US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy Shares His Recipes for Connection
Photos by Bon Appétit staff; Illustration by Olga Prader
Most people know the US Surgeon General as the nation’s doctor who sets the agenda for health and wellness for the country, encouraging Americans to eat more vegetables and quit smoking, and more recently, giving guidance throughout the pandemic.
But Murthy, who is closing his second term, has reshaped ideas about the nation’s health by prioritizing warnings about gun violence, mental health, and loneliness, which he calls an epidemic.
In his latest project, Recipes for Connection, he says that food is a power connector. Gathering and cooking together, he says, are ways to build friendships, deeper relationships, and community. “Food is much more than calories; it’s the love your mother gave you as a child,” he says.
In this episode of Food People, Murthy shares his dreams for America and how to meet people on a food journey.
Jamila Robinson: I am Jamila Robinson, Editor-in-Chief of Bon Appétit and Epicurious. And this is Food People.
Food People is the show where I get to sit down with the luminaries making big moves in food, from chefs and entrepreneurs to celebrities and activists, because food is something we all participate in. And this week I was honored to sit down with the 19th and 21st US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy. In addition to his public service, Dr. Murthy is the author of the bestselling book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. Our conversation centered on the themes of his book and how food and gatherings around the table can help combat what Dr. Murthy sees as an epidemic of loneliness. I hope you enjoy.
Dr. Vivek Murthy, the nation's doctor, welcome to Bon Appetit. It's so lovely to have you here in the studio.
Dr. Vivek Murthy: Well, thanks so much. What a treat to be with you.
JR: We are so excited to talk to you, but I first want to start off with a question we ask all of our guests, which is what makes you a food person?
DVM: Well, so many of my memories, my good memories are tied up with food. When I was growing up, my mother, when we would have prayer services, she would always prepare food and we would offer it on the altar, and then we would all eat that food afterward, and that became a symbol of our spiritual practice. I also think when I was growing up, we used to have friends over a lot. My parents came to the country without a whole lot of resources, but they knew community was important, and so we used to gather with friends, and my mom and I and my sister would spend a lot of time together in the kitchen making that food. It was my job to not only help with chopping the vegetables and assembling things, but to keep the list of all the dishes we were making and to cross it off when they were done. Even to this day, when I go home, when we have people over, my mother will say, "Vivek, make the list," and I'll know that that's my job.
But lastly, even at moments where I've felt homesick, like when I had my freshman year in college when I was just really just feeling so sad because I missed my family so deeply, relief came in the form of these small packages with homemade food that my mother would make and send to me, and that was like a lifeline to me. So, oh, food has been a really important part of my life. A source of joy, reflection of my relationships, and I'm very grateful for it.
JR: What was in those little food packages?
DVM: So there was a particular dessert that my mother made, which I loved called [inaudible 00:02:43], which is a very simple semolina-based dessert. And usually there were some other tidbits, maybe some other Indian sweets that she had made, but was the [inaudible 00:02:53] was always the center point. It's what I looked forward to. And now what's really amazing and fun is my kids have come to like it too. And so my mother makes it for my kids and on occasion I do as well.
JR: I imagine that when most Americans think about the Surgeon General, they are thinking about warning labels and telling you how to eat your vegetables. But you're a person behind this important role. Can you talk a little bit about your job as the US Surgeon General?
DVM: Yeah, and look, I think a lot of people have heard the title of Surgeon General, but they may not know what Surgeon General does. But here's what the job is. There are two primary responsibilities. One is to make sure that you're communicating to the public what critical health issues they need to be made aware of. And the second responsibility is actually less known. It's to oversee one of our eight uniformed services in the US government. People are familiar with the army and the navy. We also have a US public health service, which has 6,000 officers, nurses, doctors, pharmacists, physical therapists, and many others who respond to emergencies, whether it's a hurricane or a tornado or another disaster. And they provide basic healthcare. They help build up and support the public health infrastructure. And as Surgeon General, that's the service that I'm privileged and honored to oversee.
But the first responsibility of communicating with the public, that can take so many different forms. There are questions of what issues you take on. Do you communicate through reports or do you find other channels? During my time, what I've really tried to prioritize is number one, just listening as much as I can to people around the country to understand what issues are top of mind for them, and then using those to guide the issues that I take on. And I've also tried to prioritize finding more out of the box and creative ways to reach people. Recognizing that putting things out in publication, that's one way to reach people through a report, but not everyone's reading those things and we need to find other ways. Whether it's starting a podcast, which we did a couple of years ago, or whether that's creating events with the arts and with music, which we've been doing as well, but finding different channels to reach people where they are.
