About

Parenting is full of surprises. One of the surprise I did not see coming was that my 9-month old daughter, child of two vegetarians, loves meat. This has resulted in a mad scramble to reconfigure how to feed my family, while still maintaining our values.

This blog grew out of a series of private posts on the photo-sharing site 23snaps, and private emails to a friend who took an interest in those posts. My instinct is still to keep things private, but I don’t think it’s possible to write about the people I love without at least giving them names: my daughter Nora, and my husband Jeremy.

My motivation for going public is to contribute, in however small a way, to disseminating accurate information about food, food traditions, and nutrition science. I might post an angry rant or two about pregnancy and fertility myths as well. As the daughter of scientists, I will do my best to hold everything I write to scientific standards. You won’t find an anti-vaxxer screed here. But as a software engineer, my modus operandi tends to be to hack first and optimize later, especially in the kitchen. And as a humanist, I strongly believe that there are many aspects of food culture and food traditions that have stood the test of time for good reason, despite science having not yet figured out why they work. We ignore these traditions in favor of reductionist research studies at our own peril, and perhaps at the peril of the human race.