Transcription of Sienna Mazone for the show Young Maine Voices #179
Dr Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 179, Young Maine Voices, airing for the first time on Sunday, February 15th, 2015. When it comes to having a voice, age is relative. It matters less how old we are than how willing we are to share our story and our convictions. Today, we speak with 13-year-old, Sienna Mazone, about her ideas regarding the importance of vegetarian eating, which won her a trip to the White House to meet the President and First Lady. We also have an uplifting conversation about overcoming depression with Cape Elizabeth High School senior, Hunter Kent. Thank you for joining us.
Today, in the Love Maine Radio studio, we have with us an individual who shares my love of healthy food. I’m very happy to have Sienna Mazone, who is a 13-year-old from Dresden, Maine. She was one of 54 children who won the Healthy Lunch Time challenge, a national Youth Recipe Competition to promote healthy lunches as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” initiative. She created the Mexican Haystack, a dish that includes an avocado, sweet potato, chili pepper and tortilla shells. Thanks so much for coming in Sienna.
Sienna Mazone: Yeah, thank you for the opportunity.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Sienna, you have been on the media circuit.
Sienna Mazone: I am?
Dr Lisa Belisle: You’ve become a celebrity.
Sienna Mazone: Thank you. Yes.
Dr Lisa Belisle: When you created this recipe, did you think this would happen?
Sienna Mazone: I knew if I won I would definitely be in a couple of newspapers and magazines but I didn’t really anticipate going this far.
Dr Lisa Belisle: You got to meet the First Lady.
Sienna Mazone: and President, yeah.
Dr Lisa Belisle: and President. What got you interested in creating this recipe? Why do you care so much about healthy food?
Sienna Mazone: My mom is a fitness trainer and has always been very healthy. My dad is a doctor in [inaudible 00:03:46]. I’ve always lived a healthy lifestyle. I’ve always loved cooking. It’s just one of my passions. I think it was 2011, my aunt from Colorado sent me an article from her newspaper with Michelle Obama’s Healthy Lunch Time challenge. She wanted me to enter really bad. I thought about it. I was a semi-finalist last year, I’m sorry, 2013. Then, 2014, I entered again and won.
Dr Lisa Belisle: What did you enter in 2013? What was your recipe that year?
Sienna Mazone: I did a veggie burger and fruit salad.
Dr Lisa Belisle: How long have you lived in Maine?
Sienna Mazone: All my life.
Dr Lisa Belisle: You were born here?
Sienna Mazone: I was born in Maine Medical Center in Portland.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Your dad is a family doctor. I think up in Lewiston, is that right?
Sienna Mazone: Yeah. That’s Central Maine Medical Center.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Central Maine Medical center. It sounds like it’s just in your blood.
Sienna Mazone: It’s just there.
Dr Lisa Belisle: It’s just there. Why has it been important to your parents for you to be so interested in eating fruits and vegetables, for example.
Sienna Mazone: Not really that they wanted me to. They have, but I’ve also had an interest. I also garden with a couple of friends. I can salsas, pickles, things like that. I’ve just always been there.
Dr Lisa Belisle: It’s always been there.
Sienna Mazone: Always in there.
Dr Lisa Belisle: My daughter is 13 also. She’s almost 14. She likes food but she tends to cook, more like bake. She likes to bake.
Sienna Mazone: Like?
Dr Lisa Belisle: Cookies, and pies, and cake, some things like that. Do you like to do that too?
Sienna Mazone: Yes. I like anything to do with the kitchen.
Dr Lisa Belisle: With the kitchen.
Sienna Mazone: and food, yes.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Tell me some of your favorite things to cook besides your Mexican Haystack. There must be lots of other things that you like to cook.
Sienna Mazone: Yeah. With Dr. Tim Hau. At his house, he has a pizza oven. We would always make pizzas with him. I enjoy making pizzas and seeing how many vegetables I can fit on to one pizza. It was just really cool. I like to bake pies and things, pretty much anything. I’m not picky.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Do you like to share your food with other people?
Sienna Mazone: Love to, yes.
Dr Lisa Belisle: When you cook something, is it something you’ll sit down and eat with your family?
Sienna Mazone: Absolutely. Yeah.
Dr Lisa Belisle: What are their favorite things that you make?
Sienna Mazone: I do a lot of salads, different kinds of salads. They love salads. I like casseroles or different things like that, yeah.
