‘Healthy and Delicious Can Coexist’: Experts Discuss Making Food More Joyful and Sustainable

—Taylor Hill—FilmMagic/Getty Images, Dave Kotinsky—NYCWFF/Getty Images At a TIME100 Talks event in New York City on Sept.

21, chefs and food industry experts discussed the challenges our communities face in making food healthier, more accessible, and more joyful for everyone.

Cecile Beliot-Zind, the CEO of Bel Group, which sponsored the event, said that her company believes “there is a model to make healthier and sustainable food for all possible,” but one of the issues facing the industry today is that people “keep on opposing instead of combining” ideas.

“We believe that the right way to define healthier food is to combine what usually people tend to see as trade-offs,” she said.

“The big issue of our industry: If you want to scale healthier and sustainable food, you are first to make sure and to believe very strongly that health can be combined with taste, that nutrition can be combined with accessibility, that fair revenues for the farmers—who, by the way, feed all of us—could be combined with fair values for the communities we feed.” She gave an example: Bel Group makes Babybel, the popular small cheese snack wrapped in a red wax coating, which Beliot-Zind called “the perfect snacks.” “The reason why kids and I love Babybel is because it’s convenient, because it’s a great natural source of protein, because I play with the wax.

It gives me joy,” she said.

Bel Group, she continued, focuses on balancing these two ideas: making food both healthy and desirable.

“Healthy food will have an impact on the world if we are capable to make it nutritious enough to matter, accessible enough to be everywhere for everyone, and desirable enough to be chosen,” she said.

“The issue with the food industry is that the big food manufacturers have created desire for product[s] that provide empty calories.

They scale it, they spread it all over the world.

We feed the world with fat and sugar at a low cost. … It hurts the planet, and it hurts the health of the people.” TIME executive editor and panel moderator Nikhil Kumar then asked Vikas Khanna , a chef, author, and filmmaker, how he navigates making healthy food as a restaurateur.

Khanna, who was on the 2026 TIME100 list , talked about how, at his New York City restaurant Bungalow, he and his team have worked to make their food delicious, healthy, and sustainable.

“There’s also an extreme stigma around ethnic cuisines not being healthy,” Khanna said, but it isn’t necessarily accurate.

Much of Indian cuisine, he said, “is based on the principles of Ayurveda and sustainability.” And eating healthy doesn’t have to come at the cost of authenticity.