Cooking Light Subscription: September 2012

Cooking Light Magazine

As Executive Chef for Cooking Light magazine, and resident “celebrity chef,” Chef Billy Strynkowski has gained followers with his positive attitude, healthy and delicious recipes, and helpful cooking tips.

His natural performance skills, engaging personality and well-rounded culinary experience have made him the unassuming culinary go-to guy for millions of Americans.

Chef Billy, as his is commonly known, is a regular guest on CNN and has appeared on dozens of other TV shows including ABC’s The View and CBS’s Good Morning America as the face of Cooking Light. When he’s not developing recipes in the Cooking Light Test Kitchen, Chef Billy is traveling around the country hosting Supper Clubs and other Cooking Light events.

Billy is a culinary graduate of Johnson and Wales University in Providence, R.I. A resident of Hillsdale, N.J., Billy spends his spare time cooking for friends and taking vacations with his wife and two children.

Cooking Light Magazine

Food Magazine

His Quackwatch Web site has a whimsical title, but don't let that fool you. Stephen Barrett, M.D., a retired psychiatrist, cares not a whit about amusing anybody. Rather, he is an indefatigable medical troubleshooter and B.S. detector who wants to tell the truth, as he sees it, about consumer health issues. As for the Web site which gets more than 1,000 hits a day, its self-described purpose is "to combat health-related frauds, myths, fads, and fallacies."
Barrett, who works out of his 1500-square-foot basement home-office in Allentown, Pa., has the credentials to prove both his intellectual weight and workaholic disposition. The co-author/editor of 45 books, including Health Schemes, Scams, and Frauds (Consumer Reports Books), and Chemical Sensitivity: The Truth About Environmental Illness (Prometheus, 1998), he received an FDA Commissioner's Special Citation Award for fighting nutrition quackery in 1984, and two years later was awarded honorary membership in the American Dietetic Association.
Raised in New York City, Barrett received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University, an M.D. from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, and did his psychiatric residency at Temple University in Philadelphia. Married to Judith Nevyas Barrett, a physician, and the father of three (Daniel, Deborah, and Benjamin), he practiced psychiatry for 35 years. "In the late '60s, I began taking an interest in health frauds," says Barrett, 65. "As time went on, I began cutting down on my practice to pursue my hobby. Eventually, I just shut my door." In 1993 he began pursuing his avocation full time.

Food Magazine

Bettycrocker

The Washburn Crosby Company -- later re-named General Mills -- invented the character Betty Crocker in 1921 to personalize letters in response to customers. Betty Crocker's name and signature soon became a representative for the company's flour and other "home economics" projects, including a chain of cooking schools throughout the United States designed to test and demonstrate products and recipes. By 1936 Betty had become so popular the company created a face to go along with her signature. In 1950 the first Betty Crocker cookbook was published, and quickly became a staple in American kitchens. Around the same time the logo, a red spoon and signature, appeared on boxed cake mixes. Since then Betty's name has been used on a wide range of products, and her image has been updated 8 times, most recently in 1996.