Dr Lisa Belisle: We’ve had Dr. Hau on the radio show. He has talked about how he eats, basically, it’s a meat-free diet.
Sienna Mazone: Right, right.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Is that something that you believe in too?
Sienna Mazone: I do, yes.
Dr Lisa Belisle: This is something that you’ve always done?
Sienna Mazone: It’s something most of my life I’ve done, yeah.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Why is it important to you to limit or not eat meat at all? Is there something that, just tell me why is that so important?
Sienna Mazone: I research with my dad. Some of the anti-biotics and things that can be put into meat and that scared me. It wasn’t something that we always had in our diet. I am a very original. Yeah just it’s not necessarily something I’m terribly interested in.
Dr Lisa Belisle: It just fell off your radar screen.
Sienna Mazone: Yeah.
Dr Lisa Belisle: What is it like to be someone who doesn’t eat meat in a world where a lot of people eat meat, when you go to a restaurant and most of the things on the menu have meat in them?
Sienna Mazone: That’s when I ask and say, “Can I have this without the meat at it?” Or “Can I just have this pasta instead of with pork and sauce. Just [inaudible 00:08:00] the marinara sauce. I always have salads, it’s not been terribly hard to be a vegetarian. Plus, most of my friends are all vegetarian. We’ll get together and cook just simple vegetarian things.
Dr Lisa Belisle: You’re home-schooled.
Sienna Mazone: I am home-schooled.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Talk to me about that. Tell me about a typical day for you.
Sienna Mazone: I wake up around 6:30-7:00. We’ll have breakfast. I play violin. I study with [Ma-rie-Black 00:08:37] down in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ll practice for an hour and a half every day. Then, do my morning subjects to include like Math, Reading, Science, Grammar. Then I’ll have lunch and do silent reading for half an hour to an hour. Then I have time to either clean my room or go outside or may ice skate with some friends down the road. Then, after that, I’ll finish up whatever school work needs to be done before chores and supper.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Sometimes when we think about people who are home-schooled, we think of it as more of a solitary thing where you’re by yourself a lot. I know you have a little brother so obviously he’s around. But it sounds like you have a lot of friends.
Sienna Mazone: I do have a lot of friends. I’m doing tennis. I go around to Boston every week with friends. It’s not like I’m shut up. Every Saturday I have a group that we all play at church. That’s nice. I’m out almost everyday doing something with friends, yeah.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Are a lot of these people also home-schooled?
Sienna Mazone: They are. Most of of them are. We’ll do home-school groups sometimes or get together after school hours with my friends. I do go to school.
Dr Lisa Belisle: You have a structure to your day the way that anybody would, going to a public school. You do a lot of the same subjects that people do.
Sienna Mazone: Absolutely.
Dr Lisa Belisle: You also have the chance to focus on things that you enjoy.
Sienna Mazone: Right.
Dr Lisa Belisle: What are some of your favorite subject? You talked about violin. What other things do you like to do?
Sienna Mazone: Besides cooking, I love to read. I could just sit and read all day. I have a huge passion for animals. We have a cat. I’ll spend time with the cat. We used to help a friend take care of a horse. That was really awesome, anything to do with animals. I love being outside, ice skating, sledding, in the winter. I also love to swim. We live right by a river, the [inaudible 00:11:04] river. We’ll swim sometimes in there. It’s not the cleanest, that place where I swim. Those are the things I enjoy.
Dr Lisa Belisle: What do you like to read? What are some of your favorite books?
Sienna Mazone: I love mystery books. I read those books about people that have an interest to me and things like that.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Have you read any recently that are specially good?
Sienna Mazone: I read a book on Lewis Zamporini which is really amazing.
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Dr Lisa Belisle: Tell me about this animal piece. You have a cat that you love, you have a horse that you help take care of, why do you like animals so much?
Sienna Mazone: I remember, I think I was 10, 9 or 10, my best friend and I would decide we want to ride a horse together because they have just gotten horses. We took care of the horse, her name was Honey. We took care of Honey. We both try to get on Honey. It was amazing. It’s like you’re not doing anything, you’re just sitting there on an animal and the animal is running and jumping but it’s not like overwhelming. It was really cool. After that, I really took any animals. I just had a dog. She’s an [inaudible 00:14:30] terrier. Amazing dog to cuddle with me and loved food. That’s about how it started off.
