First Lady Patricia Moore-Pastides led a cooking demonstration at the Healthy Carolina Farmers Market on Tuesday. She taught the crowd how to make a Mediterranean dish and gave information and advice on staying healthy.
Carolina Dining prepares and offers samples and recipe cards for a different dish from one of Moore-Pastides' cookbooks each week. Moore-Pastides started the Healthy Carolina Farmers Market and used to come every week for a demonstration, but this was her first appearance this year because of her busy schedule.
“My love of cooking came from my background at public health," Moore-Pastides said. "It’s not that I’m such a great chef but it’s that I did a masters degree in public health administration and worked for a lot of public health agencies.”
For the demonstration, she made a modern version of tabbouleh with bulgur. She also used mint grown from the president’s house organic vegetable garden in her recipe. Moore-Pastides reminded students that there is a community herb garden behind Russell House with herbs that are there and labeled for students to cut and use in their own cooking.
“She’s a big proponent for the Mediterranean diet and its health benefits. It helps you live longer and prevents cancer. She likes students to see that cooking’s not difficult that everyone can do it and that healthy cooking is not so hard,” said Meagan Crowl, event coordinator for the special events office.
Moore-Pastides also stressed that being healthy is more than eating vegetables or following a Mediterranean diet.
“One thing I have seen is that our health is completely determined by our lifestyle. So what you want to do in order to be a healthy young adult and live a long life is you want to not smoke cigarettes, right, you want to eat a healthful diet like the traditional Mediterranean and you want to get your exercise every day,” Moore-Pastides said.
Moore-Pastides’ books feature many recipes as well as histories of Greece and summaries of studies that look at the health benefits of a Mediterranean diet.
“That’s why I got into this traditional Mediterranean diet because it has been proven since studies from the 1950s all the way up until now to be one of the most healthful diets on the planet. It uses a lot of vegetables — far more vegetables and fruits than we eat in the U.S.," Moore-Pastides said. "It uses olive oil as the central fat and bean dishes and nuts and whole grains. There still is meat, it’s not eliminated, but it’s more like a condiment.”
The first lady also teaches cooking classes for students Arnold School of Health throughout the semester and a class on healthy Mediterranean cooking at McCutchen House in the spring. She hopes this will convey to students that everyone is capable of following this healthy lifestyle.
“These recipes are inexpensive really tasty and healthful but they’re things that you can do when you have your own apartment that don’t take a long time,” Moore-Pastides said.