Happy New Year’s from the Oldways staff!
In a recent issue of W magazine, Editor-in-Chief Stefano Tonchi mused that obsession with the “new” is like a drug, one that you’re hooked on. He was having dinner recently with the designer Marc Jacobs, who offered an interesting answer to the question, “What qualifies as new?” “What is new,” Jacobs said, “is simply what is now.” Tonchi went on to write that entire generations look at fashion, art, and music with a complete ignorance of what came before. This lack of memory, which is sometimes unfortunate, can have an upside: It also allows for the kind of freshness to which Jacobs referred. He mused that the current fashion story making news was the return of Tom Ford. The clothes themselves weren’t so new, but the fresh context was. This revelation is pertinent to the Oldways [1] world—and the food industry as a whole. Like fashion, the food world is fickle. Consumers jump from one new silver bullet for losing weight to another, or tout the latest isolated source of health (“Eat more carrots!”) instead of focusing on the importance of total diet. The reality is that good health boils down to a few very simple concepts—the same concepts around health and nutrition, culture, tradition, and sustainability that our founder Dun Gifford [2] wished to celebrate when he started Oldways back in the early 1990s. And, he would say that our senses (smell, touch, taste, sight, and hearing) bind them all together. Today at Oldways we continue to focus on changing the way people eat through practical and positive programs grounded in science, tradition, and delicious food and drink. Still, it is our challenge to provide fresh programs and tools that educate the educators and help consumers turn their plans to eat better into reality. Here is a small taste of how we plan to do this in the coming year:Links
[1] http://www.oldwayspt.org
[2] http://www.oldwayspt.org/our-story-told-founder-k-dun-gifford
[3] http://www.oldwayspt.org/mediterraneandiet
[4] http://www.wholegrainscouncil.org
[5] http://wholegrainscouncil.org/get-involved/attend-our-conference
[6] http://www.oldwayspt.org/newsroom/consensusstatementsandreports
[7] http://www.oldwayspt.org/newsroom/whatsnew/archive/2010/12/travel-turkey-ana-sortun-and-oldways
[8] https://oldwayspt.org/categories/mediterranean-diet
[9] https://oldwayspt.org/categories/oldways
[10] https://oldwayspt.org/categories/rd-symposium
[11] https://oldwayspt.org/categories/sara
[12] https://oldwayspt.org/categories/whole-grains-council
[13] https://oldwayspt.org/categories/world-pasta-day