ABOUT JILL

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My quest for healthy eating started with vegetarianism in high school and continued through my 20s with the exploration and practice of macrobiotics. By studying with others and sharing the journey, cooking for one another and for our families, I became deeply committed to macrobiotics and passionate about health. I made pickles, soymilk, mochi, and seitan, and my daughter loved brown-rice syrup lollipops and umeboshi plums.

As a co-director of the Macrobiotic Foundation of Tallahassee, I helped bring macro practitioners to town, organized potlucks, and co-wrote the newsletter. I had the good fortune of being a scribe at a macrobiotic-intensive workshop in Rhode Island where it was fascinating to watch health consultations with greats such as Michio Kushi. It was exciting to witness different practitioners’ unique styles of diagnosis and treatment for people with serious, life-threatening illnesses like cancer, and it was wonderful to see people finding hope through macrobiotics. When I returned from that workshop I began to cook healing foods for people with cancer, and eventually cooking for people or families who wanted to eat healthier but did not have the time to cook.

In 1997, I went to midwifery school and also began to practice as a private chef, a profession that I still love and carry on today since it allows me to consult and share with my clients on a more personal and intuitive level. To find out more about my midwifery practice, follow the link: Blessed Be Midwifery.

Over the years, I have tried out many different styles of cooking and eating, making mental notes about how I felt with each. I became familiar with the body-ecology diet, food combining, the blood-type diet, and raw and living foods just to name a few, and I observed that what I ate dictated how I felt. Continuing to use the principles I learned from macrobiotics about balancing yin and yang, I began teaching cooking classes at The New Leaf Market on everything from macrobiotics to raw foods to intuitive eating. Eventually these classes and my private cooking practice became my life’s vocation and The Kitchen Goddess was born.

In my classes, I strive to educate on more than food science—my goal is to help people begin to know their own bodies as they learn to cook and enjoy whole foods, with an emphasis on fresh, locally grown produce. Kitchen Goddess classes cover a variety of seasonal topics, including sprouting, natural ferments, cooking with (and understanding the health benefits of) seaweeds, vegan living, and raw and living foods.

One of my ongoing goals in life is to constantly be my own guinea pig for healthy (and unhealthy!) food experiments, and to educate and inspire others to do their own experimenting and learning about the health of their body in relation to food. I further enjoy non-judgmental teaching and seizing opportunities for learning moments. Wherever we are is a good place to start. We can always feel better, and that is the goal: to feel great and have a quality of life that is full and rich and lively.