I became certified as an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach years ago, before health influencers became a social media phenomenon. My key interest is in nutritional neuroscience – specifically how food can affect our moods, behaviors, and cognition. Our brains are affected by the foods we eat in much the same way that the rest of our body is affected. For some, the idea that food can affect our mood is brushed off as mysticism that doesn’t seem to hold much scientific basis. But it is readily understood that if you want to build body muscle most efficiently, you should eat more protein. Why would food affect our muscular system but not our central nervous system, especially when one of the essential jobs of the nervous system is to tell the muscles to contract? Come to find out, protein is vital for both. What we eat can greatly affect how we feel mentally, cognitively, and behaviorally.
Once I understood the science, eating healthier food and relishing in my new-found health followed quite easily. I established myself as a nutrition professional and started my own business; coaching others in their nutrition habits and tracking progress. I created my own website, wrote a weekly blog, and began collecting a following online. I had social media accounts, a local office to see clients, and a website to run online nutrition programs. Things were taking off… and then I took it all down.
I was in my early 30s when I stopped blogging and moved away from nutrition as my main focus. It has taken me a long time to figure out why I did this – it didn’t make sense; I was just on the edge of success. I had the blogging wave of the 2010s propelling me towards becoming a social media influencer and maybe someday writing a book (my dream since a young age). The reason was that I knew something major was missing. The science was what interested me, originally, and it informed me in ways that I’ll be forever grateful. But what was missing was the heart of what makes food truly nourishing – connection, love, intention, customs, rituals, history – the culture.
For the last many months I have immersed myself once again in learning. But this time something else is guiding the way. I’ve found that what was lacking was my own personal connection to my culinary culture – either by genetics or influence – and how the modern culture that I belong to now is almost completely devoid of true connection to food as health-giving and life-giving. We have food health enthusiasm around beauty standards, to be sure, but this is the very opposite of what I’ve needed. Our health doesn’t lie in the shape of our bodies (especially if there is only a very narrow range of acceptable body size standards).
I’m white and I live in Colorado along the outskirts of Denver, a major city. I don’t grow any of my own produce or grain, and I don’t kill the animals that provide the meat I consume. I don’t collect herbs for culinary nor medicinal purposes. The food I can find most easily usually comes in some kind of packaging, and sometimes it comes already cooked. Even when I was eating the most nutritionally dense food I could find, the majority of work in this endeavor resided in driving from health store to health store. This is all by design of modern civilization – hardly any humans in the world still collect and kill all of their food themselves. Not only would it be unnecessary, we’d hardly have the time. As a single parent I struggle to grab breakfast from my fridge before running out the door to transport my kid to school and myself to work.
As I’ve embarked on this journey to find my culture, I’ve found there have been many influences that guided my passion. For example, I spent some of my young years living with my family in Ankara, Turkey. A Turkish woman, who felt like a second mother to me, had enormous influence – in fact, this was where I felt a more enveloping sense of love and care than I’d felt from my own culture. Turkish culture is very family-oriented. Children are revered and treated with great affection from family and strangers alike – it is believed that children are society’s responsibility and so they are truly “raised by a village.” It is not uncommon for a baby to be passed to a stranger on a bus while the mother finds a seat to rest. As a child in Turkey, my cheeks would be pinched by strangers and I would be handed sweets as we perused the markets. My older brother would have his hair rumpled and receive pats of encouragement on his back. Children are not only seen but celebrated. There is even a national holiday called National Sovereignty and Children’s Day; the country’s independence day that was dedicated to the children in 1929.
In the last many months, I’ve taught myself about middle eastern/mediterranean foods – and most importantly, I learned how to cook the foods myself. Not just by putting the ingredients together – but by connecting with the rituals. I made a popular Turkish dish called “kisir” and chopped and mixed ingredients by hand, adding the special ingredient of loving care. When I opened a pomegranate to add to the dish, I allowed myself to be in awe of the abundance and vibrance of the seeds, thanking Mother Earth for the bounty, and popping some in my mouth to experience the sweet juiciness of them on their own before they became a new flavor all together with the dish. I shared some with my daughter, both of us marveling at the color of the gems before exclaiming at the perfection of this batch’s particular balance of tart and sweet. I remembered my Turkish “mother” and how she would place fragrant rose petals into the envelope of a letter before sealing it, as a symbol of her love. THIS is nourishment. This was the connection I was missing.
