Thursday, August 09, 2007
Mary Kay Culpepper, "Cooking Light" magazine editor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1
Like most Americans, I don’t have the best eating habits.
I generally try to follow the 80/20 rule. I make an effort to eat smart and well about 80 percent of the time and give in to my inner teenager the other 20 percent, having an occasional burger and fries.
Over the last 25 years, we’ve been barraged by media and marketing that urge us to eat a better diet and make better choices at every meal, and one of the magazines long at the forefront of this effort is Time Warner’s Cooking Light, and I should know, my wife has stacks of back issues all over the house.
Joining me today is Mary Kay Culpepper, editor of Cooking Light, which she took over in January 2001. Since then, the magazine’s audience has grown to more than eleven and a half million readers, and it seems safe to assume that at least a few of them have improved their health by following the ideas and recipes in Cooking Light.
CULPEPPER: Wow, Bob, thanks so much. I’m happy to be here, and I’m delighted that you and your wife are living with some back issues of Cooking Light.
ANDELMAN: Oh, yeah. We’ve got them here for sure. I was just afraid you were gonna ask me if I’m having an 80 day or a 20 day.
CULPEPPER: Well, tell me about 80/20.
ANDELMAN: Well, it’s something I picked up on in a book I worked on years ago called The Corporate Athlete. The fellow I did that with said that if you follow 80 percent of the time you do the right thing, and he said that could apply to exercise or eating or pretty much anything in your life, he said the other 20 percent you can kind of let yourself go a little bit. He said it’s a lot easier than trying to be 100 percent of the time so perfect. So I always thought that was a good way to go.
CULPEPPER: That sounds logical to me.
ANDELMAN: Something I could live with.
CULPEPPER: In fact, it’s something that fits really well with the tenets of the magazine to eat smart, be fit, live well. We let readers have access to a lot of great information about doing just that and let them make the decisions themselves. So 80/20 goes right there.
ANDELMAN: Do you ever worry about having too heavy a tone in a magazine like this, that thou shalt eat well?
CULPEPPER: No. One thing that we work on here and are quite conscious about is keeping a very positive voice in the magazine. I think Americans and American women, in particular, are given so many conflicting messages about food and about health and trying to help people understand the choices in front of them and giving them the power to make those choices. Not necessarily making them for them is one of the real special parts of the magazine in my point of view.
ANDELMAN: So you present the information, you let them know what’s good, and hopefully, they make the right choices.
CULPEPPER: Yes, because it’s all about context. The 80/20 situation is a great case in point there. You are making a choice, and it really does work well for you, and it’s such a good way to proceed that you feel that you can live up to it almost all of the time. And so I think you work out really hard one day, you don’t work out so hard another day, or perhaps you even take a rest day, but it all fits into the package of what’s going on at one particular time. You’re not made or broken in a day. And life is like that. You have lots of different choices. And I think the great thing about cooking, in particular, is you have three shots a day at it.
ANDELMAN: One of the previous jobs that you had was executive editor of Weight Watchers, right?
CULPEPPER: Yes.
ANDELMAN: What is the difference in philosophy, let’s say, between Weight Watchers and Cooking Light?
CULPEPPER: Well, Cooking Light really is about healthful living, and it’s not necessarily about weight loss, and Cooking Light is really more holistic, I think, than the focus that Weight Watchers has. And Weight Watchers is a really terrific magazine and continues to be quite strong. But Cooking Light really takes into account the whole person and where readers go on vacation, what they’re interested in besides cooking, although we know that our readers are passionate about food.
ANDELMAN: So, would you say it’s a lifestyle magazine?
CULPEPPER: I think that’s a great description.
ANDELMAN: I’m curious, and you don’t have to answer this, but I’m curious, someone who’s been at Weight Watchers and then Cooking Light, have you ever had to deal with weight or health issues that are relevant to these two magazines yourself?
CULPEPPER: No, not really. But I will tell you that I have cooked from Cooking Light since it began, and I have worked out from Cooking Light pretty much since it began, and oddly enough, taken vacations that Cooking Light has recommended well before I was on the staff of the magazine. So I’ve always understood the premise of the magazine and, as a subscriber, really loved the way it got its point across. It is a terrific idea for a magazine, and, in fact, I think it’s a terrific magazine, and I am thrilled that we have 11.5 million readers who agree.
ANDELMAN: It’s a good thing you’re the editor because all that enthusiasm would be wasted otherwise.
