What even is this?

Probably my most favorite text I’ve received this year.

What even is this? Is it a personal project, a side hustle, and new way to bother my friends, something to do while I delay getting a real job? Something that is inevitable and unavoidable now that I’ve talked about it so much?

The topic is kind of complicated. It’s about nutritional science, but not just that. It’s about connecting the dots between diet culture, oppression of women and minorities’ bodies, body neutrality, intuitive eating, and injustice around food education and food access. It’s about me wanting to help people navigate through the messiness of our relationships with food while also feeling empowered and knowledgable about the positive benefits to understanding how nutrition affects all of our bodies' health.

I have a lot to say and a lot of questions for people. I really think I could help people. I think that I help my friends when we talk about things like therapy, food, our relationship to food, diet culture, our families, and self-reflection. My close friends and I often end up talking about these things, and I’ll talk about where I need help and tell stories about my stuff. I think that it helps other people want to talk about their stuff.

I helped Emilia one time. She texted me asking what I ate for breakfast.

I am working hard to eat healthier so I can live a long and happy life but I fucking hate oatmeal. All the healthy people I know eat oatmeal. I can’t find a way out!

Out of curiosity, I asked her what it was about oatmeal that she fucking hated.

It’s the mix of textures: lumpy and smooth both. I cannot.

Fair enough. I asked what she liked eating (most other things besides oatmeal), I suggested some ideas (peanut butter on whole wheat toast and a side of cottage cheese and fruit), explained why these ideas were not bad ones but good ones (peanut butter gets a bad rap, cheese does too, both have a mix of nutrients that are filling and satisfying if you enjoy them), shared why it makes sense to aim for each type of macronutrient with an emphasis on fiber, and then sent a resource - a podcast episode explaining Nutrition 101.

A year or so later I got a text from Emilia who just moved to LA.

We now have a breakfast in our household called The Andie.

So I have a breakfast named after me. A year later and 3,000 miles away.

Another time more recently I was in the market buying stuff for dinner: artichokes, mushrooms, lemons, pasta. The cashier started checking out my items not in the way I’d expect, not running them over the scanner to ring me up, but actually picking up my items and inspecting them.

What are you making?

It was during the pandemic and I’ve been genuinely taking delight in conversation with people other than Brian or my coworkers or my friends. It was exciting to me that she asked. I said I was making this creamy artichoke, mushroom, and sunchoke pasta.

What’s that?

I told her I didn’t really know either, I had never made it before. I pulled up the link on my phone to show her the recipe, thinking that it might be interesting to show her how pretty and tasty the finished product looked. She didn’t know what sunchokes were to I tried to explain those (they’re a root vegetable also called Jerusalem artichokes, and, because of the high fiber content, some people call them fart-ichokes. I didn’t mention that part to her).

I don’t eat really healthy. I want to change my diet!

I am conscientious most of the time to not come on too strong or seem too excited when someone tells me this, so I tried to tell just the truth which is that I found these sunchokes at the farmer’s market and looked up recipes online to figure out what to do with them. I said that one way that I try to eat new types of food and especially new types of vegetables is to find one or two of them at the market, look up recipes online, and then try to make it. The sunchoke pasta looked fancy and had 8 different plants in it.

That’s a really good idea! I’m gonna start doing that. Will you come back and tell me how it was? It looks really good.

I did see her a few weeks later and told her that dinner was tasty. She told me that she and her friends had talked about trying to buy new vegetables and look up recipes online to cook them. So I think maybe I helped her a little bit too.

The thrill and sense of useful-ness I felt from these moments I just can’t really ignore.

There’s a field called Nutritional Therapy that seems interesting. It’s hard to come across a single definition of the field, but it has to do with the belief that food in its whole and natural form can provide what’s needed to obtain and maintain a vibrant state of health. I like the idea of deeply understanding nutritional science, and then putting that knowledge to work in the context of real life.

Nutrition as a science field is relatively new and fucking confusing. It changes frequently like other sciences, and is the type of science that media and capitalism bends, twists, and inverts to make money. It’s a type of science that feels tangible because it happens in our bodies everyday and involves something that most of us do every day if we’re lucky, which is eating.

But eating isn’t a science. It’s a really complicated thing that means a hundred different things to each of us. It carries the weight of emotions and unspoken lessons we were taught growing up. Eating connects us and divides us. Eating is joyful and anxiety-inducing. We’re highly interested in what others are eating and how it makes their bodies look, then we decide that the way that they eat and how their bodies look equates to healthiness or lack thereof. We do lots of public eating and talking about food with our families and friends and coworkers. Many of us will go on to feel guilt or shame about the very foods we talked about and ate with the people we love.

I’m really lucky to have loved ones who make me feel safe and who also share their vulnerability when I talk about this topic. The more I talk to people about this kind of stuff, the more clear it becomes to me that so many of us would benefit from some type of help in these areas. I think maybe I could help people, but I don’t really know where to start. Maybe that doesn’t really matter, or maybe it does and I’ll learn at some point. I’m feeling energized by this, whatever this even is.

One thing I’ll do first is ask questions. I want to know more from more people. If anyone wants to talk, I’d be so honored to listen, so please reach out. And, if you’re keen, please answer some questions I have.