Hello, I’m Louise Browaeys and I’ve been hosting this podcast for five years. You hear me on this mic asking questions and often my jokes get cut in the edit. Since we’ve reached the fortieth episode and I’m myself going to turn forty, I saw it as a kind of sign. So today I’d like to offer you a food monologue that has no direct link with a midlife crisis. I wish I could offer you a guitar solo, but I don’t know how to play.
Often when my friends ask me for advice about food, they beg me to write everything down for them, to send them texts, notes, and shopping lists. So here it is, I’ve tried to make a list of very concrete little things. I’d like it to sometimes sound like supermarket poetry, even though I know cookbooks are more successful than poetry books, I’d like it to help all of us dance a bit more with our health which, as you know, is that of the vast world.
I’ve interspersed the different parts of the episode with scenes I recorded with my phone, voice messages from my friends — you’ll hear Hortense, Fanny, Julia, Stéphanie, my children, and also Marc and Marie — with music I love that is distantly related to organic sauerkraut. For example, if you hear the music from In the Mood for Love, it’s because originally the film was supposed to tell three stories centered on food and its impact on romantic relationships. The first one, which overshadowed the other two, was devoted to the social revolution brought about by the pressure cooker, which freed Asian women; the second was about the appearance of instant noodle soups, associated with a restriction of that same freedom; the third examined the consequences of the success of fast food, associated with the development of “fast love”…
Let me remind you that thank God I am not a doctor. In fact, I’m not particularly fond of doctors, except maybe Anton Chekhov and my gynecologist, whom I found in the hallway of a public hospital after three years of medical wandering. I’m just an agronomist engineer specializing in nutrition. From my studies I only remember that you have to eat fatty foods and that you can make a decent meal for less than three euros.
And it’s been 20 years that, between books by Virginia Woolf, Richard Brautigan, and Albert Camus, I’ve been poring over little practical booklets that talk about canola oil and soaking chickpeas. I’m not trying to give any advice; I’m simply sharing the tiny conclusions I’ve reached by rowing more or less regularly, by watching my children and my friends in restaurants, by fiercely fighting the dairy product lobbies, by doing the grocery shopping, by checking my blood sugar with my diabetic husband’s device.
I made a list and I’m going to try a kind of improvisation on each of the topics. If it goes wrong we’ll cut it or we’ll put some Dalida over it.
- Groceries
- The list of ingredients
- The composition chart
- The restaurant
- The three pillars (plant-based diversity pleasure)
- Balances (proteins)
- Essential nutrients
- Proteins
- Meat – carbon footprint
- Legumes – soaking them
- Dietary supplements: omega-3 vitamin D magnesium
- Immunity – Echinacea
- Diets – let’s forget about them
- How to drink – tea coffee water
- Powders –
- Fat and sugar
- Dairy products – let’s forget about them – buffalo milk
- Fermented foods
- Seeds
- Nuts and oilseeds
- Omega-3s
- Meals – balances – fasting
- Children
- Raw and rotten – punk cuisine
- Anti-capitalist foods
- My bread recipe
- My minestrone recipe
- Beyond food
- Physical activity / sleep / stress / social connection.
- The enemy is a sedentary lifestyle
- Persimmon tart.
Music references:
- Sabine Paturel, Les bêtises, 1985
- Anne Sylvestre, La vaisselle, 1981
- Philippe Katerine, La banane, 2010
- Débordement – garden (prod. by Security DJ)
- Chinese Man – Arsenic Pudding (by Leo Le Bug)
- Dalida, Dying on Stage, 1983
- Soundtrack of In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai, Shigeru Umebayashi, 2000
- Julien Doré, Paris-Seychelles, 2013
- Jean-Jacques Goldman, Not You, 1985
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A podcast hosted by Louise Browaeys with Matthieu Brillard on sound engineering
