New year, new blog

Hello friends and faithful followers!

I am back. I have a laundry list of excuses for my absence ranging from uninspired dishes to sun setting early making it hard to photograph food to lazy to busy. But they are all excuses. The only two that I would like to specifically mention are as follows:

1) I was teaching Intro to Human Nutrition at Berkeley this past fall. Which, even though it was only a 20 hour/week assignment, kept me insanely busy. I think partly because I truly loved it and felt I had a purpose there so I wanted to spend the extra time. And it showed in my student evaluations, swoon (shout out to any former students that have found this)! The reason I am mentioning this is because teaching that class really reenergized my love of nutrition. Not that it was ever gone, but it reminded me of both the importance of teaching nutrition and also reminded me that I do have something to contribute.

2) Man oh man should nutrition classes be mandatory. In reading diet analyses of student diets, I was shocked. Few of them eat breakfast or vegetables. Most food is completely processed or Subway (the amount of Subway eaten by the undergrads at Berkeley is alarming). The excuses I usually got were, "Oh, but I don't have the time to eat healthy," or, "Oh, I don't have the resources to cook." And well, as far as I am concerned, that is bologna. You will never have more "time" than you do in college (and I cringe even typing that, because I hate treating time as a commodity) and your health should always be taken seriously. Many student promised that they would start to eat healthy when they finished college. But this is the phase when you are building habits, so it is important to build healthy habits. I could go on and on sharing horror stories of some of the diets I saw, but the point I am trying to make is that there is an incredible need for nutrition/cooking classes in the middle class youth. As a species (and this is about to be a wildly blanketed statement, so stay with me), our relationship with food is so broken and it needs some mending. And that is where I come in.

Stay tuned on my reenergized journey over at http://veggiewithacause.wordpress.com and then shortly that will be ported over to veggiewithacause.com :-). Once there, let me you know your thoughts on the new design or any types of recipes that you would love to see!