How Pete Wells, Former New York Times Restaurant Critic, Made His Kitchen Healthier

In the second part of a monthlong series, Pete Wells and experts say the easiest way to a better diet is to surround yourself with the right foods.

Reset Your Appetite This is the second of four articles by Pete Wells, appearing each Monday in January, about how he developed healthier eating habits. The first focused on reducing sugars.

In 1976, David Bowie moved to West Berlin. He would make some of the most original music of his career there, but that wasn’t why he went. He was trying to kick cocaine, which had taken over his life in Los Angeles, destroying his memory and producing round-the-clock hallucinations. “I felt like I’d fallen into the bowels of the earth,” he later said.

Obviously, there are major differences between a life-threatening drug addiction and the struggles of an overfed restaurant critic, although my former life could get downright hallucinatory at times. But one of the ways I pulled myself back to health was the same method used by Bowie and countless other people who decided to get clean: I changed my environment.

I needed to eat more of my meals in a place that wasn’t filled with temptation and where nobody ever said no, least of all me. I had to replace all the habits that were slowly killing me with new ones that might keep me alive. The only way to do this, I knew, was to stay home while I taught myself how to eat again.

If I was going to clean up, I needed to start with the place where I lived. My apartment became my Berlin.

Master the Market

Lisa R. Young, an adjunct professor of nutrition at New York University and a nutrition consultant, tells clients that the success or failure of any diet is largely determined by what’s in the kitchen.

“Willpower is overrated,” Dr. Young said. “It doesn’t exist, really. What’s in your house is what you’re going to eat. By focusing on healthy foods that you could add to your plate, you’ll end up eating more of those and then you’ll cut out the cookies, just naturally.”

To turn my Brooklyn home into a retreat where I could unlearn my self-sabotaging behaviors, I had to look a few blocks away, to the stores where I shopped for groceries.

I became a regular at the food co-op I’d joined as an experiment during the pandemic. The store was small and patchily stocked, with an emphasis on brown rice and dried beans. The refrigerated cases were so weak they barely kept lettuce and herbs cool. Every week, a different section of the floor seemed ready to cave in. But the prices were a lot lower than at my corner grocery, and that made a difference now that I was eating at home most nights.

It turned out that this scrappy little co-op, with its faint aroma of a 1970s commune, is ideal for somebody trying to remake his diet. It is full of things I wanted to eat more of. The overworked produce section is stuffed like a Tetris grid with interlocking bunches of greens and baskets of roots. An entire wall is taken up by plastic bins filled with almonds, unsweetened papaya and other dried fruit, lentils in a surprising range of colors, and grains that seem to be inviting me to take my cooking in new directions: fonio, millet, amaranth.

Reset Your Shopping List

• Whole grains, like brown and black rice, millet, fonio and farro

• Dried beans, including colorful ones like red lentils and cranberry beans

• Canned beans and fish, like tinned sardines and mackerel

• Vegetables for salads and snacks, like cucumbers, carrots, radishes and cherry tomatoes

• Long-lasting vegetables for cooked dishes, like winter squash, kohlrabi and broccoli

• Fruit for salads and snacks, like apples, mangoes, berries and citrus

• Other staples for easy meals and snacks, like eggs, nut butter, unsalted nuts and hummus

Just as important as the items my co-op stocks are the things it doesn’t. There is no room for chocolate cakes or muffins. There is no cereal aisle, just a few boxes squeezed in between the whole-wheat flour and the oat biscuits. In front of the register, where most supermarkets have candy bars and gum, the co-op has a table spread with wilted kale and lightly bruised fruit at half-price.

It’s easier for me to walk past a basket of free kittens than to pass up a bargain on perfectly good produce. Wilted kale is as close as I come to an impulse buy at the co-op, though. I try not to shop hungry, which history shows will result in a basket full of cider doughnuts. No, I stalk the aisles like a coldblooded assassin whose targets include persimmons and ginger tea. I walk in with a list and try to stick to it, although I might work an attractive squash that catches my eye into my plans.

Now, after pulling the makings of dinner out of this store hundreds of times, I can walk into a bigger, gaudier supermarket and see the bones of my food co-op hidden inside. I can head straight to the canned white beans, the bags of barley, the chartreuse fractals of romanesco. (And right there, I’ve got the makings of a filling soup built to withstand the cold Northern Italian winters of Friuli.)

And I know which aisles to avoid. This is a strategy known as shopping the perimeter, because most supermarkets display the least-processed foods — vegetables, dairy, meat and seafood — along the outer walls, while stacking the Cinnamon Toast Crunch in the interior aisles. By sticking to the perimeter, I can strip-mine the good stuff out of a food environment that’s loaded with bad ideas.

Program Your Kitchen

When I get home, clutching my chia seeds, I have another food environment to clean up — my kitchen. I have no radical new ideas about putting food away, but I do have some tricks.

Fruits that will quickly collapse in a wet puddle of mold, like raspberries, have to be stored in plain sight, either on the counter or at eye level in the refrigerator, where I’ll come along in an hour or two and think, “Ooh, berries!” (This is what magicians call forcing a card.)

Produce that should last a few days is written down on a list that I stick to the refrigerator door, where I’ll see it every time I think about my next meal. Radishes, cucumbers and small carrots, which will keep for a while, go into a small, clear bag in the crisper drawer to be made into salads or antipasto plates.

The millet, popcorn, red lentils and other bulk ingredients are lined up along a shelf on the freezer door, so they won’t disappear into the tundra. Pistachios, sardines and dates are stuffed into a crowded cabinet. (Together with a hard-cooked egg, the sardines and radishes make a handy lunch.)

The point of all this strategic resource deployment is to surround myself with non-sabotaging snacks and a few simple, intelligent meals before I’m actually hungry.

Corby Kummer, the executive director of the Food and Society program at the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit effort to make food systems healthier and more equitable, said that what I had done so far was nice for me but would be extremely challenging for many people. The average American, he said, would have an easier time eating sensibly if supermarkets offered a greater variety of foods that are more wholesome, less processed, easier to prepare and more affordable. Like other nutrition experts, he believes that the best way to help large numbers of people eat better would be government action to control what food manufacturers are allowed to sell.

In the meantime, he added, it’s worth any effort you can make. “Changing your food environment is the single most important thing you can do for yourself.”

Recipes to Make With Your Kitchen Reset

Roasted Broccoli Grain Bowl With Nooch Dressing | Saland-e Nakhod (Chickpea Yogurt Stew) | Everyday Dal | White Bean, Tuna and Kale Salad | Soba Noodles With Ginger Broth and Crunchy Ginger | Frijoles de la Olla | Maraq Misir (Red Lentil Soup) | Toasted Millet Salad With Cucumber, Avocado and Lemon | See all recipes from this series

More From This Series

Read the first of four articles by Pete Wells about how to reset your appetite.

Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.