Food has the ability to comfort, connect, and communicate — sometimes more powerfully than words. How do you see food functioning as a form of therapy?
Food is one of the first languages we ever learn — before we speak, we are fed. We come to understand love, safety, even rhythm through that exchange. So when I think about food as therapy, I’m not thinking about a clinical process — I’m thinking about returning to something ancestral, embodied, and deeply relational.
In our work at The Evolved Network, we don’t use food to teach in the traditional sense. We let food reveal. It becomes a mirror, a portal. A young person might show up guarded, shut down, unsure. But give them a knife, a cutting board, a few vegetables, and the silence begins to soften. Suddenly they’re asking questions, laughing, experimenting. Or they’re quiet, but present — which is its own kind of healing.
Existentially, therapy is not about diagnosis. It’s about making sense of one’s experience in the presence of another. Food allows that sense-making to happen in a nonverbal, non-invasive way. It bypasses defenses. It says: Here. Try this. Do you like it? What does it remind you of? What does it awaken in you?
And that exchange isn’t one-sided. When I cook with a young person, I’m not just watching them grow — I’m being reminded of my own tenderness, my own hunger, my own need for connection. The kitchen becomes a sacred in-between, where teacher and student disappear, and only humans remain.
Food, at its best, is a kind of presence. It says: I made this for you. I thought of you. That alone can be therapeutic — especially in communities where so much has been taken, denied, or made transactional. A shared meal can be the first time someone feels truly seen.
"When I cook with a young person, I’m not just watching them grow — I’m being reminded of my own tenderness, my own hunger, my own need for connection."