Our Relationship With Food Is Threaded Through Our Lives

Food is never just food.

It’s memory.
It’s identity.
It’s love, guilt, celebration, culture, survival — sometimes all on the same plate.

We don’t just learn how to cook. We inherit how we feel about food.

Some of us grew up cleaning our plates, even when we were full.
Some of us saw food as comfort… or control.
Some of us learned to chase convenience, to keep moving, to eat on autopilot.
And some of us are only now realizing how much those early messages shaped us.

I’ve thought about this a lot lately — how food ties itself to our stories. How it shows up in the way we shop, how we talk to our kids at the dinner table, how we feel when we skip meals or reach for seconds. How it follows us from childhood into adulthood and waits patiently for us to notice it again.

Rooted Feast was born from that noticing. From watching my son begin to form his relationship with food and realizing that I wanted to give him something more than just “eat your vegetables.” I wanted to give him agency, confidence, curiosity, and yes… nourishment. But not through rules. Through reconnection.

Because our relationship with food isn’t just about health. It’s about healing.

It’s about learning to cook something from what you already have— and feeling proud of that. It’s about not shaming yourself for how you used to eat. It’s about rewriting the story… one real meal at a time. Food holds our history — but we get to decide what we carry forward.

Let this be the season you return to the table not with guilt, but with care.

Rooted. Present. And free to choose a new way forward.

Rooted in care,
Jennifer