There is something rather fashionable about declaring that you are going green. A new wardrobe, a new skincare routine, a new approach to wellness. Suddenly, everyone is drinking something chlorophyll-colored and telling the rest of us that we’ve been doing life incorrectly.
But what happens when going green isn’t a trend at all? What if it’s a return to something our grandmothers, great-grandmothers and generations of cooks before them understood long before wellness became a billion-dollar industry?
That is the more interesting question sitting at the center of Marcus Samuelsson’s latest cookbook, Back to Green: Rediscovering a World of Delicious, Healthy Eating.
And if anyone knows how to make a conversation about food feel like a conversation about culture, it is Samuelsson.
The celebrated chef, restaurateur, television personality and longtime Harlem presence has built a career that refuses to keep food in a single category. His cooking has always traveled. From Ethiopia to Sweden, from the Caribbean to the American South, his culinary identity has been shaped by migration, memory, reinvention and the extraordinary things that happen when cultures meet around a table.
With Back to Green, published October 20 by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House, Samuelsson turns his attention toward the ingredients and food traditions that connect nourishment with heritage. Developed with Jamila Robinson, the 368-page cookbook looks at plant-forward cooking through the lens of cultures around the world.
It is a rather different proposition from simply telling people to eat more vegetables.
The green we’ve been overlooking
For years, the American wellness conversation has been remarkably good at making old ideas sound like expensive new discoveries. Suddenly, ingredients that have been central to African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous food traditions are being introduced to the mainstream as if somebody just discovered them in the produce aisle.
Samuelsson’s book invites a different perspective.
Its culinary landscape includes coconut, rice, corn, açaí, plantains, teff and chilies. These aren’t merely ingredients selected because they photograph beautifully on a restaurant menu. They carry histories. They tell stories about geography, migration, agriculture, family and survival.
Consider the plantain. In Caribbean kitchens, it can be breakfast, a side dish, a snack or the centerpiece of a meal. Rice has traveled through continents and generations, becoming something entirely different depending on whose kitchen it enters. Teff, central to Ethiopian food traditions, has a history that long predates its appearance in contemporary wellness conversations.
There is a certain irony in watching ingredients that have sustained communities for generations become fashionable once someone gives them a new label.
And perhaps that is one of the most compelling ideas behind Back to Green: the recognition that some of the most interesting conversations about eating well have been happening in communities that rarely receive the credit.
A cookbook with a passport
One of the pleasures of Samuelsson’s approach is its refusal to make healthy eating feel like punishment.
The book moves across the Caribbean, South America, East Asia, Africa and other regions, looking at how food traditions have incorporated ingredients from the earth into everyday cooking. It is a global conversation, but one that begins with the plate.
Among the recipes featured are a papaya and passion fruit smoothie, steamed black cod with spicy pineapple salsa, an eggplant omelet with banana ketchup, a rice noodle bowl with ginger and garlic broth, and lentil salad with coconut turmeric vinaigrette.
There is also a vegetarian injera lasagna, a particularly intriguing meeting of culinary traditions.
Notice what is happening here. The food isn’t being stripped of its personality in the name of wellness. The flavors remain bold. The ingredients have character. The dishes are allowed to be delicious.
And this matters because the conversation about healthier eating can sometimes become unnecessarily elitist. It can suggest that eating well requires a specialty grocery store, a complicated supplement routine or a refrigerator stocked with ingredients whose names sound like they belong in a chemistry laboratory.
But the most meaningful food traditions are often built around knowing how to use what is available, how to make ingredients work together and how to feed a household with care.
Samuelsson’s perspective makes room for that history.
The Harlem connection
For New Yorkers, and particularly those who know Harlem’s restaurant landscape, Samuelsson’s name carries a special resonance.
Red Rooster Harlem has become more than a restaurant. It is a gathering place, a cultural address and part of the neighborhood’s contemporary hospitality identity. Its existence reflects something larger about the role restaurants can play in a community: they can be places where food, music, conversation and cultural expression coexist.
Samuelsson has long understood that the restaurant experience is about more than what arrives on the plate.
That sensibility was visible during the New York launch of Back to Green at the Perelman Performing Arts Center on October 20. The conversation, moderated by Michael Strahan, brought the cookbook into a setting that felt appropriately connected to the broader cultural conversation. Guests could also dine at Metropolis, Samuelsson’s restaurant inside PAC NYC.
