About the author
I was raised in a big Italian and Irish family, with extended clan members roaming wildly in and out of our house and lives on a daily basis. With the exception of my Irish father, we all cooked…my brothers, sister, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and of course, my mother.
She was a lot of things, but ahead of her time is what I remember most about her…and her passion for good food.
As a child, some of my most vivid memories are of the weekly treks to farmers' markets to find the freshest vegetables and fruit (that my grandfather didn't grow). Our eggs were delivered weekly by a local organic egg farmer (although we did not use that word back then). My father brought home the finest cuts of meat. She baked all our bread and sweets, working outside the home as well as in it. She loved to cook and to nourish. Maybe who I am today is "baked" into my DNA.
My mother passed away at 49 years old from cancer and I thought to myself, "What was all this commitment to health for?" I moved to a new city and started a new career. No more food for me. Having wandered in and out of commercial kitchens working as a line chef, sous chef and pastry chef, I was world-weary and so tired of cooking. Little did I know that within 6 months of my mother's death, when I was diagnosed with AML, an acute form of leukemia and the prognosis did not look promising, I would return to the kitchen. They gave me a mere nine months to live, even with conventional intervention, like chemotherapy.
It was like living in a bad TV movie. You know the ones; the young woman with everything to live for diagnosed with a terminal condition. Cue the violins and the tears. The end.
But it would not go that way for me. A dear friend of mine introduced me to his buddy who ate whole grains, veggies and beans. He said it cured cancer. I thought, "Whatever."
I agreed to meet Robert Pirello, who introduced me to macrobiotics. He gave me a book by Michio Kushi called 'The Cancer Prevention Diet.' I read it in about 36 hours because I couldn't put it down, and I thought it was either the biggest crock I'd ever read or the best-kept secret on the planet.
While my doctors were not offering much hope, this man was. And so my adventure with plant-based macrobiotics (and the love of my life) began. Robert convinced me that I had a future when no one else saw it that way.
beans, kale, tofu, miso and sea vegetables became as familiar to me as my diet soda once was.
I cooked and cooked. It was hard at first, with under-cooked beans and over-cooked rice, tasteless tofu and boring vegetable dishes. But then it hit me. All the techniques I had mastered in my cooking life could be used here. Only the ingredients had changed…and the goal. I was cooking as though my life depended on it…because it did.
It took a year and a half to regain my health and there were lots and lots and LOTS of ups and downs.
My blood was tested every month throughout my healing period. In the beginning, some months showed I was in remission and sometimes not. After about nine months, I showed steady improved blood health that was called 'spontaneous regression,' an explanation that seemed to satisfy the doctors' need for an answer.
It was a long year and a half, but after that period, my blood tests showed no sign of cancer and haven't since. When I think back to those days, they seem other-worldly, distant. They have become a part of the tapestry of who I am, but not only who I am.
It was the mid-1990's when Robert had the idea that we should conceive and produce a television show about healthy cooking built around me and after I stopped laughing at such a crazy idea 'Christina Cooks' was born. Who could have predicted that cooking on television would garner me an Emmy Award and result in a show that consistently gives me a platform for my message about healthy eating?
Here we are, hundreds of episodes into this amazing journey to help people all over the country change their relationship with food and discover what it takes to get it to our plates. Filming in the US and in Europe, we see that love of food and health knows no boundaries.