Culinary Medicine
The story of food is the story of humankind. Our personal food experience tells of our relationship with food, each other, and the world at large. But our stories are often muddled by the overwhelming amount of information, disinformation, and misinformation about how what we choose to eat affects our health and well-being. Perhaps at no other time in history has there been more confusion impacting our decisions regarding healthful food choices.
Chef Dr. Mike’s Practical Culinary Medicine
Because nutrition alone is not the answer, Chef Dr. Mike’s healthful approach stems from the eyes and palate of a true chef. His deep-seated love of food and keen medical awareness resulted in his exceptionally insightful approach to eating.
Chef Dr. Mike’s focus is on the individual—their roots and their relationships—as opposed to the one-size-fits-all “eat this, not that” approach. It is a blend of the Science of Medicine and Culinary Arts. Multidisciplinary, evidence-based science is the foundation, but it is not the whole package. Every lesson must return to the individual. That means learning to be comfortable with a degree of uncertainty in both Culinary Medicine and life. Chef Dr. Mike serves as the gateway between what “a body” needs and what your body needs. The ultimate goal is what we all seek: to simply be healthier and happier.
The Food Experience
By approaching the Food Experience through the lens of Culinary Medicine we:
- Understand the links between food, health, and wellness
- Develop a well-founded and healthful relationship with the food we eat that positively sustains ourselves, our communities, and the planet
- Transmute our lives by restoring the connections, balance, and power found in an authentic food experience.
- Utilize our relationship with food as a stepping stone to improving our overall relationships in life
“Culinary Medicine is the multidisciplinary application of evidence-based decision making in the selection of ingredients and techniques used in preparing foodstuffs with a goal of achieving and maintaining health and wellness through an optimized food experience.”
– CHEF DR. MIKE
Relationships Define Your Life
The Food Experience: The Meal & The Weave
Our lives are our stories. Stories that come from the experiences we have in the relationships we forge. Collectively, our individual stories become the face of society and culture. With the wide lens of time those stories become the pages of history—the history of humankind.
The food we’ve eaten has been a constant throughout the ages. A shared necessity like the act of breathing, every person must eat to survive. But the consumption of food, unlike breathing, involves choices. From the time before Homo sapiens sapiens, the consumption of food — the meal — became our social currency. It became the basis of our ancestors’ relationship with each other and their tribe. And the abundance of the meal, or the lack of it, defined the tribe’s relationship with the world at large.
That hardwired instinct, that uniquely human mix of fellowship and food – The Food Experience – remains both prominent and relevant in our modern world. At its most basic level, the foods we choose to eat put us on a path towards health and wellness or towards disability and disease. Will your story be an inspiring tale worth retelling or just another sad, forgotten tragedy?
And yet our relationship with food extends far beyond the physiological and into the deepest realms of the psychological. What, with whom, and how we eat defines our relationship with each other, and by dynamic extension our society and culture. Simultaneously, it is the thread that weaves the cloak of humanity we all share and the thread that weaves the sigil of our individual identity.
This Food Experience, this meal and the weave, is at every encounter a unique narrative waiting to unfold. You can never have the same meal twice. Every opportunity to dine is a fresh event in that collection of experiences that become the story that is our lives. What relationships will define the weave of your life: rich, delicious, healthy, and happy or hurried, harried, hateful, and ill? There is a fork in the road, which path will you choose?
