If you’re a homecook I want you to use my site as a place to connect with other homecooks or people that cooking is a major part of their lives. If you’re just someone who enjoys food content I hope you have an excellent time here as well, I’m very proud of what I write and the things I choose to share.

Mental health is important whatever your relationship to it is. I don’t believe that mental health is a “one size fits all” conversation or has a universal solution so I think the most important thing to do is to keep talking about what is going on in your head and what you think. To that end, it really helps to know what other people are going through and how they’re dealing with it. I hope that everyone who visits iambearhands eventually feels comfortable joining the conversation or starting one themselves if there’s something you wanna talk about that no one is discussing yet.

Food and mental health are very intimately connected for me. When I’m depressed I’ve binge ate, when I’m stressed it’s very relaxing to cook huge meals. I do a lot of really deep and important thinking when I cook, standing over a stove and developing a recipe and waiting to see results bloom has a beautiful monastic peacefulness to it that is hard to describe but I’m sure more than a few of you know exactly what I’m talking about. Cooking for other people as well has very peaceful feelings surrounding it, it’s a wonderful feeling knowing that you’re feeding your family and loved ones food they enjoy eating.

In making this site I intend to share prose, articles, recipes and musings on what food has meant to me throughout a lifetime of studying it. More than anything I really hope to represent my deep reverence I have for foods history and I’d really like to show you how food is very often the six degrees that separates us all. We all have to eat and more often than we realize we’re eating foods that are more similar than we know.