This Plate Will Save Your Life*

Hey y'all!

After polling the crowd (the sub one thousand people from all over the country that follow me on Instagram), I've been convinced to make this Substack and build a house for some recipes and nutrition blogs to live.

I'm a private chef based in Phoenix, Arizona, and I'm a healing person in a body with an autoimmune disease. I am not a doctor, nutritionist, or naturopath - I don't even have a college degree - but I have been sick, and I have been healthy, and I've meticulously tracked the relationship between the two, as well as the role that herbs, medicinal plants, and intentional eating and cooking have played in between.

Nothing that I post about here is newly discovered, and certainly not by me - plants and foods as medicine have been studied, trialed and created by indigenous peoples, ancient societies and a harmony between nature and man that I strive to one day understand. I will always focus my research on anthropological origins to honor and highlight credit where credit is due, as well as quote and reference people of color active in the naturopathic community.

Why mention race and ethnicity in a health and wellness blog? Well, because the wellness industry is a fucked up place, and it's centered on marketing, profiting, and white supremacy. If you don't believe that, ask yourself how the #1 greens supplement on the Internet which has virtually zero nutritional value got its launch on TikTok, or how labels and marketing campaigns around commercial supplements are strikingly similar to the blob-core, puffy serif fonts of viral social media posts. More on that later.

For now, we'll start with the foundational knowledge needed to confidently shop and cook for yourself (and your people) broken down into terms for us simple mortals to understand. We'll explore single ingredient products (think garlic, burdock, clover) in a 1x3 format - same plant, three ways - raw, cooked, and fermented - and how these forms affect us for better or for worse. We'll move into combining these ingredients into plates that actually taste good, and we'll break down where to buy things without going broke - because you don't have to, I swear.

If this is up your alley, follow along. I've opened up an optional paid tier which you're not beholden to.  Monetizing this project would be great, but at least for now, it's optional - and in the future, I'll only charge for things like complete recipes - because the knowledge provided by nature to heal your body MUST be free and available to everybody.

The pace of this blog will be about two posts per week, and if there's anything you'd like me to cover, just let me know.

'Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.'

BIG LOVE

Anna