I migrated from the Midwest to Brooklyn, where I've made my home for over 15 years. In that time I've worked across nurturing professions — as a doula, nanny, family assistant, private chef, and yoga instructor. Nutrition and wellbeing has always been central to my curiosity: how it relates to wellbeing alongside an already demanding, fast-paced culture.

I've seen trends come and go — soy milk, no soy milk, raw milk, raw food, no raw food, plant-based, nose-to-tail, pureed baby food to baby-led weaning. But moving beyond trend, toward intuitive discernment, has been innate in me since I was a little girl — raised on farm-to-table summer goodness from my grandmother, on her cow farm in Missouri. Tomatoes in abundance, melons, peppers, dinners served with green onion and jalapeños picked minutes from the vine. It's the best produce I've had to date, and it taught me the essence of food, its primal benefit: unadulterated, uncomplicated, without deconstruction.

Food processing differs around the world, based on availability, climate, access — the way we process what is bio-available differs from region to culture. In the last hundred years, food has become mass-produced, factory-farmed, canned, compressed, extracted, diluted, optimized, stabilized, enhanced for flavor, color, texture. Food is not only a commodity — our imagination of what "food" can be is defined by the commodity. We're moving further away from what our ancestors ate. Though food is abundant now, and famine and malnutrition less prevalent, other problems have grown in their place: wastefulness, loneliness, anxiety. Food is missing its communal counterpart — the element where preparation and consumption was shared.

I want to keep food traditions alive — bread making, fermentation, pickling, preserving — communing with food in its purest, whole form. Not only to nourish, but to delight the senses, decipher origin, explore traditions from around the world, some complex, others surprisingly simple. It began for me with nourishing an immature palate — believing a child's first experience with food should be sacred, and paying homage to the delights of a perfectly in-season peach.