By Michelle

Hi there. I’m Michelle and I’m new here. I really enjoy food – shopping for it, planning it, cooking it, and eating it (but most decisively not cleaning up after it). I also really enjoy it when my body feels good, healthy, like it’s working the way it should. Because of that, I’ve been on a journey towards shifting my family’s diet towards wholesome, unprocessed, natural, (some) organic and nutritious – basically, “real” – food for about four years now.

I spent my childhood in Georgia, where my family’s diet was certainly not perfect but was far superior to most people I knew. A meat, at least two vegetables and sometimes a carbohydrate (all homemade) was our standard dinner while most of my friends were eating frozen TV dinners, boxed macaroni and cheese or take-out. My parents taught me to care about what I was putting into my body and gave me a solid foundation in understanding nutrition, and I am so thankful for that.

I ate what I would now consider a decent diet in college and then in the first years of marriage, but it wasn’t until I got pregnant with my first child four years ago that I really started to put major thought into what we were eating. At the time, I was working as an environmental scientist. I did a little research and was more than a little dismayed when I realized that the chemicals I was testing for in the soil and groundwater in amounts like micrograms (1/1,000,000 of a gram) were the same chemical residues on my apples and pears. In the last part of my pregnancy, I took a birthing class in which we wrote down exactly what we ate for two weeks, and I realized I had to work hard to get enough, or sometimes any, vegetables into my diet every day. These things along with the new responsibility of nourishing a tiny person first through my body and later through the food on our table spurred me to start making changes in what we were eating.

I started out small – the first thing we tackled was a bit random but was easy for us, switching to whole wheat pasta instead of white pasta. I really don’t remember all the steps along the way, but they have all been small. And, partially because we took it slow and simple and partially because I am just plain stubborn, they’ve stuck (for the most part). I am actually very happy with what we eat now, and yet I still realize that we have a long way to go.

So, welcome to our journey! I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts about the process, the particular choices we’re making, and especially some delicious recipes. You can also read more about me and my family and see some of my recipes over at my food blog, Thoughtful Kitchen.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 at 10:19 am and is filed under Bite-sized, Blogs, Deliciously Wholesome, Nutrition & Diet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.