What's food got to do with it?

So I left off still wondering what to eat. This question that we face daily has a lot to do with mood and taste, but in my life, it also has to do with health. You see, both my parents, well, primarily my mother, were plagued with the same dilemma every day, three times a day. My mom built a career around food and health and she wasn't about to let us (my sister and I) get away with eating frosted flakes for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly for lunch and a happy meal for dinner. As a kid, the aforementioned foods did not really exist in my world. A sample of my standard daily menu goes something like this: Oatmeal with tamari and miso soup for breakfast, rice ball (brown rice wrapped in Nori seaweed with umeboshi plum paste inside) and a salad sandwich on homemade bread for lunch, and millet croquettes, fish and kale for dinner. Believe it or not, 30 years later, I still look at that menu and, except for the salad sandwich (sorry mom, not really a home run), my mouth begins to water. We were lucky. In my house, the food was different from everybody else's, but the majority of my friends still loved to eat dinner with us.

When my mother met my father, she was fatigued constantly, always trying to energize herself with coffee and sugar. At the time, my father was following the macrobiotic diet. Well, one thing led to another and after they started hanging out together, my mother started following the diet as well. When her skin cleared up and her energy increased (with no caffeine!), she was hooked. For the following ten years, being a homemaker and new mother allowed her the time to teach herself about food and its connection to health and well being. When I was five and my little sister was three, my parents divorced and my father moved to Los Angeles. My mother needed to make a living, but she wasn't willing to put us in daycare, so she started teaching cooking classes in the kitchen of our New York City apartment. Now, 33 years later, her cooking school takes up two full floors of a commercial building in downtown Manhattan and my mother not only has her Ph, D., but she is the author of 4 published books! Anyone wishing to learn more can go to http://www.foodandhealing.com/.

So with a history such as this, the reader must be curious--wouldn't it seem that I already know how and what to eat? Well, unfortunately, not really. Once you really get interested in the connection between health and food, it's like opening a can of worms. And I've got worms up to my ears!