Hero Food is an important first book by a young chef of great substance and talent--Seamus Mullen, an Iron Chef finalist, is thoughtful, articulate, telegenic, and on the way up. Tertulia, the restaurant he’s creating from the sum of his experience and passion, will open in New York’s Greenwich Village in late summer, and will be a great launching platform for the ideas in the book:

Nutritional commonsense for everyone--Seamus’ diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis five years ago led him to make the kinds of food choices that happen to be good advice for the rest of us, too. The book is full of nutritional commonsense. It is NOT an RA cookbook.

18 “Hero Foods” that everyone should know about-Seamus made the happy discovery that “the things I most like to cook with are the things that are best for me to eat.” The book focuses on how incorporating 18 key “hero foods” into his diet improved his quality of life, and how using great recipes featuring the hero foods can benefit your health as well.

Beautiful photographs that reinforce a commitment to delicious well-being--Hero Food has more than 125 recipes and techniques, photographed in an abundantly sunny style that celebrates the book’s commitment to delicious well-being, with location photography shot in Spain, New York City, Upstate New York, and Vermont. Nothing in the book happens by accident or because it’s the way things are done. Every photograph, every recipe, every word of text reinforces the mission of the book and is all the more powerful for that integrity.

Sustainable food cooked with imagination--Seamus’ recipes and food sense are smart, original and satisfying. He is devoted to real food, grown sustainably, cooked with imagination. As he writes in the introduction: “My Heroes are real food. Elemental things like Good Meat, Good Birds, Eggs, Greens, Grains, and Berries. I believe that Michael Pollen is right when he says in In Defense of Food: '...instead of worrying about nutrients, we should simply avoid any food that has been processed to such an extent that it is more the product of industry than of nature.’”