An Explanation

Why I was absent and why I'm back.

It’s been so long since I logged in here that I have to reset my password. The interface is different and it takes me a while to get my bearings. I can’t find my drafts. I have no idea what chats are. My absence was planned but I didn’t expect it to go on for quite so long.

I paused Food As/Is in June 2024 because I felt like it had reached a natural point to do so. I had just graduated from my Food Studies program at NYU and I was about to transition into working as a food therapist in addition to my freelance work. The small business I envisioned for myself required a leap of faith, dedicated focus on developing partnerships and finding interested clients, and a robust marketing and branding strategy. I had always planned to come back to this space once I built my practice. I had plans for recipes and interviews and appreciation posts for the small but mighty food therapy community. And then I got pregnant.

Photo by David Vilches on Unsplash

To be clear, this was planned and desired, though perhaps not expected to happen as quickly as it did. And I was hit with severe first trimester symptoms that extended well into the second. I couldn’t eat anything but green apples and Cheez-its for weeks. The nausea, fatigue, and general malaise of pregnancy quickly made me realize a simple truth: if I could barely cook for myself, how was I going to cook for others?

I paused and pivoted. The appeal of freelance work dulled a little as I thought realistically about supporting not only myself now, but my child. I ended up finding a job that has been an absolute dream and I now work with Brigaid, an organization that brings the culinary expertise of chefs into institutional food settings — primarily schools — to help them reach their goals. I’ve been there for over a year, and I’ve also been blessed with an absolutely delightful little kiddo. Life has settled into a beautiful and steady new rhythm.

But recently I started to feel itchy, like something was missing. And a few weeks ago, with the release of the Trump administration’s new Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs), I realized that one thing I wanted was a space for engaging with food policy and the very real ways it impacts us at home.

Food therapy, to me, has always been about bridging the gap between what the policy says, what our tastes want, and what our bodies need. As my child has started to eat solid foods, the choices we make as a family and the ones that are made for us have come into stark relief.

At the same time, amid unceasing violence against the communities that are most impacted by the shifts of these policies, it feels like one small thing I can do is to engage in discourse regarding what food as medicine and, by extension, food as care, really means.

Stuck Between a Rock and a Rotten Place

Yes, nuance is important. But also, when fear keeps people inside their homes and prevents them from meeting their basic needs for food in subzero temperatures, we need to consider how conceptualizing food as medicine can motivate us to demand the right to food that supports our physical and emotional health. It is no coincidence that this administration seeks directly to cut access to food, using hunger as a cudgel to bully resistance movements into submission.

This is a long-winded way of saying I’m back for now. I want to engage with these topics in a more intentional way, rather than just consuming news in the dark hours after my child is asleep. Life is different now, and while I can’t predict when or where I’ll have the time to sit down and write like I used to, I know something deep within me feels grounded when I put even a few words to a virtual page.

So to those who have been here since the beginning: thank you, and hello again. To those who are new: welcome. And to all of us, I look forward to continuing to learn together as we explore what a renewed vision of food as medicine and care might look like.