The tab on my teabag reads: “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted.” John Lennon.

Friday afternoon. 

I don’t feel like running. In fact, I think I might be getting a sore throat, which is a good enough excuse to go running tomorrow, when I’m rested and feeling better.

I don’t have any homework to do, because I’m not in school, which is this bizarre feeling of weightlessness and/or disbelief and anxiety that I’m forgetting some big assignment. (I’ve dreamt about this. A sure sign that I need to go back to school.)

I could make soup or organize my miscellaneous papers file, but I don’t really feel like it. 

Or I could follow all of the mind-numbing, soul-flattening links about “Top-Ten Embarrassing Celebrity Selfies” on Facebook, but, eh, I’m not feeling particularly motivated. 

However, I am here – here on the couch with my heating pad, a quilt and the cat – enjoying “wasting” my time on this project I cooked up about a month ago:

I’m going to start a food blog. I’ve just been loving Pinterest so much lately that I need to do something crafty and entrepreneurial myself.

So I had this idea last month when I was winging some gluten-free carrot muffins. I had a recipe, but I don’t like using a ton of oil and I didn’t have this or that and I was just throwing things in as I thought they might work. I even snapped some artsy pictures, dreaming about blog layouts. However, when the muffins were an epic fail, I reconsidered my aspirations as a food blogger and put the project on the back burner.

BUT, I had this other idea as I was mixing up these muffins and brainstorming my food blogging career:

I could have not just a food blog – but – I could have a PUBLIC HEALTH blog.

Yes.

Because I like food a lot, and I like cooking a lot. But, I’m also fascinated by where food comes from and what it means to us. What are our relationships with food and how do our systems of consumption nourish and destroy our health? I’m thinking big-picture here, such as the ways in which the huge popularity of quinoa in the US impacts the Andean communities who grow it. We’re all abuzz about the grain because it is high in protein and is gluten-free – a healthy and versatile option for vegetarians and those avoiding wheat. Is or isn’t that more important than the cultural and physical survival of communities selling their subsistence? “Our” is you and me; “our” is all-of-our, everyone, circular.

Thus, a food blog. A public health blog. A place to share about my culinary adventures, primarily the ones that turn out edible. And, more meaningfully, a forum to broadcast and discuss interesting, public health-related things, which, of course, public health is everything and everything is public health.  A platform, a table, a hearth upon which to serve up tasty challenges, dialogue, community and the occasional shameless pun.

I’m inviting you, my public-health-enthusiast friends.