Being an empty nester now, it’s just my husband and me at mealtime in the evenings. It has become easy to just have “whatever, whenever” and not really pay attention to the food preparation or the meal itself. We’ve become quite mindless about our meals having the TV on.

During my classes with NTA, we studied ancestral diets and how culture is being lost from our family dinner tables. We studied how we can turn back and bring some of these lost practices back to our own family unit.

For my own and my family’s experience, I want to call on our travels to Europe and bring back a mindful food preparation and meal experience at least several times per week, if not daily. We love to travel and really enjoyed a day in Strasbourg, France last year. On this day, we strolled through markets for several hours picking up fresh vegetables and fruits, various bread made fresh that day, a variety of cheeses and meats, as well as pastries. We took our goods with us for a communal meal with our fellow tourists and had a Sommelier pair wines for us for each course of the meal. The food was fresh, made with love, and delicious! This was special and not what I would choose to nourish us with every day, meaning the quantity of bread and pastries, but the ritual of breaking bread together and slowly tasting the different flavors abound from the food and drink are what nourishment and fellowship are all about!