CULPEPPER: I don’t know. We have some readers who love us. We have an incredible phenomenon on cookinglight.com, which is a bulletin board, and people post reviews of recipes. People actually post when they get their issue in the mail and will take it upon themselves to type the index from the magazine so all of the recipes are there, and people can decide before they even have the issue in hand what it will be that they’ll make first. And that is so precious to this magazine that I’m not the only one who’s enthusiastic about it, obviously.
ANDELMAN: Is that a good thing, though, that they take it on themselves to post that to the forums?
CULPEPPER: I think free speech, as a professional journalist, is the best thing ever. So I can’t imagine that it would be a bad thing. I think, again, it’s people making choices for themselves and extrapolated out to this particular degree.
ANDELMAN: It’s certainly not cutting into your circulation, apparently.
CULPEPPER: Nope.
ANDELMAN: Speaking of recipes, I have to ask you this. I always wonder about this when I see the cooking magazines, especially when I see the stacks of Cooking Lights here, why don’t you guys ever run out of recipes?
CULPEPPER: That’s a great question, Bob, and I don’t know that anybody’s ever asked me that. We assign recipes. Actually, it’s a fairly interesting process that we go through to get recipes. We work with recipe developers that are on staff, and there are some incredibly talented people here and actually around the world because I think it’s really important that we have a sort of pan-national palate, something that certainly represents American appetites but also because our readers travel, and they’re exposed to many different world cuisines that that’s here too. So we assign recipes to developers, and we are constantly looking for people who have a great palate and who can really make recipes come to life and make healthful recipes, in particular, come to life.
ANDELMAN: So the recipes do not come from the Keebler Elves.
CULPEPPER: No. Or from wishing and hoping. It’s a lot of work that goes into them.
ANDELMAN: As a veteran freelance writer who’s used to getting assignments, I’m kind of curious, though, how do you assign recipes? You say, hey, you know what, we’d really like something with halibut, whip up something with halibut, or how does that work?
CULPEPPER: Well, it’s not unlike that. You do have parameters. One of our most popular columns is “Dinner Tonight,” which is essentially four menus, and there is a main recipe and a couple of very quick, straight-forward side dishes that go with this main recipe to create a menu that can be put together in about thirty-five minutes or so. So I say to you, “Bob, we would like your best ‘Dinner Tonight’ recipes for halibut.” That’s a little narrow for us, but I can see it happening. So you might decide, well, one would be grilled halibut with fruit salsa, and perhaps one would be pecan-crusted halibut. Another would be perhaps broiled halibut with lemon pepper. And then the last one could be steamed halibut in a ponzu sauce. So you would create those recipes and suggest the side recipes that would go to it and submit them. We would run them through our test kitchens to see if the proportions were right, the balance was right, that the nutrition information came through loud and clear and really fit the parameters that we have in the magazine. We rate the recipes at taste testing. If they pass, then they run in the magazine, and your assignment is complete. It’s just like that.
ANDELMAN: You mention test kitchens, and I wanted to ask you. Consumer Reports has its fabled test laboratories. What exactly does Cooking Light have?
CULPEPPER: We have some fabulous chefs in our test kitchens, people with incredible backgrounds, and interestingly enough, given that, they all have various specialties that really do inform the pages of the magazine. The test kitchens director, Vanessa Johnson, who has actually been at all of the test kitchens at Southern Progress, so she was director of Southern Living’s test kitchens, which really started it all for this company, as well as Oxmoor House, the book division’s, and has run ours for the last seven years. And she’s sort of the ringmaster of eight different chefs who work in the kitchens preparing recipes in various cooking stations. And we really do test every single recipe that runs in the magazine as well as prepare the dishes for photography, and they are all real and all ours.
ANDELMAN: There must be a couple of slightly overweight people on staff there if someone’s testing all these recipes.
CULPEPPER: They’re light.
ANDELMAN: They’re light. I kind of set that up, and you hit it out of the park, didn’t you? Let me ask you this: how has the definition of “cooking light” changed over the years?
CULPEPPER: That’s a great question. We are actually celebrating our 20th year this year, and we’ve had a lot of occasion to look back at what the magazine was and is, and it’s been interesting because in a lot of ways, Cooking Light has not changed at all. In the very first issue, Don Logan, who has now retired from Time Warner, said that what we wanted to bring you is straightforward, credible information about how to eat well and exercise, and that’s never really changed at all. What we have found that’s changed in twenty years has been a real shift in thinking that Cooking Light would represent diet foods, for example, or deprivation. And I think that given the results of our last proprietary insight study that we did with the Roper Organization, we found that people are really aware of what they should do to eat more healthfully and to move more, which is half the battle is knowing what you should do.
Click here to keep reading!
