This morning I watched Jamie Oliver’s TED Talk from the Long Beach TED conference.  When I watch a TED Talk, I have my notebook out, pen in hand.  I take notes – all the time now.

In the first thirty seconds I was already scribbling down a quote that pulled at me.

“I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life.”

At that point I knew I was in.  Food has a profound impact in my life, in many ways.

I grew up helping in the kitchen and the garden with my grandmother, or at dinner time with my parents.  You either helped cooked or you did the dishes.  I hated doing dishes, so I generally preferred cooking.

We didn’t eat out often, we indulged occasionally in american Chinese food or pizza, but more often it was just homespun recipes from memory or from the bank of index cards my mother keeps in a drawer near the microwave.

As a child I was a slow, picky eater.  But somehow, as I grew up, I came to love food in an entirely different way.  Foodie may be too strong of a word, I can’t really afford to be a real foodie, but I do love the act of preparing and enjoying quality food.  Occasionally I indulge in a fine dining experience or dropping too much money on a trip to Whole Foods, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

There’s no guilt involved in my food life, I eat what tastes good and makes me feel good.  That process of selection has eliminated most processed foods, high volumes of carbs and starches, refined sugars.  My diet consists mostly of vegetables, fruit, nuts and animal protein (fish, meat, eggs, cheese).  But I’ve trained my taste buds to appreciate fresh whole foods; the average grocery store in the U.S. is 75% wasted space to me – I ring the outer edges where the produce, meats and fruits are and ignore that blackhole of processed foods, canned goods, pasta.

Our tastebuds are trained by what we eat: those who eat bland food continue to enjoy bland food; those who eat fast food come to enjoy fast food;  and so on.

I digress.

When it comes to food our upbringing, our emotions, our memories are all tied together.  Much of food is tied to our sense of smell and our sense of smell connects the deepest with our memories.

In some ways that is why food makes me cry.

When I prepare a cup of tea, properly, and sit and smell it, a flood of memories of a time in Montreal comes back to me.  There was a time when I couldn’t drink tea for almost a year because of those memories.

When I smell the sweet cinnamon of monkey bread the years of Thanksgiving and Christmas mornings leap back at me; sitting at a the kitchen table quartering Pillsbury biscuits and rolling them in sugar and cinnamon.

Food conjures memories, emotions and a deep connection to where we came from.

In a sense, that is why food makes me cry.

But there is yet another sense that food makes me cry.  And that is when I watch or read or work with people involved in the food and food justice world.

My intensely emotional and positive engagement with food is lacking for a massive percentage of the U.S. population, not even considering the rest of the world for the moment.

When we consider the amount of time we invest in food – deciding what to eat, where to eat, when to eat, how to eat, and the act of getting or preparing food – it adds up as one of the largest activities that consumes our time.  If that time is not positive, enjoyable, rooted in an enjoyment of food that gives us energy and enriches our lives it becomes a massive drain on our lives.

If we don’t have access to fresh whole foods, if we don’t know which fruits and vegetables are which, if we don’t know how to cook simple recipes from fresh foods.  We are denied one of the most powerful and enriching experiences of our lives.

Food can improve our own life and well-being, but it ties so deeply into our shared experiences, that the act of gathering, preparing and sharing food if lost severs us from our families, friends and communities.

When I see the loss of food culture in this way, not in the high flying foodie way, this makes me cry.

This is why food makes me cry.

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My first guest post is up on Untemplater, a collaborative blog founded by Jun Loayza, Adam Baker, Cody McKibben,Monica O’Brien, Carlos Miceli, and Andrew Norcross, with many more writers in the Gen-Y movement.

Check out my post here: How to Get Lucky… Creatively.

Welcome to Drop of Change for all of the readers from Untemplater.

Drop of Change is a blog about creating, dealing and enjoying life with its constant changes.  It’s the intersection between creativity, entrepreneurship, lifestyle, Gen-Y issues, sustainability and more from my perspective.

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Check out these posts for more from Drop of Change:

• What Makes An Expert?
• How I Managed to Speak at a Conference When I’d Never Attended One Before
• How to Succeed: A Simple Story
• 7 Obvious but Often Forgotten Tips to Being A Great Guest
• The Two Things You Need for Change
• Why Lifestyle Design is Self Indulgent
• Blogging Isn’t A Business Model

For more info on Drop of Change, check out the About page.  I also offer coaching, freelance and consulting work.  Lastly, if you ever want to learn to dance, let me know.

Please direct any questions here.

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Fleeting, spectacular, and unattainable.

Right?

Wrong. Good ideas are more like dirt than rainbows.

You can’t grow or build anything with rainbows; yet dirt, when properly worked can yield crops, gardens, houses, cities.

Are your good ideas like rainbows?

If so, it’s more than likely that whenever you have one, you stand back in awe, maybe you take a picture, and then you let it fade away. If you’re dogged, maybe you’ll charge blindly towards where it meets the horizon.

Good ideas as rainbows are fleeting, spectacular and unattainable because our perception of them leaves us to believe they are better watched than worked. Even if we snap a photo, it is unworkable; that’s jotting it down in a notebook and then looking at it as if it were a trophy.

Are your good ideas like dirt?

If so, it’s like stumbling upon a patch of earth that holds promise. It’s the vision of what could come to be from insight, expertise and perseverance.

Good ideas as dirt are all around us yet inconspicuous, workable and possible. Dirt is a place to work, to play, to create. If we treat good ideas like children treat the sand on a beach we can build sand castles that reach for the stars and touch the sky.

Are your ideas rainbows or dirt?

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Authenticity gets touted around as the big thing for personal branding.

But all this worry about authenticity means it’s easy to get wrapped up in our own bullshit. We become hypersensitive to our personal image, spending more time managing how we appear than doing what makes us who we are.

Authenticity as a selling point is important only to those who are worried that people won’t buy from them if they’re not hip or cool enough (in whatever sense for their target market). People swoon over the cool kid, and so if the cool kid sells a certain product or service, they think by purchasing the product they can be cool too.

Let me put it to you straight…

Authenticity is not a selling point.

Authenticity is part of a personal journey to align your actions with what you want your actions to be. Don’t pitch me by saying you or your work is authentic, it’s real enough as is, don’t be tautological on me. If it’s valuable enough to me and I can afford it, I’ll buy.

Pop your authenticity bubble before it breaks.

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If you haven’t been back recently, or are reading this in an RSS reader (click here for the real version), I made a major site redesign recently.

I was using Cody McKibben’s great Thrilling Theme with some modifications, however, the theme felt constricting despite it’s exceptional options.  It’s been replaced with the Headway Theme (affiliate link) and a whole lot of customization.  The Headway theme allows a lot of freedom within it’s existing structure, similarly to Thesis, and I’ve been learning the ins-and-out of customizing it and plan on using it as I build more client websites.

Switching to the Headway Theme is improving my skills in CSS, PHP and design, which in turn helps my clients get better websites.

The design change also marks a change in the overall purpose of this website.  Drop of Change was initially a followup to Slacker Reform, attempting to bridge the gap between social and environmental causes and the lifestyle design community.  However, as all things, my relationship to a particular community are changing.

While I believe the lifestyle design community empowers many individuals, there are parts of it which grate on me over time.  So, while I will still write on personal development or lifestyle design or whatever you wish to call it, this blog will be more like a Gen-Y blog with a range of topics like but certainly not limited to: Networking, Expertise, Marketing, Travel, Coffee, Social Change, Community, Philosophy, and Living.

Read the new About page for more info.

Why you ask?

Because it frees me to cover topics that I think are important or interesting or entertaining without feeling constricted by a self-defined genre.

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