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

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 present.

Uh, it's a 6-pack of little mini boxes of California raisins, and I thought we could each eat one raisin.

Just one?

One raisin.

Okay. What are 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.

Okay.

And the world of mindfulness.

So I hadn't anticipated that that could ever revolve around a raisin.

It can revolve around anything. We could be doing this with an M&M or a—

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily on Sunday.

I'm gonna 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 mercifully, we ate it.

What changed?

Everything. I mean, it's unlocked its 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 raisin meditation, was one way that he learned how to slow down and really pay 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. Pete, welcome to The Sunday Daily.

Thank you.

I just have to say that this single reason 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. I 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. How did this start for you?

Well, on New Year's Day 2024, uh, 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, oh, 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? Mm-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. Based on simply being in a sauna with you.

Looking at my stomach.

This doctor had determined—

Looking at my gut, which had just gotten bigger and bigger, and I had a hernia just above my belly button. And I knew I had—

And here you thought he'd been looking in your eyes the whole time.

It 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 diseased that it was starting to manifest in my external appearance. And so I, 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 in to see my doctor when I really wanted to. And then after that, I just kind of forgot it and I 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." You're 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, you know, 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 days before I got the blood work back, but there was a note of concern in it, in what he wrote, the commentary on it. And he said, "You're pre-diabetic." And that totally got my attention because I thought pre-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 eating out, what, 4 or 5 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 100 greatest restaurants in New York, right? 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 like, well, if I wanted to say that somebody had the best cheese pierogies, I would probably at that time have gone around and tried 10 cheese pierogies around the city. It just, it led me into much more eating than I had anticipated so that I could really feel like I could stand behind my choices. Mm-hmm. So at this point, I was probably eating more than in a short period of time than I ever had in my life.

So just as you're receiving some pretty serious information about your health, that you're kind of in crisis, you realize that you have to keep slogging through. He's 100 restaurants.

I slogged. 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 5 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. Hmm.

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, you know. Wow. I thought for about 5 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, 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 this, is you do need to give yourself over to the joy of the food.

Right. I mean, beyond the need to taste everything, which 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 the 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. Now, 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 right in front of me. I didn't need the other people to eat it, but it just wouldn't—

They were cover.

Yeah, they were cover, 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 gonna have this, the salad. I'm gonna 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 cannoli." You're on assignment here. Right. I'd sometimes be there with civilians who were 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? And a lot went with it too, that sort of my entire social life had 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 Ford Tempo? So all of a sudden you're, I presume, at home every night?

Yes, every night.

Cooking?

Cooking. Making whatever was 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. Be right back. So Pete, 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?

Well, 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 hungrier.

Like pasta.

Pasta. Love pasta. It was gone. Well, you know, so all a lot of things that I love, a great loaf of bread, you know, there's mediocre bread and there's great bread. And 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?

Oh, well, sugar. I mean, sugar is so delicious, right? And I was— every morning I would wake up and I would drink 5 or 6 cups of coffee, and each one would get a teaspoon of sugar. The teaspoons got a little more rounded as time went on. And I was drinking—

so you're having essentially 5 or 6 teaspoons of sugar a morning.

Yeah.

What is it like, just to use this microcosm, when that coffee is sugarless 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? What I discovered as I gave it up was that my mind cleared. It— 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. Well, you know 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. This just vast hunger that I felt almost all the time was being produced by food.

By what you were putting in your system.

Yeah.

So 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 mean, 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 like spike my blood sugar right away and make me run like a, like a rat in a wheel. You know, I was figuring out without exactly understanding why that like 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 of this extracted sugar just never did.

What about meat?

Oh, well, 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 out to be sometimes fish, but a lot more often plants.

Vegetables.

Beans, lentils, broccoli, kale, stuff that I liked already, but I had never really made it the focus of my meals.

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, tastier vegetables, I ended up spending a lot more time at my food co-op 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, or 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 that you that you couldn't possibly miss. It's just all in your face trying to get your attention. It's just like walking through the slot machines, like bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. And the co-op is not like that. It is a 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 that if I, you know, shop in a place and in a 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 shopping, which we're like, you know, I might have in the old days waited until it was like 7:30 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 boy, that was cookies or cookies. I gotta put in some ice cream for later, just in case, just in case, right? And, uh, it's different when you go into it with cold blood, with a plan.

And once all this food comes home with you from the co-op, what are you doing differently with it?