Dr Lisa Belisle: It sounds like you’ve made friends with these animals in a way.
Sienna Mazone: I have.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Tell me about some of your experiences as a result of the Mexican Haystack and entering this “Let’s Move!” initiative with Michelle Obama.
Sienna Mazone: I was working with Chef [inaudible 00:15:00] here [inaudible 00:15:02] in Portland. We did a series of demonstrations. I think we did 6 or 7. Here on Portland, we did some at Parkview Hospital in Brunswick where we would present my dish. I got very good feedback of how they like the beans and sweet potato go together. Originally, people wouldn’t think of sweet potato and beans really together, but I put them together. I got feedback that people really like the flavor we’re putting together. The whole dish all had flavors that I love. Put them together and people seem to like that.
Dr Lisa Belisle: When people hear about the Mexican Haystack or the demonstrations that you’ve been doing or all of the conversations that you’ve had, I think you’ve had interviews with newspapers and you’ve been covered, I think on television, what are you hoping that people will learn from the Mexican Haystack? What do you put at hoping to inspire people to do?
Sienna Mazone: Most people think that in order to be healthy, you sacrifice taste. Trying to let people know that this dish is vegetarian and it still tastes amazing, you don’t need all this extra meat, unhealthy oils and fat, everything to make a dish taste good.
Dr Lisa Belisle: It also sounds like one of the messages is that it’s a nice thing to be able to eat together as a family and to enjoy healthy food together as a family.
Sienna Mazone: It has, yeah. It’s nice. My dad is obviously pretty busy. It’s usually just mom and my brother and I. I have friends over and we’ll time each other to create something wacky and tastes good at the same time.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I’m interested in this next question because I have never had the chance to really ask my own kids this because I’m a family doctor and my kids, they grew up when I was going through residency training just like your dad. What was it like to have a dad who is a doctor, who is out taking care of patients and maybe isn’t as home as much? How do you feel about that?
Sienna Mazone: It’s nice in a way that he is doing what he loves. It’s nice to know, if I fall and break something he can fix it. It was nice. My dad, before going to medical school, was a pilot for American Airlines. That was very different from being away a lot. He would fly for 3 or 4 days then be home for an equal amount of time. Now he’s working, I think 5 days a week and then home, maybe a day and a half or less vacation. It’s not the easiest thing or the easiest job but he likes it and I think that’s good.
Dr Lisa Belisle: You support him because you know he’s doing something that’s important to him and the he likes.
Sienna Mazone: Yeah.
Dr Lisa Belisle: That sounds like your parents do the same thing for you and your brother.
Sienna Mazone: They do.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Sienna, do you have anything that you would like to tell the people, who listen to Love Maine Radio, about eating healthy or things that they can do to incorporate vegetables into their diets?
Sienna Mazone: With my presentation Sienna and Bard, we were talking about trying to get as many colors on your plate as possible, sort of making a rainbow. Let’s make it in my dish is trying to get as many colors as I could and that healthy isn’t always sacrificing taste and that us kids can be a good role model to older people and younger people if we will take the time.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I think that’s a very important point, is that by the time you get to be your age or even when you’re younger, if you’re going to help out in the kitchen, you can help make things, you can learn how to cook from an early age. Sounds like you can learn how to garden, you can learn how to can, all these things that you do. It can be a lot of fun for you and for your family.
Sienna Mazone: It is, yeah.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Sienna, how can people find out about the Mexican Haystack? How can they read about your recipe and also read about Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” initiative?
Sienna Mazone: You can get the cookbook for the 2014 recipes on [inaudible 00:19:45]. They will tell a little bit about the “Let’s Move!” initiative and then how they choose the kids to come. They had 1500 entries for 2014. Then, tell us how they will narrow it down to 54 winners. [inaudible 00:20:07].com. You can get the cookbook as well.
Dr Lisa Belisle: I suspect that you have a very long and interesting life ahead of you. You’re already living a very interesting life. It’s really been a pleasure. We’ve been speaking with Sienna Mazone, who is a 13-year-old from Dresden, Maine and one of 54 children who won the healthy lunch time challenge. Thanks so much for coming in and taking time out of your very busy schedule to talk with us.
Sienna Mazone: Thank you.
Dr Lisa Belisle: Happy New Year.
Sienna Mazone: You too, thank you.