From the moment her son Ralph came to national attention, Rose Nader was constantly asked, “What did you feed Ralph?” People weren’t just curious about her son’s impressive height (6’4”) - they wanted to know what they should cook in order to create someone like Ralph Nader, that rare creature blessed with a compassionate heart and the brains and talent to do battle against overwhelming forces - like, say, General Motors. If “You Are What You Eat” is true (and it is, literally; our bodies are made of food), what is Ralph Nader made of? What are the secret ingredients? To answer that question, Mrs. Nader wrote "It Happened in The Kitchen: Recipes For Food and Thought" (The Center for the Study of Responsive Law), a book about cooking and child-rearing, with a bonus chapter containing the wit and wisdom of Ralph’s father, Nathra Nader, the Oscar Wilde of Winsted, Connecticut.

For the last forty-plus years, Ralph’s focus has been on safeguarding the basic necessities for human health: clean air, food, water, and keeping dangerous consumer goods out of the marketplace. Ralph fights the perpetrators who destroy these necessities - uncaring corporations that poison our air, food, and water, and push dangerous goods on the American consumer. The best summary of Ralph’s work came from his big sister, Dr. Claire Nader, who said, “He doesn’t like seeing people get hurt!” Ralph can’t bear to see people getting maimed (hurt physically) or ripped off (hurt economically). Corporations, in their never-ending quest for the almighty buck, have no qualms about pushing their junk foods on the public, and specifically, on vulnerable, impressionable children. These were not lessons learned at Princeton or Harvard (where Ralph was a student), but in the kitchen of his mother. Mrs. Nader was a woman ahead of her time, a homemaker who cooked low-fat recipes and disdained hot dogs, refined wheat, and processed foods. Mrs. Nader’s simple, wholesome cooking helped build a tall and mighty consumer advocate who was able to work twenty-hour days without relying on a single cup of coffee.

A favorite family story was how Mrs. Nader once caved in to her children’s pressure to make a birthday cake with frosting, like “all the other children” had. Mrs. Nader, who allowed only tiny amounts of sugar in her family’s diet, dutifully made the cake...but after the candles were blown out, she whipped out a knife and scraped the frosting off. During Ralph’s 2004 presidential campaign, his staff was routinely treated to similar scenes. Besides encouraging us to eat carrots instead of trans fat-laden chips, whenever someone on the staff had a birthday, Ralph would get them a cake from Whole Foods (“It’s healthy,” Ralph would insist with a sly grin, “It has shredded cabbage inside!”). Ralph never went so far as to scrape off all the frosting, but he would eat only the cake and leave his frosting standing on the plate, kind of like a sugary, tooth-rotting monolith. One could almost feel Rose Nader beaming with approval from 350 miles away in the house on the hill in Winsted.

Mrs. Nader lived to be 99 (she died just 18 days shy of her 100th birthday). Ralph’s father lived to be 98. At the party celebrating the 40th anniversary of the publication of Ralph’s landmark book, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” I personally witnessed 71-year-old Ralph, at the end of a long day, jogging up two flights of stairs. No matter what you think of Ralph or where you stand politically, that visual should be enough to make you put on your apron and whip up a big batch of hummus. The recipe can be found on page 44 of "It Happened in the Kitchen."

Jürgen Vsych, author of "The Woman Director," (http://www.thewomandirector.com), was Ralph Nader’s 2004 campaign videographer, and is the author of a forthcoming book about Ralph’s campaign.

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