Mary Kay Culpepper, "Cooking Light" magazine editor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(Return to Part 1)

BOB ANDELMAN: How affected are you -- or not affected -- by trendy diet things, like Atkins when it was hot or South Beach or whatever the big one of the moment is? Or do you try to not be affected by that?

MARY KAY CULPEPPER: I think, again, that we give readers tools, and when people were heavily following low carbohydrate diets, they would use the information in the magazine to help them plan their meals. When people are restricting calories, they can do the same thing. It has been interesting, because in seeing essentially those specialized diets like that, knowing that the magazine can be useful for people but ultimately people go back to making choices for themselves means that we have really weathered those fads quite well, I think.

ANDELMAN: Well, and that’s what I always wonder about when these things come up. They always tend to be fads, they come, they go. It seems that the same people get attached to each one of them that got attached to the last one, but has there been a diet type of fad like that over these twenty years of the magazine, and I know you’ve been there for the last six, six and a half, but has there been one that the magazine has been attached to in some way or found more credible than others for its purposes?

CULPEPPER: We really stick to the recommendations from the American Dietetic Association for a healthy diet, and in every issue of the magazine, we print what those recommendations are so people can go back to those, and that really is what we hang our hats on.





ANDELMAN: Has the magazine ever come up with -- or defined -- the three or five or whatever basic rules of thumb for Cooking Light?

CULPEPPER: Yes. We do, and that actually subtly involves us, evolves, rather, as I think it does for any magazine. The nuances change at bit with time. For example, besides having a very clear and ultimately positive message about food itself and not demonizing any particular food -- and that’s one rule of thumb that I think has more or less held its way throughout the magazine. People want to feel good about choices they make, and they want to feel that they’ve done something good for themselves and the people they care about, because ultimately, that, for so many of us, is the biggest motivation to want to cook this way and live this way.

ANDELMAN: So if there was a convention of Cooking Light readers, they’d probably be some very healthy-looking people?

CULPEPPER: I think so. When I’ve met them, it’s always the case. It’s interesting to me that when I do meet readers, they will be very specific, and they’ll tell me the recipe they love the most or the Cooking Light city destination that they love the most, and it really says to me that this is a vibrant, living entity.

ANDELMAN: In the 20 years that the magazine has risen to such success, there has been a number of contrary things going on. The steakhouse has grown in immense popularity, the high-end steakhouse. The Food Network is huge, with most of its programs very high caloric, things like that. Is there some contrariness going on in American culture, or is it just business as usual?

CULPEPPER: I think that food, like the other big topics in the world, is so complex and so layered that it’s all out there, and I do think that Americans in particular have become much more conscious of what they eat and how they cook and what they want than ever before. I think that that’s probably a really good thing. The point that you bring up actually led us to our first Cooking Light insight study with Roper Group in 2004, because we were seeing these contrary trends, and we really wondered what they meant. And what we think it really does mean is that people are just more aware, and I think that that really does resonate with the message of the magazine. But they also love food and, on a metaphysical sense, it’s a communion with other people that you get to partake in, and there is no escaping that, but I think that that’s a great thing for people who want to eat well.

ANDELMAN: Now, at the opposite end of the steakhouse phenomenon, I wondered if sushi has a place at the Cooking Light table.

CULPEPPER: Oh, it definitely does. We’ve run a number of stories on sushi and how to make your own. In fact, I’ve made my own sushi and been really rather pleased with it.

ANDELMAN: Really?

CULPEPPER: I think it’s definitely within the grasp of a home cook. If I can do it here in Birmingham, I think people all over the place can do it.





ANDELMAN: I’m glad you mentioned Birmingham. It would seem like one of the last places on Earth to be talking about cooking light and cooking well would be in a place that is so well-known for southern cooking, which is not the lightest of cooking styles.

CULPEPPER: I believe that creative fires burn everywhere, and I think that having this magazine here is a great example of that, because we have drawn chefs from all over the country to come and work with us, certainly in our test kitchens and our editors have actually, a number of them have worked in professional restaurants, have been chefs on their own, and I think if you’ve got something great, it does draw talent. But I can tell you, I grew up in Mississippi, a place that has an incredible food gestalt that, whether it’s light or not, there is a respect for ingredients, and there is a reverence for freshness that I learned and a lot of the other Southerners who work here have known, and as a birthright, that’s a really amazing one to have, and I think it’s something that is really good for the magazine.

ANDELMAN: I mentioned the Food Network before, and of course, Cooking Light has the magazine, there are Cooking Light books, there is the Internet. What other multi-media opportunities are there? Maybe you’ll correct me, but I don’t recall seeing like a Cooking Light breakout on television at a time when we see a lot of food programs. Is any of that going to happen?

CULPEPPER: We think it will. We aren’t quite ready to talk about it yet, but yes, we’ve actually worked on a special with the Food Network on our supper clubs, which are an amazing development that sprang from our bulletin boards. There was a reader in San Francisco who posted about six years ago that she liked to cook from Cooking Light and wondered if other people in San Francisco liked to do that. She got responses back and actually still has a supper club that meets in the members’ houses once a month, cooks from the magazine. It really started something that’s been quite a phenomenon for us. By our count, there are more than 500 Cooking Light supper clubs around the country.

ANDELMAN: Wow.

CULPEPPER: Completely grassroots. They use the magazine as the spark that gets them together.

ANDELMAN: They light it for their fires, their barbecues? What are you saying, Mary Kay?

CULPEPPER: It jump-starts them, Bob!

ANDELMAN: I remember Esquire had a story on how to use the magazine to pop the top on a beer bottle, so I thought maybe they were lighting… Anyway…

CULPEPPER: We will explore origami, I feel sure, in another issue.





ANDELMAN: Is there a single healthy-eating guru at the magazine’s core, I mean like a go-to person either on staff or consulting, whose expertise you rely upon above everyone else?

CULPEPPER: There is a team, and one of the glories of working on this magazine professionally is that this team is so really very strong. One of the founding editors, Mary Simpson Creel, is a registered dietician. She also just completed the Iron Man up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, so she is a phenomenon herself. But also, there is a young woman on staff, Kathy Kitchens Downey, who is a foods editor and is also a dietitian and has a really great sense of food and just understands the healthfulness that goes into it but also a great sense of the story. We actually featured her family reunion in an earlier issue of the magazine this year because she has a cousin who’s a vintner, and they all love to get together and cook. But beyond those two, we actually work with a panel at the University of Alabama/Birmingham who can help us on some more complex measures of nutrition and of healthy living. That advisory panel is headed up by Dr. Julius Lynn, and they are a terrific resource.

ANDELMAN: I mentioned Esquire a minute ago; I am going to mention it again. They used to run an occasional feature called “Esquire Regrets” in which the magazine pointed out fashion mistakes it regretted from previous years. Is there anything you regret publishing from your first six and a half years at Cooking Light?

CULPEPPER: I can’t think of anything. Regrets are pretty expensive emotions, and one of the great things about working with such a powerhouse of a staff here is that we deliberate a lot and we consider a lot. I also think that we are extremely fortunate in covering the subject that we do because there is so much to it. So I can’t really point to a single thing.

ANDELMAN: Okay, fair enough. You will probably get off the phone and think of something. But finally, nobody is looking, there is no one listening to us right now, you can speak out for any guilty pleasure, meal or snack, you choose, Mary Kay. What would it be?

CULPEPPER: Wow. You know, one time my husband and I were on vacation in London, and we were watching “The Late, Late Breakfast Show” with Noel Edmonds, so you can think, this must have been in the early 1980s, and they had a clip of Margaret Thatcher, who had been asked what her favorite fish was, and you can imagine in the U.K. what a loaded question politically that is, because of all the constituencies that deal in seafood in the U.K. So she named every single fish there was, and the clip ran for about five minutes. So there are a lot of things I love, but so much of it depends on the context, which is what Margaret obviously was playing to. But I’m thinking that right now, what I have in my fridge that I will go for when I get home is a great ratatouille that I have to go on pasta with some Kalamata olives and fresh tomatoes, red and yellow peppers, eggplant, and some really, really nice olive oil all sort of coalesced together on some long fusilli, and I’ll probably have a great Pinot Grigio that is really cold to go along with that, and then I’ll have some, I believe that I will have some cantaloupe with port for dessert.

ANDELMAN: But you’re going to pour gravy over it in the fine Southern tradition. Gravy goes well with everything.