How to think of cooking as less of an item on your to-do list and more of an act for you.
Hey, I'm Christina Quinn.
Welcome back to try this from the Washington Post.
This is the third class in our course about how to enjoy cooking more.
In our last class, we focused on where to find inspiration and how to turn whatever you may already know into a repertoire of dishes.
In this class, we're going to take a minute to reframe the way we think about the task of cooking, to think of it as less of an item on your to do list and more of a natural that can be for you and can nourish you in more ways than you think.
One place to start recognizing those benefits is by digging in to the pleasures of cooking.
We'll do that with the help of another expert.
Let's start with a take that boils it down to something very black and white.
Everyone who I've ever spoken with about this will say that an Oreo tastes better when you eat it exactly the way that you want to eat it.
If you're somebody who twists it apart and eats the cream first, you like that better and you find that more satisfying than if you're somebody who just bites into it.
That is a food ritual.
A food ritual can be that.
A food ritual can be breaking up a candy bar before you eat it.
I mean, it's these things that we do that when we do them, increase the pleasure that we get from it because flavor is created in the brain.
Thats Mary Beth Albright.
Shes a former Washington Post journalist and she has a lot of experience in the world of food.
Shes a lawyer who has worked in public health food policy for the us surgeon general.
She was a finalist on the reality tv cooking show Food Network star.
And shes also the author of Eat and Flourish, a book that explores the connection between food and emotional well being.
Mary Beth is talking about the joys of ritual Oreo consumption, because when it comes to cooking, we can reap the same kind of mindful pleasure in the process.