JR: Your podcast is called House Calls, and you do take on some of these public health issues. And a lot of your advisories have been, I think it might be fair to say that they have been a little bit unconventional because it's not just about eating your vegetables. You've talked a lot about here's how to have better mental health outcomes, here's how we should respond to gun violence, here's why your kids should be off social media. You've talked a lot about those things. Can you talk about how you have prioritized those advisories to the American public?
DVM: What's really interesting to me, I think our understanding of what contributes to health has really been expanding over the years. If you go back 40, 50 years, our primary understanding of health was all physical health. And then a few decades ago, we started to realize more and more, hey, mental health is important. And now we're recognizing that social health is important and that loneliness and isolation take a profound toll on our physical and mental health. And then there's our spiritual health which matters as well. If we open up the lens through which we look at health, we start to realize that there's more to it that perhaps we have realized, and that has actually helped shape how I've approached this job and the issues that we've taken on. And so that's why I've began early on with launching an initiative around youth mental health, recognizing we were living in the middle of a youth mental health crisis.
And the other initiatives we've launched around loneliness, around social media and youth mental health, around parents' mental health and well-being have all come from these conversations with people around the country. And then also from data, which tells us that mental health, social health, these matter tremendously. And when we don't pay attention to them, then we see the consequences in our physical health as well. But they also show up in how our kids do in school, how people perform in workplaces. When people are lonely and isolated, for example, that even contributes to the division and polarization that we're seeing today. So however you look at it, these dimensions of health are a critical part of what we need to be grappling with, and that's why I've chosen to take them on as Surgeon General.
JR: We're going to take a quick break. When we're back, Dr. Murthy shares some recipes for connection.
We've written a lot about loneliness at Bon Appétit. We used to have dinner parties and we gather and we found that this new generation, you just don't do that as much. So we've written about the ways that people have felt lonely and the way that you can gather, you can have dinner parties. We've done reporting on social clubs, lonely hearts dinner parties, as ways to help people who find partners or to find friends or to find connection. And you have a very similar initiative called Recipes for Connection. Can you talk a little bit about your project?
DVM: Well, first it just warms my heart that this has been a priority of Bon Appétit to think about how food can be a force for social connection. Because it's absolutely right, and food is more than the calories we put in our body. It's about the way we gather. It's about a way of showing love and affection toward one another. I had a mentor who once told me when I was in medical school and I was trying to figure out how to help patients think about their diet. And he said to me, "Vivek, you have to understand that food is so much more than calories. It's the love your mother gave you as a child." And when you see it in that way, it helps you understand why it's sometimes very hard for somebody to change a habit that they associated such positive memories from growing up. So food plays these powerful roles in our life.
One of the things that became clear to me though, in talking to people around the country is that one of the reasons people aren't gathering is they've become anxious about it, worried about how to actually create a gathering. And these questions like, "What should I cook? What if I can't cook? What if I invite people and nobody comes over? What if my house isn't so fancy and it's really small? Will people not have a good time 'cause it's too cramped?" We think about all these things, we worry about them. And you know what? I have worried about these too.
JR: I worry about them too. Even as somebody who throws dinner parties, I still have that moment where I say, "Is anybody going to come?" Or people don't want to invite me over because they'll say, "Oh, Jamila's very good at cooking. She's going to judge me." As opposed to building that connection.
DVM: Yeah.
JR: Why do you think we have those social anxieties around food?
DVM: I think for whatever reason, maybe in some cases how we were brought up or the stories that we see on TV or in the movies, we have this notion that throwing a dinner party, for example, means that food's got to be really good. All your stuff has to be really fancy. The dinnerware you're using, your house has to be impeccable. It has to be perfect for hosting. And the truth is, very few people live that life.
JR: Nobody lives like that.
DVM: Yeah. And I remember when my wife and I first had kids, and for anyone out there who's had kids, you know that it can dramatically change your social life. And all of a sudden you're finding that when your friends are asleep, you're up at 3:00 AM trying to change diapers, and when they're ready to go out on Friday night, you just want to conk out. So it changes a lot.
