Chef Camille Becerra is packing a new kind of sustenance into every bite.

Camille Becerra cooks with her cravings in mind. For the past 30 years, the New York–based chef and recipe developer has been honing a practice of listening to her body and feeding its appetite with food that’s both nutritional and visually stunning. It was Becerra, for example, who shined a bright light on dragon bowls, those macrobiotic grain bowls topped with bright, zesty garnishes like goji berries and pickled beets, propelling them to a place of internet ubiquity.

“It’s not about hitting people over the head by making food super healthy,” Becerra says. “Within that realm of eating healthy, there are so many other things that happen. Your body’s more connected to the food that grows around you. On a spiritual level, once you start eating seasonally, you start noticing things that you wouldn’t normally, and I think that’s the biggest plus.”

In her upcoming book, Bright Cooking, due out next spring, Becerra encourages her read- ers to tune in to the body for culinary guidance so that they can create dishes that truly satisfy. “I think that it’s easy for us to look at a recipe and follow it, and then that’s the recipe you go to all the time,” Becerra explains. “I wanted to give people the tools to understand how to develop and create a dish on their own, regardless of where they’re at on the globe, where they’re at in the seasons, and where they’re at physically. It’s about listening to your body and understanding what it needs.” In Bright Cooking, Becerra says she hopes to offer something unique, a departure from the typical staccato cookbook formula of recipe-plus- picture ad infinitum. “I wanted to break that up, and I wanted it to read more like a novel so that each page isn’t the same,” says Becerra. “I wanted to give it mystique.”

Though based in New York, Becerra draws inspiration from her travels, especially frequent post-pandemic visits to Miami, a city that con- nects her to her Puerto Rican and Cuban roots. Exploring indigenous teachings and ingredients there, Becerra aspires to find a point of con- nection that transcends a single place, one that speaks to the practice of eating locally and sea- sonally wherever you are. “Everyone talks about certain ingredients, like sea moss, but the thing is, yeah, that works great if you’re in a subtropi- cal environment, but what’s the sea moss of this area?” she asks. “I want to keep learning, and understanding, and opening a bigger scope and lens to the indigenous ingredients of this area.”

With her book finally done, Becerra looks forward to getting back in the kitchen (she’s currently considering which restaurant would be the ideal place to put roots down). Working with the public is, after all, the best way to bring her insights from pages to plates, where everyone can share them. “The kind of work I do and the kind of chef I want to be is about education. It’s about always putting forth food that ultimately makes people feel good and also is enjoyable,” she says. “It’s really about giving people a lesson in eating well.” ❤