How has food and nutrition become such separate entities? My answer is, they’re not. In my perfect world, all nutritionists are chefs, and all chefs are well-versed in nutrition. All foods are whole, organic, and from our friendly neighbouring farmer.

I love food more than my son, ALMOST. It's been a love affair since I was 7 years old. I became a certified holistic Nutrition Consultant and a professionally trained chef because true nourishment only exists when nutrition is sound and the food, satisfying. Find out HOW I do that on the Work With Me pages.

I was a sickly kid. I met my grandmother when I was 7 and my chronic bronchitis never came back when I started eating her amazing home-cooked food. My mother and I immigrated to Canada when I was 9. She worked, I cooked. I learned my first roux in a home economics class and my first success was a creamy baked onion and potatoes. I still have that 80’s roasting dish. Unbeknownst to me then, I fell in love with food.

When I traded in a suit for a chef’s jacket, I loved the searing, smoking, baking, cutting, sous vide, being on the line...but I grew increasingly uncomfortable witnessing the waste we were creating. Food waste, plastic waste. Something wasn’t right about the convenience of mass orders of factory-farmed meat and vegetables from industrialized agriculture. Coincidentally, there were more frequent news of cancer diagnosis in people around me. Was it a coincidence?

My education, my research, and my work in food and nutrition all pointed to a healthy diet to be a common and modifiable underlying cause to major Non-Communicable Diseases, which causes 40 out of 56 million global deaths a year. Food must be tasty and good-looking, but I can now include ingredient quality, consideration of the producers, nutritional value and environmental impact in my love affair.

Teaching about and serving real food with a clean conscience is my happiness, this is why I became a nutritionist and a chef.