Hobos Restaurant Teaches How to Go Back to Basics

Chef Gretchen Hanson instructs classes in plant-based cooking, eating and wellness.

If you’ve never thought about how you eat, what you eat, how it affects your body and how agriculture impacts the environment, Hobos chef Gretchen Hanson will break it down for you. For the past five years, she has taught a class in plant-based cooking, eating and wellness at her popular Rehoboth restaurant. This year’s will run one night a week from Jan. 26 through mid-April, and is open to anyone who has a sincere interest in learning about cooking and health. In short, Hanson teaches how to cook healthy food that doesn’t taste like health food. Participants not only learn all the techniques that turn grains and greens into mouth-watering meals, but how to balance foods for maximal nutrition. She reports that many participants shed  significant weight—200 pounds in one case—and become truly conscious eaters, just by going back to basics. “Imagine again that you were in this pre Big Mac industrialized-food-as-big-business-world and lived in an agrarian culture,” Hanson writes. “Vegetables would be fresh from the garden and abundant. Meat and animal products would be used, but very sparingly, in small quantities and as seasoning or flavoring, not the base of every meal. Livestock would not be prophylactically treated with antibiotics or steroid enhanced. Animals would eat the food they were intended to by God and not just clear up man’s surplus corn. As a farmer you would work hard manual labor for many hours a day, lowering your BMI and increasing metabolism so calorie counting would be superfluous. There would be sugar, but a rare special treat.  During the winter or fallow months you would eat more sparingly of preserved food (canned, salted, dried or oil packed) and dried meats and beans. Alcohol would be a rare indulgence for very special celebrations.” Well, the classes teach you how to live something like that in this modern, consumption-crazy world, and explains why you’re better off for it. “We are turning back the clock with a few small changes,” Hanson says. She promises a wild and enlightening ride. Call 226-2226 or email chefgretchen@gmail.com.

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