introduction
The Ikaria Way was born in the summer of 2021 on Ikaria, the Blue-Zone Greek island where “people forget to die,” as the venerable New York Times wrote a few years ago. I have deep family roots on the island, and for almost two decades, I have been running a cooking school out of the kitchen and garden of my village home. It was at one such weeklong class that the idea for this book was sparked. I had two guests from Montana who stood in bewilderment at the kitchen counter on the third day of the class and confessed that they not only ate meat three times a day back home, but they also never imagined that plant-based cooking, which is mostly—but not all of—what we do during our week together on the island, could be so satisfying, varied, and real.
It was a eureka moment for me. What I take naturally to be the “right” way to eat, mostly plant-based meals, with occasional (totally guilt-free) diversions that sometimes include a little meat, fish, or dairy, was to them an absolute revelation. Granted, having a garden and an island with incredibly varied and rich flora at my fingertips makes cooking and teaching about plant-based foods easy. But this book aims to make the lessons of Ikaria accessible to modern cooks anywhere, using ingredients that are readily available in most shops and markets.
I am not a vegan. I just eat a diet of real food grown locally with an overwhelming amount of vegetables, greens, beans, great Greek olive oil, herbs, spices, whole grains, crunchy sea salt, and all the other gifts of the earth with which we happen to be blessed in the Mediterranean. The “grown locally” is important; one can adopt the Mediterranean diet and the old Ikarian way of eating a mostly green diet regardless of where one lives. I do love cheese and honey, and as a cook with Greek roots, it would be not only difficult but most unpleasant to live—or cook—without them, so most of the guilty pleasures in these pages are meltingly good thanks to a little cheese!
The Ikaria Way aims to bring the spirit of the island and its plant-based traditions to a wider audience. Ikaria is a Blue Zone, a term coined more than a decade ago by Dan Buettner and his team of researchers, who were studying longevity patterns around the world. They discovered this remote island to be one of a handful of places around the globe where people live an inordinately long time. The term was coined when one of the team members literally circled these places on a map in blue pen!
In 2009, a group of Greek physicians and researchers conducted the Ikaria Study, corroborating what Buettner and his team had surmised. The Athens Medical School team looked at the local diet, lifestyle, and income levels of a sample population of 1,420 Ikarians. (The island’s total permanent population is about eight thousand.) They discovered that 13 percent of the study’s sample subjects had a life expectancy over the age of eighty. Globally, the over-eighty age group accounts for just 1 percent of the population; in North America and Europe, the octogenarians and over make up 3 percent of the population. Another peculiarity of Ikaria is that men and women both seem to age equally well. In most of the rest of the world, men tend to die before their partners. Another startling revelation is that Ikarians are ten times more likely to live to one hundred than Americans.
I spend almost half the year on the island and cook very locally when I am there. But I also came to see that I carried the lessons of Ikaria wherever I go, by trying to live a calm life, not stressing out about much, and embracing local ingredients wherever I am. So, in creating the recipes for this book, I venture beyond the local larder but stay true to a spirit of cooking that is simple, vibrant, and rooted in the tenets of the greater Mediterranean diet. Tofu is an example of food that is not traditional to Greece. I’ve come to embrace it and adapt it to my way of cooking, with olive oil, fresh seasonal vegetables, and herbs. In this age of global accessibility, tofu is actually even available, up there with chia seeds, quinoa, and goji berries, in a few of the markets on the island. My goal is to provide a template for cooking like an Ikarian in a global world.
In my life and kitchen, I try really hard to stay away from processed foods, and I am philosophically perplexed by the whole notion of vegan meat and starch-packed vegan cheese. I avoid plant-based imitations of animal foods, except for a few recipes in which I suggest cashew milk. Of all the vegan cheeses out there, I have found the cashew-milk cheeses to be the closest approximation of real cheese; as for the plant-based milks, my kids showed me the way, having gone off cow’s milk for a few years now.
We live in crazy dietary times. In my experience as a cook and cooking teacher, I never cease to be amazed by two things: how extreme people’s neuroses about food and eating have become and how little most people actually know about cooking and eating well. This book is my response to those two issues: how to be good to your body without being mean to your mind, and how to cook in the spirit of a relaxed, healing kind of island where the tempo of life is slow and easy and where people connect through food around a table. Cooking shouldn’t be another stressful moment in our day!
My background as a Greek-Mediterranean cook is steeped in the deep traditions of plant-based cuisine that has evolved over centuries. Greeks are, indeed, almost vegan, but they’d never call themselves that. The array of plant-based (main course) dishes in the Greek diet is unsurpassed anywhere else in the Mediterranean, and they developed because poverty forbade anything resembling a frequent indulgence in animal products, as did religion. Many Greeks still fast for half the year, as the religious calendar dictates, thereby foregoing most animal products during those periods.
On a personal level, my DNA as a daughter of Ikaria has blessed me with a naturally relaxed attitude toward most things in life, especially food. Indeed “relax” is the keyword in my whole approach to cooking and eating. Food equals pleasure, and cooking is the vehicle for delivering that. In the spirit of Ikaria, that means sharing a plate or two with friends, drinking some wine, creating a ritual around the table that involves simply sitting down, taking a breath, and respecting the meal in front of us enough to put away our gadgets and focus on what we’re eating.
In this collection of plant-based recipes, I am offering people a way to reconcile the extremes, the divisiveness and fear that we have allowed—yes, it’s our choice—to pervade every part of our modern lives. The recipes are a mix of traditional and contemporary dishes. They aim to be simple, almost entirely plant-based with some cheese here and there, prepared with real food and almost nothing processed save for the occasional can of tomatoes. My pantry, and the one I will suggest for readers, is culled from the traditions of the Mediterranean: chock-full of all the things that have long given food its flavor in this part of the world: herbs, olives, nuts, and more. The dishes have to have “craveability,” which is born when textures, robust flavors, and mouthfeel, achieved with the inclusion of good fats like olive oil, work harmoniously together. I made a conscious decision not to include dessert recipes. As for during our Ikaria classes, mostly what we serve after a meal is fresh, seasonal fruit, which is the real tradition on the island.
Food is about nourishment of body, mind, and spirit. It’s about pleasure and giving and should not be a source of stress or guilt. The Ikaria Way is a loose and loving road map for how to make and enjoy food that happens to be almost all plant-based and always natural, but with a little wiggle room.
The Ikaria way is essentially the Mediterranean diet coupled with the fresh, seasonal local ingredients we can find wherever we live. It’s less a diet with all the strict rules and dos and don’ts of what you can and cannot eat, and more a mindset. A basic road map, as I like to call it. Food should equal pleasure! The Mediterranean diet should be accessible anywhere. It’s just a matter of knowing what elements, techniques, and Mediterranean ingredients are the most important.
Copyright © 2024 by Diane Kochilas