And we were struggling to figure out how do we get our house in shape? Because our house was total chaos and a disaster. How do we get our house in shape to have people over, et cetera? And finally, at one point, just driven by desperation, we gave up and we said, "You know what? We're just going to invite a couple friends over and just tell them the house is a disaster and we don't really know what to make, but we'll just order something in. Or we're just going to make the same food we're making for the kids, but whatever, just come over. It's going to be chaos, but just hang out with us for an hour." And you know what we found? We had the best time.
JR: The best time.
DVM: And they did too. They didn't care that our house was messy. They didn't care that the food wasn't super fancy. They were actually coming for us. 'Cause they wanted to spend time together. And that to me is actually the great secret of dinner gatherings is that the number one, two, and three priority for people is to hang out with you. So if what you're doing at your dinner party is you're bringing people together and you're going to spend time actually talking to them, you've already won the game.
JR: You've won.
DVM: Everything you do on top of that is gravy. And by the way, if your house is messy, other people are going to see that and be like, "Oh, wow, my house is messy too. Maybe I can also host a dinner party."
JR: Yeah.
DVM: So don't feel like you got to make everything perfect. I think honestly, Jamila, one of the things I worry about in the world we live in is that it feels like it's harder and harder to just be real and be ourselves. Especially we look online, we look on social media. It seems like everyone's got perfect lives and et cetera. But the truth is, we're all living messy lives. And I encourage people to be real when they're with other people. Let that messiness be there. Because not only is it easier on you, but it gives them permission to be real as well.
JR: How does this project or Recipes for Connection help meet people where they are in that food journey, in that connection?
DVM: So Recipes for Connection, it's almost like a how-to guide that we put together. It's an actual physical publication that we put together to help people understand how to manage some of these anxieties and to give them some easy and fun tips for how to gather. So I'll give you an example. One of the things we talk about is this simple idea of gathering people around childhood favorites. And I actually just did this a few weeks ago with some friends who are chefs, and we all thought about a recipe that our mom made or our dad made when we were growing up that we liked. We made that recipe and we brought it over and we just all ate together. I made a dish that my mother used to make, a dessert. It's called [inaudible 00:13:01]. And it was very simple and we all did the same thing.
And you know what? We told stories about our dishes and we learned about each other, and we actually felt closer to each other. Chef Jose Andres was one of the friends who we invited to this, and he talked about his mother and the dish that he made. I mean you could just hear his mother's love coming through his words. When he was stirring the pot, he was thinking about his mother. And as we ate that dish, we're like, "Wow. He shared something really special with us." And this is just one simple example. You also can imagine having a leftovers party
JR: Yeah.
DVM: Where you all just bring leftovers from your fridge and you just eat it together. 'Cause again, number one, two, three priority is just being together. So this book just has a number of tips like this that can help people take some of the anxiety out of gathering, give them some ideas for how to gather friends, and hopefully create just much more of what we need, which is social connection.
JR: That sounds like a dream outcome. I mean, it sounds, is what you're giving the recipe for the guidebook for is actually for building community.
DVM: That's exactly right. And that is my hope for America that we can rebuild our sense of community. And that's really vital because we have big challenges ahead of us that we're facing right now, whether it's challenges with economic inequality or climate change or violence, gun violence in particular, they're big problems that we're facing as a country. Now that's not surprising. There's always going to be big challenges, but whether or not we can meet those challenges depends on how connected we are to one another, how much we have each other's backs. Are we moving together to address these problems? Are we splintering and falling apart?
And that sense of community is best built through these kind of small gatherings in communities and neighborhoods, among friends. And we can't, I think for generations, Jamila, I think we just took these connections for granted. I think we just assumed you grow up, you build connections and friendships and everything works out well. But we live in a very different world than we did a couple of generations ago. People move around a lot more, but also technology has fundamentally changed our interaction with each other, and a lot of our interactions have shifted online instead of in person. And I'll just tell you, they are not the same. And we evolved over thousands of years to engage with each other in person. When you and I are talking right now and we're sitting recording this podcast, face to face-
JR: We're face to face, we're talking to each other.
DVM: We're talking to each other, and I so treasure that because what we're doing is we're not only listening to the content of what we're saying, but we're hearing each other's tone of voice. We're looking at our facial expressions, our body language. All of that factors into how we foster a connection with somebody. And that's why these in-person gatherings around food can be very powerful. They can take us away from the on-screen interactions that we're so used to having and give us what our body craves, which is in-person human connection.
