The Health Diaries

Bon Appétit’s Food Director Wants You to Stop Meal Planning

‘I go shopping without a shopping list or a recipe in mind.’

There are many ways to live a healthy life. The Health Diaries is a weekly series about the habits that keep notable people living well.

If you’re a Bon Appétit fan, you probably know food director Carla Lalli Music for her quirky, instructive YouTube videos and love of the pressure cooker. But before running all things food-focused at one of the world’s most famous food media companies, she worked as a line cook and an operations manager. At one point, she was the first general manager at Shake Shack.

All of this is to say that Carla Lalli Music understands food and hard work. On March 19, she’s releasing a new cookbook, Where Cooking Begins, to help the rest of us learn what she already knows: cooking and grocery shopping don’t have to be chores.

Lalli Music shares with Medium her struggle to eat healthy in Bon Appétit’s overflowing test kitchen, the habits that are keeping her sane, and her obsession with intuitive grocery shopping.

I have two children, a 15-year-old and a 9-year-old, so I definitely wake up to an alarm every morning. Unfortunately, that alarm goes off every Monday…