This article is part of our Healthy & Whole series for awaken the passion for home cooking and a sustainable healthy lifestyle. See the whole series here.
A few months ago, some mesmerizing photos from my Instagram feed caught my eye: brightly colored fruit floating in the air. It turns out that the face behind these slick photos is Carlene Thomas, Registered Dietitian and author of the blog Healthfully Ever After. Carlene’s goal is to get people interested in good food and then realize that it’s healthy. (Secret: us too!) No wonder we hit it off and I knew we had to feature her in our Healthy & Whole series. For us, a playful and creative approach is KEY to enforcing healthy eating, because who wants eating to be a chore? Although Carlene is a qualified health professional, she told me that “I don’t want anyone to badmouth Nutrition 101 because I’m a Registered Dietitian.” We love this approach and are honored that Carlene shares with us how this beautiful fruit and its approach came to be. Discover Carlene on Twitter or Instagram (see Instagram tag #floatingfruit).
Copyright: Carlène Thomas
I’m a Type A non-creative list builder by training. In fact, as a Registered Dietitian, I’ve had years in the chemistry lab and even body disassembly and I can’t lie… somewhere in there I’ve lost some of the passion for food that got me into this career in the first place (probably in the corpse laboratory). When food is your job, doing nutrient analysis calculations or measuring recipes to the gram, you can fall in love in the midst of boredom. And for a while, food and health became just a job and it started taking on this negative tone for something I was passionate about. I was so stressed and so focused on staying afloat from a business perspective that I lost touch with that fire.
I remember very well that one day someone I love told me how lucky I was to have this as a career: playing with food. Which really made me feel like a big idiot for behaving like that…because it definitely wasn’t always like that. Growing up, my best memories were all related to food. From my dad making pancakes of specific colors and shapes (we’re talking botanically correct flowers and your name on a pan) to my grandmother taking us for walks in the woods to pick berries for ice cream afterwards. Dinner. And there I was, years later, totally Pain-in-you-know-what because I had made it miserable with excessive pressure. I had lost my sense of wonder and my ability to appreciate and play with a medium that made me so happy.
Things started to change when I decided to surround myself with people who were passionate about what they were doing in life. People who have shown me that having a sense of wonder and continuing to learn and explore is an essential part of growth and happiness. For me, the best example of this is my husband: the ultimate creator. He can look at a room and describe four hundred ways to decorate it, and then build a custom chair out of a car windshield. Or look at a color and you say exactly what you want that color to look like and a story behind how that color evolved, while I look at that color and say, “It’s like a cucumber and a lemon have a child, but fewer green. It’s basically green. Why are we doing this?”. That was exactly my problem. Unless something was on the to-do list with a specific goal, my Type A brain saw no point in engaging in games or creativity.
When the husband pushed me to get creative with food with a purpose (which I’ve added to my to-do list), it really clicked. The idea of looking at food differently in a fun, playful, and challenging way can fuel that fire. Food can get lost when the consumer focuses on calorie counting or, conversely, double bacon cheeseburgers. Playful and visually stimulating food is good for everyone! Because my job is to make healthy foods look (and taste) amazing to appeal to these more nutritious options. Broccoli isn’t that sexy, folks, but I do my best for people to enjoy it, and sometimes that means thinking outside the box. My real goal is to have someone say “It looks amazing/delicious/beautiful” and not “It looks healthy”.
This is how the floating product series and food squares were created on Instagram. Part of maintaining your passion for food and health is not always taking everything too seriously. To make it less analytical. Be a player! And if you’re a list maker and planner (like some people I know) take the time to make this happen. Here are some starting goals and tasks to inspire you to be creative:
5 ways to be creative with food today
- Buy a new seasonal product. Find a way to eat it (because you can buy it and use it as decoration, but that’s not the point).
- Get three things from your pantry or fridge (chopped kind) and see if you can figure out a way to get them together for dinner.
- Buy a new spice.
- Stylize and photograph an entire group of monochromatic foods.
- Make a cocktail with something that normally shouldn’t be. I’ve had mushroom cocktails before. Really.