JR: I think you've said something so interesting. Because we did take these kind of gatherings for granted. You just talked to your friends after school, but we had this thing that happened called the pandemic, and those natural social interactions overnight just disappeared. And I'm not sure if they have ever come back in the robust way that was there before, whereas I might've invited people over every couple of weeks, and now it's only a couple of times a year. And you declared that there's an epidemic of loneliness, and I'm wondering if the Covid lockdowns accelerated that loneliness or if that was the impetus for it?
DVM: Well, I think Covid added fuel to the fire, but the fire of loneliness was burning long before. And what we were seeing actually for more than a decade, and actually for almost half a century prior to Covid, was that the kind of organizations that used to bring us together in our communities, they were declining. The people were going to service organizations and engaging with them less often. There's less participation in recreational leagues and faith organizations. And those all used to be powerful sources of gathering for people. Then you add the technological changes we were talking about with social media coming onto the scene, creating a dramatic shift in our relationships from in-person to online. And then you layer on top of that this pandemic. Which especially in that first year, and I remember being at home as a private citizen looking at what was happening to our country and seeing all of a sudden... It's not just that you couldn't see family and friends, but I think many of us realized that even those incidental interactions we had with somebody in a coffee shop or in the grocery store, we didn't have those. And we realized, wow, those actually made us feel like we were a part of something.
And so we lost a lot of that. And I agree with you that it's been hard to get all of that back. When I go to schools in fact, I had talked to students in high school in particular. A lot of them say they feel they're still struggling to get back to the same level of social comfort that they had before the pandemic. For many of us who may be older, we may have a point of reference, we may have had many years of social interaction before Covid. But if you're younger, if you were going through a critical developmental phase in adolescence or earlier than that, there's not really a point of reference.
So I do think we have to more proactively rebuild this. And one just thing I would offer here is in the same way that we think about hopefully having a regular exercise routine, I think it's important for us at this phase where we're trying to rebuild social connection to think how can we regularly build opportunities for a social connection into our life. That could look like saying, okay, you know what? When I go to work at least three days a week, let me just call a friend on the way to work so that I can talk to somebody. Or might look like saying, "Hey, you know what? At least once a month I want to get together with friends for dinner. Maybe we stay in, maybe we go out, but I want to do something fun around food with my friends at least once a month." Hopefully more often. But I think we have to be more proactive about it now than perhaps we were a generation ago.
JR: We're going to take another break. When we're back, Thanksgiving and some of the food people Dr. Murthy is paying attention to right now.
One of America's big food holidays, it's always comes back to the kitchen for us, but it's around the corner. How do you celebrate Thanksgiving?
DVM: Thanksgiving has evolved a lot in our family over the years, in part because people's dietary preferences have evolved a lot. But the mainstay of it, the cornerstone has always been being together, making food together, and consuming that food together. The making food together, by the way, is really important because there is something really special about being in a kitchen and preparing something with someone else. It's a partnership that is hard to describe unless you've experienced that. I grew up doing this with my mother and my sister and then later on with my dad as well. But even when you are not doing that, even when everyone is bringing something and contributing to a potluck, that just makes you feel like you helped create a meal together. In my family, it's about cooking. And what we cook over the years has changed. We used to have a traditional Turkey that my dad was in charge of and great gusto and enthusiasm and make the Turkey every year. And then most of the family became vegetarians. So then he experimented with vegetarian turkeys, which some years were great. Some years were a struggle-
JR: I was going to ask, how did that go?
DVM: They were a real struggle. But now we in our blended extended family now have a mix of people who eat meat, who don't eat meat. So we make everything now. So we've got turkey, we have chicken, we have Indian food, we've got all kinds of stuff going. But the main say is that it's a time for us not only to be together, but to focus our minds on each other. A lot of times, sometimes when we're with one another, we're distracted. We're thinking about work, we're thinking about this or that. But for us these days, especially now that my wife and I have kids and we want to create and build new traditions with them, we want Thanksgiving to be a time where they know we're together with family, we're making food with family, but we're also focused on family. This is where we put away our devices. This is where we put away work and distractions and we just be fully present with one another.
That's something, by the way, Jamila, I think we just don't have enough of, being fully present with one another. We're very distracted so much of that time. One of the most beautiful and powerful gifts that we can give each other is the gift of our presence. It's the gift of our attention. If you've ever had the experience, and Jamila, of being with somebody where they listened to you deeply, where they looked into your eyes when you spoke, where they responded to what you were talking about, not just to their own random idea, but where they were fully present with you and they weren't checking their devices, they weren't distracted by email or the TV, that five minutes of conversation where we're fully present can feel so much more fulfilling than half an hour of distracted conversation.
