Nutrition

Embodied, a talk with Connie Sobczak

Connie Sobczak is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Body Positive and Author of Embody: Learning to Love Your Unique Body (and quiet that critical voice!)

This event was during...

There are new food experts in town! Please meet the Nutrition Outreach Workers, aka NOW. The NOWs are nutrition students at UC Berkeley hoping to spread nutrition information to their peers.

Fiona Beltran, Nutrition Outreach Worker

Let’s talk about Covid-19. Not the virus itself, but how it has changed our lives. Living in the Covid era, there’s little to do. We can do outdoor activities, sit 6 feet away from our friends, make small talk over Zoom and experience all of the excruciating, awkward silence when no one speaks, but where does food fit in?

Grabbing a socially distanced meal or a cup of coffee with a friend is one of the essential activities we can still do in the Covid 19 era. I’ve never looked forward to buying something as simple as a 99 cent Frosty through the drive-through window quite as much as I do now!

Covid has changed our view of food. The highlight of my week now is the walk I take to get a cappuccino in the morning or my weekly lunch date with a friend. Sometimes when I’m stir crazy I decide to run out and grab a snack, thankful for the change of scenery and fresh face as I order, pay, and enjoy. Looking forward to food dates with friends and family or impulsive drive through runs is a new, but a regular part of our lives now. With food taking an unexpected more prominent role, and an unintentional lack of exercise accompanying it due to work from home and online school, food feels different. It’s easy to feel overindulged, or easily full. Waking up 2 minutes before a morning lecture is great, but sometimes we skip breakfast and then satisfy our hunger too readily at lunch and feel bloated and uncomfortable.

During midterm season, the question of what to eat becomes more desperate. It becomes more of a question of what to eat when I’m running low on groceries, don’t know what to cook, and don’t have time to think about food right now. And sure, during these hectic weeks, Uber Eats and local spots have always been there for me, providing a quick solution to my dilemma. It works for the first few meals, and then slowly I realize my checking account won’t be able to sustain my current eating habits for very long. I had to find another way, and after lots of practice and experimentation, I did! I figured out some basic principles that can be used to make meals that are not only fast and cheap, but also delicious, and I’d love to share them with you so that you can use your time and brainpower for exams, not for agonizing over what to make for dinner. Here are 5 basic cooking skills you can use to make fast and delicious meals to fuel you through exam season.