In The Ikaria Way, Greek American chef Diane Kochilas offers a roadmap for people who want to incorporate aspects of the Mediterranean island’s “Blue Zone” diet into their lives.
As one of the world’s five designated “Blue Zones“, Ikaria, a small Greek island in the eastern Aegean, has lower rates of chronic disease than most other places, and its more than 8,000 full-time residents have some of the longest life expectancies in the world. In fact, one-third of Ikarians live past 90 years of age, and factors such as strong social and family ties, exercise that is integrated into daily life and frequent napping are thought to be why these island inhabitants often live to be centenarians.
Another important contributing factor is what they eat.
Like the Mediterranean diet, the Ikarian diet includes healthy fats, a lot of fibre and nutrient-rich whole foods. It’s highly plant-based, featuring nuts, grains, potatoes, legumes, vegetables and seeds, and olive oil is the main source of added fat. Yogurt and cheese, fish, poultry and red wine are consumed in moderation, while red meat is limited to just a few times per month. Eating this way has been shown to lower risk factors for health conditions such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity and high blood pressure.
In her new cookbook, The Ikaria Way (available on 26 March), Greek American chef Diane Kochilas offers a “roadmap” for people who want to incorporate aspects of the Mediterranean diet, inspired by how residents eat on Ikaria, into their lives. For her, the book focuses on 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”. It highlights dishes for light meals, snacks, dinners for larger groups and everything in between, with recipes such as yogurt cucumber soup with walnuts; grilled peaches and rocket salad with feta; spicy fava beans braised in red wine; and orzo pilaf with pistachios and currants, among many others.
“I think that one of the things that always surprises me is just the level of stress that people accept,” she says. “In the US, stress is so detrimental, and most of it is in our own heads and thought patterns.” The Ikaria Way aims to help people become more mindful in how they take care of themselves, and Kochilas wants to show them how “food is also love”.
In addition to authoring several other cookbooks and hosting the PBS cooking show My Greek Table, Kochilas runs a cooking school on Ikaria, where her family is originally from and where she lives for half of the year. It was during one of her weeklong classes that she got the inspiration for the 100 plant-based recipes that she includes in her new cookbook. She writes, “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.”