Food Heaven’s Wendy Lopez Discusses Cultural Competency and How to Transform Holiday Dishes This Season
As Christmas nears and the pernil and pastelitos get prepared for cooking, transform some of your favorite holiday dishes with healthier ingredients. It’s often misconstrued that healthy eating means less tasty foods and getting rid of the sazon. However, Wendy Lopez, RD, CDE, and Jessica Jones, RD, CDE, created Food Heaven as a means to break barriers between health and enjoyment.
“Jess and I saw a huge need there because there weren't really any resources and people weren't connecting with the materials that were out there in the clinics where they're seeing their dietician,” Lopez says. “I think that's why our platform resonates so much with people of color, because they feel seen.”
Lopez is a Dominican American who was raised in the Bronx, NY. She became a registered dietician in 2014 and does consulting as a CDE (Certified Diabetes Educator) for a telehealth startup. She and Jones met while working at farmers’ markets within the Bronx as they performed food demonstrations for low-income communities.
“It was a very pivotal experience in the start of my career because that was kind of my introduction to nutrition education,” she says. “And I just saw how effective it was to give people practical tools that they can use to incorporate in their day-to-day life when it comes to food and cooking and nutrition.”
When it comes to the lack of resources available for communities of color, particularly those from Latinx backgrounds, Lopez noticed a concern around abandoning their culture when transitioning towards healthier eating. This is an issue that often gets suppressed by the majority of leading dieticians and nutritionists not accurately representing the eating habits of those from communities of color within the United States.
According to the Commission of Dietician Restriction, 2.6 percent of registered dietitians are those who identify as Black or African American, 3.1 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino, 0.3 percent are American Indian or Alaskan Native, 3.9 percent are Asian, 1.3 percent are Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander and 81.1 percent are white.
While attending Hunter College in East Harlem, Lopez noticed a lack of diversity within the nutrition program and it made her feel out of place.
“I was one of the few people of color and it just felt very weird,” she says. “I just didn't really connect to the curriculum. We didn't touch on anything related to culture as it relates to counseling and nutrition therapy and so it was something that you kind of bring to the table yourself.”
Lopez and Jones provide a wide range of recipes on their platform, including personalized twists around popular meals within different Latinx cultures such as Peach Summer Ceviche, Dominican Macaroni Salad, or Cheesy Spinach Pastelitos.
When they’re not sharing recipes, they provide content on the Food Heaven Podcast, where they talk about topics like food and culture, intuitive eating, mental health, and more. Lopez believes that a shift has to occur within a society where healthy eating isn’t only seen as something for only non-Latinx white people.
“Our foundation, oftentimes, is plant foods [but] it's just within the context of other foods, like animal foods,” Lopez says. “How do we restructure that to celebrate plant foods that are part of our culture and kind of go back to our roots with farming and sustainable agriculture?”
While working at the farmer’s market, Lopez and Jones often experimented with introducing the community to unfamiliar produce by incorporating cultural recipes. Lopez explains that over 10 years ago, kale was a rarely consumed vegetable so she often showed those, such as Mexican communities how to incorporate it into tortillas and make it enjoyable.
“We were just really inspired by working with the community because we saw how excited they were to try the recipes and they would come back, week after week, and tell us how it went for them,” she says. “We noticed that the cultural component in incorporating [cultural foods] made a huge difference in how open they were to receiving the information and actually incorporating it into their life.”
During this holiday season, Lopez advises that in order to recreate favorite cultural holiday dishes into healthier dishes is by tapping into certain preferences. She mentions that something often included in meals is raisins, which are used in their Rum Raisin Cake recipe.
“There's just so many opportunities to use foods that are culturally relevant to you like for Dominicans, especially, raisins are a very commonly used food,” she says. “And also it could be animal-based foods too and just trying to figure out how to incorporate them but also, and I hate to use the word balanced without context because it's very vague but [basically] eating a wide variety of different foods so that you're getting different nutrients in so that you feel satisfied as well.”
In aiming to provide more resources and break boundaries between those available for low-income communities, Lopez emphasizes the need for funding and increased education which has successfully been improved throughout the years for communities like the Bronx.
Lopez says, “They really did a great job at expanding that program and there are farmers markets all throughout the Bronx now which that was not the case 10 years ago and I've seen just how impactful that can be.”
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Andreina Rodriguez is a freelance writer for We All Grow Latina. She is a Dominican American journalist born and raised in Queens, New York and dedicated to highlighting the stories of Latinx people. After recently graduating from St. John's University, she's published works with QNS, The Mujerista, and Latino Rebels. As a writer, she hopes to help readers gain insight around societal issues, particularly in relation to underrepresented communities.