I found that I was also interested in the ancient cultures of the land I currently live on. I believe it is important to connect to local foods and cultures, since the foods we have readily available are appropriate for the climate that we ourselves are in. In school, I learned about Ayurvedic medicine and how the best foods for the climate we reside in are under our feet. For example – in Hawaii, tropical plants like fresh pineapple, coconut, and aloe are likely available. As nature would have it, these are full of quick acting energy – hydration, natural sugars, and cooling properties that nourish those who need replenishment from tropical heat and sun. In Colorado, we might want to stock up on root vegetables and hearty meats such as elk for the winter, as they act in the human body like slow-burning fuel, getting us through a season of less food and movement.
Perhaps my favorite part of this culture journey has been when I finally connected to my own ancestry. This took some time and, to be honest, I wasn’t sure who or what I was looking for. To be white in the United States often means you have lost the thread to your origin. I have the blood of many European cultures running through my veins and I pulled on the threads of a few before one spoke to me. Half of my genes belong to the British Isles – this is where my father’s family came from. As I delved into my family history, I found connections that kept placing me here, specifically in England and Wales.
A breakthrough happened when I pulled on the threads of “Wise Women” and “Folk Healers” from these areas. Well before modern science and pharmaceutical advances, a sick person might visit a Wise Woman who held vast knowledge of plants, herbs, rituals and remedies that spanned centuries of treatments and results. This knowledge was passed down from mother to daughter and shared between other Wise Women in the community, and included vast knowledge of midwifery. Much of what we have recently proven through nutritional science was already known during these times through close study and of course, trial and error. These women had knowledge of nature such as which plants could slow bleeding, which plants could be used as topical numbing agents, and which plants were medicine in small doses but poison in large ones. Not everything was known, of course, and we can be grateful to science for what we’ve learned since then, but I’m also not remotely interested in dismissing the abundance of knowledge that was already there. We can be quick to point to the things they didn’t know (and couldn’t know) as proof that it was all mysticism all along – but the reality is that food was used medicinally, and often successfully, for a long time before we had the blessings of modern medicine. This was true throughout many ancient cultures in the world, from Japan to India to Africa to South America. As the body became to be understood scientifically, and men became interested in science and thus became doctors, Wise Women were not only shunned but eventually hunted. Burning these women at the stake can be likened to burning an ancient library to the ground. And here is where I found the holistic answer to what I had been missing in my previous nutrition studies; we can break things down to science as much as we want, but if you take love, compassion, intention, healing, meaning and ritual out of nutritional foods – you will not feel nourished. It’s like harvesting an entire field of wheat and throwing away the seeds. And isn’t this what our food has become? We have dismantled it into parts, stripped away its fibers to make it faster to prepare, reduced it to sugars to make other food-parts more palatable. This is why what we eat now has been labeled as “Frankenfood.” Our food has been stripped of nourishment in almost every way. Naturally, I had added back in the macro- and micronutrients that nutritional science told me had been taken out. I hadn’t recognized that the heart of nourishment lies in the rituals of preparation.
I’ve been reading books to connect to my ancestry mostly for fun, but it has also been teaching me some important lessons. Unfortunately, most of what I’ve described about Wise Women was turned into what our society knows as witchcraft. The best way to demonize a culture is to start by calling it evil – and Wise Women were an easy target. Their medicine didn’t always work, of course. They turned to charms and spells for that which they didn’t know, and although some may argue (myself being one of them) that this can lend to rituals that are beneficial for the mental and spiritual health of the sick and dying – it was easy for others to make a case of their danger to society (and danger to the power of certain religions, no doubt).
As for now, I find myself cooking more foods from scratch again. This time, I’m experiencing the process as it happens and celebrating the moments of connection with food, and connecting with my community through food. I’m finding ways to add in the nourishment that has been my missing ingredient all along, and I find myself being pulled to rituals throughout the process. I can’t yet explain it – and maybe that’s the beauty of it – but somehow it is working. My vitality is returning. I feel a spirit waking within my bones that had gone silent for some time. It is the food… it isn’t the food. It’s everything and nothing all at once.