And at a time where I know we're all trying to figure out how to add that 25th hour to the day 'cause there's so much to do, the secret is that our attention has a power to stretch time. It can make five minutes feel like 30 minutes. And if we show up for each other in that way, even if it's just for a short period of time, we can do so much to deepen our connection with others.
JR: That's so beautiful. Dr. Murthy. Before we wrap up here, I have one last question for you. Can you tell me about three other food people whose work you love? It could be somebody in the public eye or someone you know personally or other food people who you think are just doing some great work.
DVM: That's a beautiful question. Well, my friend Jose Andres is a well-known chef, many people have probably heard of him. But what I love most about Jose is that he sees his food as a force for love. And that he, in his work, particularly in parts of the world that have been hit by disaster, by war, he recognizes that when you bring food to people in those areas, you're not just bringing them physical sustenance, but you're bringing them a message that they're not alone, that there's somebody who cares about them. And that is so valuable.
But the other two chefs I'll mention actually are my mother and my father. They are very, very different chefs. My mother, she has more simple recipes, and she actually tends to have a recipe that she follows that she has in her head, and she'll make it the same way each time. And it is, her food is incredible. And for my father who's a very different kind of cook, he absolutely does not follow any recipes. He's a creative cook in every imaginal interpretation of the word. He makes not only Indian food, but he makes Italian food, he makes Italian-Indian fusion food. He makes all kinds of stuff. But if you ask him, "Dad, how'd you make that dish?" He'd be like, "Oh, I don't know. I just put a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I don't know. Just put it all together. It's easy." That's what he'll say.
JR: Those are units of measurement: a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I'm going to argue for your dad, that is a unit of measurement.
DVM: Yeah, well, it certainly is for him. But for him also, I just see how much joy he gets. My kids absolutely love his chicken. They call him Tata, which is the term for grandfather in the part of India we come from. And if you just say the word Tata's chicken, oh my gosh, they just get so excited. They start jumping up and down. And he knows that his cooking brings so much joy, and I watch him cooking. My mom finally had to move him out of the main kitchen into the patio with his own grill because she was like, "He makes too much of a mess." So he's got his own space now, but it is full of joy.
And so in all three of these cases, what I see, the common denominator and what I love, is that these three individuals, Jose, my mom and my father, they all cook in very different ways at different scales, but they all see their food as a way of expressing love, of building relationship, of contributing to community. And that to me is one of the greatest contributions that we can make to society, to help build the kind of relationships and community to help share the love that we all really want and crave, and often don't have enough of.
JR: That's so beautiful. I have chills. Anything else that we haven't asked you about that you would love for listeners to know?
DVM: Well, I know that we're talking today at a time when the world feels really fraught and it feels complicated, and many people look at everything that's happening in the world, and they might be really worried, and at times feel pessimistic. Like is the future really bright with everything we're dealing with? But the one thing I want to say to people who might be worried about the world and the future is that sometimes our greatest source of hope and reassurance can actually be found in each other. When we sit down and talk to one another, we share with one another. When we're just really human with one another, what we realize is that we all have common needs. We all want to be understood for who we are. We all want to be loved. We all want to contribute something to the lives of people around us.
And my hope is that if we are more human with another, if we build the kind of connections we've talked about today, that we can find hope in each other. Because the truth is, even though it seems like the world has become more mean and people have become more focused on themselves, what I have found as I've traveled across America is that there is so much generosity still deep within people. In our own ways we reach out, we help one another, we care for one another because that is who we are.
So I just want to say to anyone out there who's worried about the state of the world, just to remember that good people with hearts full of love can change the world. That's the most powerful force that we have. And if we can see that in ourselves and in each other, we can see that by building relationships with one another, then person by person, relationship by relationship, community by community, we can create the kind of beauty and harmony in the world that we want for ourselves and for our children.
JR: So beautiful. Dr. Vivek Murthy, United States Surgeon General, thank you so much for joining me today.
DVM: Thanks so much, Jamila. I really enjoyed this.
JR: Thanks for listening to Food People. Check out Recipes for Connection and Dr. Murthy's newest endeavor, Project Gather at projectgather.org and linked in our show notes.
If you've enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating and review on your podcast app of choice and hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. I'm your host, Jamila Robinson. Our senior producer is Michele O'Brien. Pran Bandi and Jake Lummus are our studio engineers. This episode was mixed by Jake Lummis. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's Head of Global Audio.
Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit
