attention to the carrot, I would thread it with little bit of olive oil–one that’s super fruity and very high end–a twist of lemon and that’s it.
 
How else do you feel your cooking has evolved?
 
My earlier vegetarian cooking was not so much vegetable-based as it was focused on eggs, cheese, and grains. To make “convincing” plant food swaps for meat, I kept that American center-of-the plate tradition alive, with a big entrée at the center of the plate. Vegetables would show up here and there, but it was more about convincing people that they could swap a plant food entrée for the meat on the plate.
 
Now, I no longer feel the need to convince people that they’re OK without the meat. Instead, I focus on making a beautiful arrangement of a few simple dishes that I can plate side-by-side. I also focus much more on the actual vegetable. I pay attention to texture and juxtaposition, and keep everything simply prepared. The meat is neither here nor there; it’s just not as relevant to the plate.
 
As an artist, how do you view the relationship between food and art?
 
They’ve always been two sides to the same coin for me. Art is a personal aesthetic statement and food is just a medium for art, another way to express and share beauty with other people. That’s really what art is about: beauty, and creating something that’s evocative, that adds layers, and makes you feel more human. That is true for food, too.
You find so much beauty in food. What draws you in?
 
It’s wonderful when the very traits that are beautiful in the food are the elements that make it good for you. This happens so often in the plant world. The colors in fruits and vegetables–those pigments are the beneficial antioxidants. It’s a beautiful symmetry. The orange in squashes that you see is the beta-carotene; in kale, the green you see is the chlorophyll. In eggplants and blueberries, it’s blue and purple anthocyanins, and in watermelon and tomatoes, the red you see is lycopene. It’s boggling when you think about it!
 
Read the full interview and find out much more about Katzen.