The launch itself became an extension of the book’s philosophy: food as an experience, food as conversation, and food as an invitation to discover something beyond the familiar.
The book’s tour also included appearances in Miami, Atlanta and Los Angeles, connecting Samuelsson with audiences in different culinary communities.
It is a reminder that a cookbook can have a life beyond the kitchen counter. It can travel into bookstores, theaters, restaurants and conversations about the way we live.
Wellness without the performance
Here is where the conversation becomes especially interesting.
We have become accustomed to wellness being presented as an aesthetic. The perfectly arranged breakfast bowl. The immaculate kitchen. The green juice held at precisely the right angle. The suggestion that if we purchase the correct products, we will somehow become the best possible versions of ourselves.
But food traditions rarely begin with performance.
They begin with necessity, ingenuity, family and the simple desire to make something nourishing and satisfying. The knowledge is often passed down informally, through watching, tasting, adjusting and learning.
In reporting on the book’s launch, Amsterdam News food editor Kysha Harris described Samuelsson discussing the importance of access to fresh, nourishing food in underserved communities. That is a necessary dimension of any serious conversation about wellness.
It is one thing to tell people to eat better. It is another to consider whether fresh ingredients are affordable, whether neighborhoods have adequate grocery options, whether families have time to cook and whether communities have access to the knowledge and resources that make healthy eating sustainable.
Wellness cannot be separated from access.
And it certainly cannot be separated from culture.
A dish is not automatically better because it has been redesigned for a fashionable audience. Nor does an ingredient become more valuable because it has been introduced to a new market. The communities that have cultivated, cooked and preserved these traditions deserve recognition in the conversation.
That is where the cultural dimension of this book becomes particularly important.
The family table is still the most important table
There is another side to Samuelsson’s story that makes this project feel more personal.
In an interview with DiningOut, the chef discussed how much of the book took shape during the pandemic, when cooking at home for his family became a more central part of daily life.
The interview included a particularly charming example involving his daughter Grace and waffles made with banana, sweet potato and cooked quinoa. The preparation reduced the amount of white flour in the recipe.
It is a small domestic detail, but it tells us something about how culinary creativity develops. Sometimes the most interesting recipe doesn’t begin in a professional kitchen. It begins with a parent looking at the ingredients available and wondering how to make something familiar a little differently.
That is the kind of cooking knowledge that gets passed along.
Not every family meal needs to be an elaborate production. Not every dinner needs a chef’s technique. Sometimes the important thing is that someone took the time to prepare something, that the food brought people together and that a new idea found its way into an old favorite.
A cookbook that can encourage that kind of curiosity has value beyond its recipes.
So, what does going back to green really mean?
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Back to Green is that it arrives at a moment when the food industry is increasingly interested in the intersection of flavor, wellness, sustainability and cultural identity.
But Samuelsson’s premise suggests that we should be careful about confusing discovery with reinvention.
There is a wealth of knowledge in traditional foodways. There are ingredients with extraordinary histories, cooking techniques refined over generations and communities whose understanding of food extends far beyond a list of nutritional benefits.
The opportunity is to recognize that knowledge, preserve it, share it responsibly and make room for the people who have carried it forward.
That doesn’t mean every reader will suddenly abandon their favorite comfort foods or begin preparing an entirely plant-based menu. In fact, Back to Green is plant-forward rather than exclusively vegetarian. Its recipe collection includes seafood, meat and vegetable-centered dishes.
The point is not to establish another set of culinary rules.
It is to expand the possibilities.
And perhaps that is the best kind of food writing: the kind that leaves you curious enough to try something new, thoughtful enough to ask where it came from and appreciative enough to understand why it matters.
For Samuelsson, whose career has consistently explored the relationship between food and identity, this latest chapter feels like a natural continuation of a much larger conversation.
The title says Back to Green. But perhaps the more important word is back.
Back to ingredients that have sustained families. Back to culinary traditions that deserve recognition. Back to the knowledge that nourishment can be delicious, culturally meaningful and accessible. Back to the idea that a meal is never just a meal.
And if all of that happens to look beautiful on a dinner table, well, darling, that certainly doesn’t hurt.
Mood Magazine | Cuisine
