Feeling Better

It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch

"Hi, how are you? "

It's amazing how often the word "hi" and the question “How are you?” go together. The latter is such a standard greeting it barely registers as a serious question.

The standard answer is, “Good. How are you?” Now, if we were to stop there and have a real conversation about how we are, most of us would say we’re good, but we could be better. We’d like a better job, better car, bigger house, more money, less stress… But much of the time these kinds of life-improvements are out of our control – or they’re a more distant goal. So, if we can’t do better immediately, what we can do is feel better.

One of the ways we do that is with food. There’s comfort food. And there’s food as medicine. One particular medicinal food that’s having a moment these days is mushrooms. Here in Baton Rouge, Jordan Gros is a Biological Engineer and CEO of a mushroom-as-medicine company called Mycocentrics.

The use of mushrooms as medicine stretches back thousands of years and encompasses cultures as diverse as Chinese, Indian, and Native American. In searching for a cure for her own spinal injuries and chronic pain, Jordan applied her college education in biological engineering to the healing power of mushrooms, and when she found it worked, she founded her company.

Different cultures have different definitions of “comfort food.” In India it’s typically Butter Chicken or samosas. Italian comfort food is lasagna, pizza and risotto. Here in the US, we in the South have a lock on comfort food with dishes like pancakes, chicken and waffles, biscuits and gravy, and gumbo.

If mom’s not cooking today, or you’re too busy to cook for yourself, you can get all these comfort foods, and much more, at Another Broken Egg Café.

More than 26 years old, Another Broken Egg Café is currently one of the fastest-growing, daytime-only food franchises in the country. There are more than 100 locations in 16 states. Here in Baton Rouge, Devin Carls is the Territory Manager for Another Broken Egg Café.

We’re all busy. We’re typically rushing between work and home, keeping it together with friends and family, trying to stay healthy and happy. In our daily zipping around, we can take things for granted.

We might not think twice about mushrooms, for example. And if we do, it’s more likely to be in a cream sauce than in a tincture. And we might just drop into Another Broken Egg Café whenever we feel like it and expect to get a table and order anything off the menu without considering the massive amount of organization that’s going on behind the scenes to keep the doors open and the lights on.

Oscar Tickle sits in for Stephanie Riegel on this episode of Out to Lunch, recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan at itsbatonrouge.la.

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