©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Like most Americans, I don’t have the best eating habits.
I generally try to follow the 80/20 rule. I make an effort to eat smart and well about 80 percent of the time and give in to my inner teenager the other 20 percent, having an occasional burger and fries.
Over the last 25 years, we’ve been barraged by media and marketing that urge us to eat a better diet and make better choices at every meal, and one of the magazines long at the forefront of this effort is Time Warner’s Cooking Light, and I should know, my wife has stacks of back issues all over the house.
Joining me today is Mary Kay Culpepper, editor of Cooking Light, which she took over in January 2001. Since then, the magazine’s audience has grown to more than eleven and a half million readers, and it seems safe to assume that at least a few of them have improved their health by following the ideas and recipes in Cooking Light.
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CULPEPPER: Wow, Bob, thanks so much. I’m happy to be here, and I’m delighted that you and your wife are living with some back issues of Cooking Light.
ANDELMAN: Oh, yeah. We’ve got them here for sure. I was just afraid you were gonna ask me if I’m having an 80 day or a 20 day.
CULPEPPER: Well, tell me about 80/20.
ANDELMAN: Well, it’s something I picked up on in a book I worked on years ago called The Corporate Athlete. The fellow I did that with said that if you follow 80 percent of the time you do the right thing, and he said that could apply to exercise or eating or pretty much anything in your life, he said the other 20 percent you can kind of let yourself go a little bit. He said it’s a lot easier than trying to be 100 percent of the time so perfect. So I always thought that was a good way to go.
CULPEPPER: That sounds logical to me.
ANDELMAN: Something I could live with.
CULPEPPER: In fact, it’s something that fits really well with the tenets of the magazine to eat smart, be fit, live well. We let readers have access to a lot of great information about doing just that and let them make the decisions themselves. So 80/20 goes right there.
ANDELMAN: Do you ever worry about having too heavy a tone in a magazine like this, that thou shalt eat well?
CULPEPPER: No. One thing that we work on here and are quite conscious about is keeping a very positive voice in the magazine. I think Americans and American women, in particular, are given so many conflicting messages about food and about health and trying to help people understand the choices in front of them and giving them the power to make those choices. Not necessarily making them for them is one of the real special parts of the magazine in my point of view.
ANDELMAN: So you present the information, you let them know what’s good, and hopefully, they make the right choices.
CULPEPPER: Yes, because it’s all about context. The 80/20 situation is a great case in point there. You are making a choice, and it really does work well for you, and it’s such a good way to proceed that you feel that you can live up to it almost all of the time. And so I think you work out really hard one day, you don’t work out so hard another day, or perhaps you even take a rest day, but it all fits into the package of what’s going on at one particular time. You’re not made or broken in a day. And life is like that. You have lots of different choices. And I think the great thing about cooking, in particular, is you have three shots a day at it.
ANDELMAN: One of the previous jobs that you had was executive editor of Weight Watchers, right?
CULPEPPER: Yes.
ANDELMAN: What is the difference in philosophy, let’s say, between Weight Watchers and Cooking Light?
CULPEPPER: Well, Cooking Light really is about healthful living, and it’s not necessarily about weight loss, and Cooking Light is really more holistic, I think, than the focus that Weight Watchers has. And Weight Watchers is a really terrific magazine and continues to be quite strong. But Cooking Light really takes into account the whole person and where readers go on vacation, what they’re interested in besides cooking, although we know that our readers are passionate about food.
ANDELMAN: So, would you say it’s a lifestyle magazine?
CULPEPPER: I think that’s a great description.
ANDELMAN: I’m curious, and you don’t have to answer this, but I’m curious, someone who’s been at Weight Watchers and then Cooking Light, have you ever had to deal with weight or health issues that are relevant to these two magazines yourself?
CULPEPPER: No, not really. But I will tell you that I have cooked from Cooking Light since it began, and I have worked out from Cooking Light pretty much since it began, and oddly enough, taken vacations that Cooking Light has recommended well before I was on the staff of the magazine. So I’ve always understood the premise of the magazine and, as a subscriber, really loved the way it got its point across. It is a terrific idea for a magazine, and, in fact, I think it’s a terrific magazine, and I am thrilled that we have 11.5 million readers who agree.
ANDELMAN: It’s a good thing you’re the editor because all that enthusiasm would be wasted otherwise.
CULPEPPER: I don’t know. We have some readers who love us. We have an incredible phenomenon on cookinglight.com, which is a bulletin board, and people post reviews of recipes. People actually post when they get their issue in the mail and will take it upon themselves to type the index from the magazine so all of the recipes are there, and people can decide before they even have the issue in hand what it will be that they’ll make first. And that is so precious to this magazine that I’m not the only one who’s enthusiastic about it, obviously.