I'm trying partly to put things that I want to eat more of right in front of me, like where I'll see them. So if I have raspberries that I've just brought home, they go in the refrigerator right at eye level. So I remember to eat them before they go moldy and squishy and, you know, turn into raspberry soup. And then there's a, I've got basically one cabinet in 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 in there. So when I open it up, there it is. Here's— have a handful of almonds. You don't—

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 eye keeps going back to this 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. They're not even— almonds aren't quite as enticing, but they become enticing when they're 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 a salad. So I had some lentils that I had already cooked, and I didn't want to just eat lentils because, you know, it's a little penitential. It's a little bit like, what have I done wrong to deserve 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 chopped some radicchio into like ribbons. And Mixed that all up, and then the lemon and olive oil just gave it some life. And, uh, and I felt pretty good about that.

That was dinner.

That was, that was great. You know, back when I was eating a lot of meat, I would have wanted some sausages to go with that.

I was gonna say, you know what would go really well with that? Roasted chicken with skin.

Anything, you know, I've been eating the, 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, all those sensors, they were always working and they were always sending messages, but you know, like the raisins, you were probably getting all of that data from the raisin in the past, but when you slow down and you register those impressions, like actually take in the data that you're being given. And I was finding this as, as I changed the way 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 to alcohol.

This break brought to you by the Lentil Council.

We'll be 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 in— to use the metaphor, you did the yellow zone. Uh-huh. 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 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 2 bottles, sometimes 3. It really adds 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 badly. Like the dessert at the end of a disappointing meal, the alcohol can also help smooth over a lot of mediocrity. You know, there were 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. It just was. He's just— and, uh, The alcohol just is your companion in 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 I drank in restaurants came from being in restaurants. And when you're at home, you might have a glass of wine, but the sommelier 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? At a restaurant, you don't have to make those decisions, right? At home and without other people around too. And this is a big part of what makes drinking, I think, the value of drinking is that 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. Well, 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. I don't need to get to know myself any better. I already kind of know who this person is.

I'm fine 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, uh, 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 that matters as far as I'm concerned.

You write about martinis 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, it's like getting an injection in your veins of some, some like experimental drug 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 brain sort of says like, I don't need to be fully engaged here. I know what that's going to be. I know what a raisin tastes like. I don't need to pay attention to all the sensory data coming off that raisin. I don't need to pay attention to this martini because there'll be another one tomorrow. There was one last night. When you haven't seen a martini for a month or two, you can really focus on it. You can really be, oh gosh, look at that. Look at the surface on that little bit of ice 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's— I feel a little bit like, okay, we're not going to 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 out at restaurants, and you are enjoying some booze. And is that because you've reached a certain point of turning your health around? Are you basically out of the red zone?

I am not in crisis anymore.

Mazel tov.

Thank you. Thank you.

Uh, 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.

Wow. You've taken 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. It didn't get to the point.

No Ozempic, no GLP-1.

No, right. So a lot of times when people go on those drugs, they've tried to diet and sometimes they have not been able to stick to the diet. Sometimes they've successfully dieted and then gained 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 this weight back. I do feel like I've learned a lot of stuff about not just managing my diet, but managing myself and managing my behavior and managing my attitudes about food that I— they feel like long-term changes. It feels like knowledge that I now have 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 it's like that my mind is, is just brightened. Like, my mind was always so heavy and underslept, confused, and just perpetually kind of groggy and grumpy. And, uh, It's wild, actually. Like, sometimes you don't realize how bad you felt until you feel better.

Right. Well, now that you're on the other side of this all, I want to invite you to be a little bit 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 poured a lot of what I know about food and flavor and spices and different cuisines into making chickpeas interesting. Right. One thing I've really appreciated about this sort of new chapter as a dedicated home cook is that, uh, 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 ideas 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 the knife. And how should I stand? 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 these things where you're just, you're existing through your senses and through your body. I find it like such a great relief from what I do in my job. And the pleasure of sitting in the restaurant is not the same because 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 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 raisin in front of me. What will I do with it? Hmm.

Well, I am extremely happy for you, Pete, and I want to thank you so much for being here today.

Well, thank you. Yeah, I wasn't expecting any of this, but it's— I'm glad to be here.

Today's episode was produced by Tina Antolini, with help from Alex Barron and Luke Vander Plugg. It was edited by Wendy Doerr and engineered by Rowan Nemisto. It contains music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, and Rowan Nemisto. Our production manager is Frannie Carthoth. That's it for The Sunday Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.