about

College is hard for a lot of reasons, but no one can prepare you for how hard it can be to stay healthy. Achieving balance between studying, working, staying social, exercising, and eating healthy is something I am constantly working towards. When there’s no one there to make your lunch for you and remind you to eat breakfast before going to school, it’s easy to neglect diet and health. For something we do (hopefully) three or more times a day, eating well can be a struggle. In college it becomes acceptable to justify a diet consisting of frozen dinners made in the microwave, dining hall food that makes you feel sick, or just having a granola bar all day between your internship and classes. It can feel like the norm to be unhappy with what you’re eating.

This problem is only challenged by all of the misconceptions about nutrition and health. What does “going on a diet” even mean? What does “I’m going to start eating healthy tomorrow” mean? Low carb, ketogenic, paleo, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, alkaline, low fat, raw, plant-based, zone, South Beach, Atkins. More than ever before, people are questioning what the ideal healthy diet looks like. Just a walk through the aisles of a grocery store is confusing. Organic, natural, non-GMO, infused, enriched, low sodium, low fat, reduced, lite. The food industry does a great job of complicating our understanding of what eating “healthy” means. That’s why going back to basics and learning to cook is the simplest way to eat healthy.

This phenomenon is a new problem. Before food became an industry, people ate what they found, grew, and cooked themselves. There were no questions about eating too much fat or not enough protein; people just ate what they could make. The industrialization of food in the mid-1900s liberated people from spending all day food shopping and cooking. However, the consequence has been people losing the basic yet vital skill of cooking. They have also lost the opportunity for that skill to be passed on. This shift, along with great marketing, normalized substituting processed, packaged, and preserved food for the real stuff. It’s been so long since people actually needed to cook to survive that many of us have developed a fear of cooking. This fear, in addition to the constraints of time and money, make it hard to get back in the kitchen. Cook food you enjoy with ingredients you recognize and can pronounce and you can’t go wrong. Cooking frees you from having to worry if something is really “healthy” or not and puts the power back in your own hands.

Of course, just saying “cook” is not so simple. For so many people, including college students, the act of cooking is complicated by lack of access to real food, time-consuming and low-paying jobs, demanding schedules, and lack of knowledge about cooking. There’s no easy remedy to these problems. For now, I want to contribute to the solution by producing information that makes cooking easier and more accessible. I guess that’s why I consider myself a food wonk.

Welcome to a food wonk! You may be wondering, what is a “food wonk?” A “wonk” is defined as “a person who takes an excessive interest in minor details of political policy.” Here at college in Washington, DC, I am surrounded by smart, passionate, and motivated wonks who are deeply passionate and knowledgable about policy and so much more. I take excessive interest– and have become a “wonk”– for health and nutrition. Through my studies as a Public Health major and through my own research, I have come to appreciate the important role nutrition has in our overall health.

When I was a freshman, I quickly realized that maintaining my good nutrition and health in college was challenging. Like many other college freshman I picked up bad habits, which compounded over time, made me really unhealthy. Dealing with a less than stellar dining hall, late-night snacking, and going out to eat are all new experiences that college students need to deal with– on top of academic, social, and professional demands. I gained weight, felt constantly tired, lacked energy, and had strayed far from the health I maintained in high school.

For sophomore year, I knew I had to make some major changes to my diet and lifestyle. I thought about all the bad habits I needed to eliminate and how I could be healthier at school. The best plan I came up with to take charge of my health was to start cooking. Living in a suite without a kitchen makes this plan more challenging, but along the way, I have come up with a system for cooking that works. Cooking gives me more control over what I’m eating and allows me to take more responsibility for my health– which I believe is the key to better health.

From talking with friends and peers, I know that many other college students struggle with the same challenges. It’s easy to let your health slip when you have three essays to write, a club meeting to go to, and an internship. In college, dealing with being unhealthy becomes the norm. As a broke college student, cooking (especially without your own kitchen) seems like a time-consuming, expensive, and challenging chore. With this blog, I hope to show that cooking can be rewarding, cost-effective, and easy. I’m not a nutritionist, a doctor, or a chef, but I do know how to cook. I have come to realize that this is not a skill to take for granted. I am grateful that I have learned how to cook from my parents, who have taught me to value my health and who have given me an understanding of what healthy food is. My “cooking literacy” makes a huge impact on my life. I want to help other college students increase their own cooking literacy by putting out the information about food and cooking that I think everyone deserves and needs to know. Nutrition is so important for our health, yet not everyone gets taught how to cook. I hope that my blog gives any college student the confidence to get in the kitchen, equipped with a little more knowledge about how to cook and eat well.

my food philosophy

welcome.