ANDELMAN: Is that a good thing, though, that they take it on themselves to post that to the forums?
CULPEPPER: I think free speech, as a professional journalist, is the best thing ever. So I can’t imagine that it would be a bad thing. I think, again, it’s people making choices for themselves and extrapolated out to this particular degree.
ANDELMAN: It’s certainly not cutting into your circulation, apparently.
CULPEPPER: Nope.
ANDELMAN: Speaking of recipes, I have to ask you this. I always wonder about this when I see the cooking magazines, especially when I see the stacks of Cooking Lights here, why don’t you guys ever run out of recipes?
CULPEPPER: That’s a great question, Bob, and I don’t know that anybody’s ever asked me that. We assign recipes. Actually, it’s a fairly interesting process that we go through to get recipes. We work with recipe developers that are on staff, and there are some incredibly talented people here and actually around the world because I think it’s really important that we have a sort of pan-national palate, something that certainly represents American appetites but also because our readers travel, and they’re exposed to many different world cuisines that that’s here too. So we assign recipes to developers, and we are constantly looking for people who have a great palate and who can really make recipes come to life and make healthful recipes, in particular, come to life.
ANDELMAN: So the recipes do not come from the Keebler Elves.
CULPEPPER: No. Or from wishing and hoping. It’s a lot of work that goes into them.
ANDELMAN: As a veteran freelance writer who’s used to getting assignments, I’m kind of curious, though, how do you assign recipes? You say, hey, you know what, we’d really like something with halibut, whip up something with halibut, or how does that work?
CULPEPPER: Well, it’s not unlike that. You do have parameters. One of our most popular columns is “Dinner Tonight,” which is essentially four menus, and there is a main recipe and a couple of very quick, straight-forward side dishes that go with this main recipe to create a menu that can be put together in about thirty-five minutes or so. So I say to you, “Bob, we would like your best ‘Dinner Tonight’ recipes for halibut.” That’s a little narrow for us, but I can see it happening. So you might decide, well, one would be grilled halibut with fruit salsa, and perhaps one would be pecan-crusted halibut. Another would be perhaps broiled halibut with lemon pepper. And then the last one could be steamed halibut in a ponzu sauce. So you would create those recipes and suggest the side recipes that would go to it and submit them. We would run them through our test kitchens to see if the proportions were right, the balance was right, that the nutrition information came through loud and clear and really fit the parameters that we have in the magazine. We rate the recipes at taste testing. If they pass, then they run in the magazine, and your assignment is complete. It’s just like that.
ANDELMAN: You mention test kitchens, and I wanted to ask you. Consumer Reports has its fabled test laboratories. What exactly does Cooking Light have?
CULPEPPER: We have some fabulous chefs in our test kitchens, people with incredible backgrounds, and interestingly enough, given that, they all have various specialties that really do inform the pages of the magazine. The test kitchens director, Vanessa Johnson, who has actually been at all of the test kitchens at Southern Progress, so she was director of Southern Living’s test kitchens, which really started it all for this company, as well as Oxmoor House, the book division’s, and has run ours for the last seven years. And she’s sort of the ringmaster of eight different chefs who work in the kitchens preparing recipes in various cooking stations. And we really do test every single recipe that runs in the magazine as well as prepare the dishes for photography, and they are all real and all ours.
ANDELMAN: There must be a couple of slightly overweight people on staff there if someone’s testing all these recipes.
CULPEPPER: They’re light.
ANDELMAN: They’re light. I kind of set that up, and you hit it out of the park, didn’t you? Let me ask you this: how has the definition of “cooking light” changed over the years?
CULPEPPER: That’s a great question. We are actually celebrating our 20th year this year, and we’ve had a lot of occasion to look back at what the magazine was and is, and it’s been interesting because in a lot of ways, Cooking Light has not changed at all. In the very first issue, Don Logan, who has now retired from Time Warner, said that what we wanted to bring you is straightforward, credible information about how to eat well and exercise, and that’s never really changed at all. What we have found that’s changed in twenty years has been a real shift in thinking that Cooking Light would represent diet foods, for example, or deprivation. And I think that given the results of our last proprietary insight study that we did with the Roper Organization, we found that people are really aware of what they should do to eat more healthfully and to move more, which is half the battle is knowing what you should do.
Click here to keep reading!
©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Cooking Light, Keebler Elves, Mary Kay Culpepper, Southern Living, Weight Watchers
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