“Bless this food to our bodies, and our bodies to Your service.” It’s a prayer I heard a teammate pray while I was on a mission trip in high school. Since then, it has been an often spoken prayer before my meals. It intrigues me—the idea of food for our benefit. Food is productive, it is for something good. To nourish, to sustain, to energize, to motivate, to enable. It is an art. It is a gift. It is culture. It is a staple of life far too often abused.  For some reason, unknown to me, God decided to give us something that would be necessary to sustain our bodies. In many ways beyond what science and medicine understands, food nourishes, food sustains, food often influences moods and attitudes. Something so necessary, God decided, would bring us great enjoyment. I love to cook. I love to have a plate set before me and take note of every detail put into place with thought and consideration, and to mimic and experiment likewise in my own kitchen. Nutrition is a passion of mine, as I will explain in more detail. I can bless my family, and enable them for a fuller life, by cooking them real, good food. Not “real good”, but “real” and “good”. I can create a culture in our home of food which brings us together, as a family, for the enjoyment of food which equips us for a fuller life, a life of service to God, our Creator, who fashioned us to glorify Himself.

From famine to foodie

I feel as though to properly set up this blog, I must delve a bit into my history. We all make a bad choice or two in high school. Mine was to stop eating. However, God is smart, and gracious, and He taught me how to eat again. The irony of all this, I find, is that I am one of the 40% of those who develop an eating disorder to fully recover. Imagine—an ex-anorexic becoming a foodie!

Even the hideous disease that it is, there are lessons to be learned everywhere. Things Anorexia taught me:

Enjoy every bite. Back then, they were far in few between. Now days, I take quite a lot more bites! I pick and choose wisely. Like someone who has seen famine, I have learned to appreciate food. It is a gift.

Yet this, too, we have abused. For far too many, food does not bring enjoyment. Rather, it is a captor. It tempts its delicacies, taunting all those who call it their master. It has many officers which it enlists to capture its prey. The scale. The gym. Magazines. Numbers. Calories. Diets. A never-ending cycle of starve-eat-exercise-hate-compare-numbers, number, and more numbers. For these, food has become an enemy.

For me—I escaped by the grace of God. And through my experience, food has become a passion. Nutrition intrigues me. For too long, food was the essence of evil. Now, as I stand in God’s grace of healing and restoration, and the renewal of my mind and body, I marvel at how God has intricately created food for the body. Each bite can build and benefit my body, that I may live more fully, and serve God to His glory with this finite body He has given me for my time on earth.

There are more abuses to be found in this culture of food. Mostly here in America, but now spreading to cultures and countries across the globe. Food is becoming extinct. “Food” now consists, in great amount, of chemicals and concoctions mixed in laboratories. For some reason we’ve made incorrect conclusions about the pure, wholesome food God provided us, and concocted “fixes” and “antidotes” to the inabilities of real food. We feed animals what they were never created to eat, so that we have more abundance (and cheaper) meat. And because of this, we are doing exactly what we set out to do—eating great abundances of cheap meat. Great. I don’t know enough about the plight of our food productions in America to try and set up a pursasive argument for organic food. Instead, I learn what I can when I can. I choose to be an acknowledged consumer so that I can be assured that what my family and I are eating is nutritious and beneficial. Empty calories are just that—empty. Who needs green, Shrek-themed ketchup for their French fries, anyhow?

My Men who I love and feed with all my heart!

I am no extremist. Just this week my husband, son and I took a late night drive to Oscar’s Custard for my favorite “Cupid’s Creation” Sundae. A scoop (or three) of rich, creamy, chocolate AND vanilla custard, topped with warm hot fudge, tart raspberry topping, just-large-enough chunks of tiramisu, whipped cream and chocolate shavings. Oh—and a side of cheese fries, please! Don’t call my doctor, this is a rare occurrence. In fact, I noted to my husband as we pulled away from the drive thru that this last occurred when I was 7 months pregnant!

There is a great balance to life. Our time, our energy, our money, our passions, our interests, our jobs, all of these require a great balance. So does our health. I have much to learn, this blog is my attempt to better do just that. To learn about food and how to bless my family with it, and to do so by pursuing my passions of cooking, baking, and nutrition.