From watching my mom create delicious dinners, to helping her fashion decadent desserts, I spent my childhood in the kitchen. There was nothing more exciting or rewarding (and there still isn’t) than making someone smile with the food that my mom and I prepared. Being in the kitchen with my mom was and is a production – from the grocery shopping to the final product – we laughed and my eyes glowed at the wondrous delicacies that came from just a little bit of work.
The kitchen is where my love for food began and the kitchen is my favorite part of any home. I owe this to my mom’s never-ending ability to make family meals, no matter what the circumstances of the busy day.
Having this mindset engraved in my mind – that anything can happen in the kitchen – is why I felt so intrigued by Jen Haugen’s blog, “Down-to-Earth Dietitian”. One of the reasons why I am studying Nutritional Sciences is because I want people to feel empowered and inspired by food. I believe that food stimulates every sense and can make nearly every person smile or feel content. This is the same emotion that I feel when I read Haugen’s blog.
Haugen, a Registered Dietitian, makes her family and her personal values the focus of her “About” page. While she does share her extensive resume, which includes working for Tropicana, Unilever, The Family Dinner Project, Welch’s, Smart Eating for Kids, and many other companies, she reveals that her primary goal is to empower moms to have a positive impact on their family’s health. She recognizes the difficulty of careers and of familial responsibility and she understands how it is easy to feel stressed and overwhelmed. However, Haugen’s aim is to ease concerns of healthy living by teaching mom’s about what nutrition facts to believe and what fads are fallacy, and she organizes recipes to simplify the process of deciding what’s for dinner.
Just as I was raised to believe in my mom’s kitchen, food is not just about obtaining enough calories, but rather food is an experience and Haugen emphasizes this mentality throughout her posts and discussions.
In addition to my love for food, I love organizing everything and it is apparent that Haugen does as well. Her blog is enticing, yet simple in design. Haugen chose earth tones as her background colors, which are very appealing and they are complimentary to the blog title. Along the heading of each page, there are navigational tools to reach her Home page, which houses her latest posts, her About page, a Services page, followed by a Recipe page and lastly, a Contacts page. In addition to these main headings, there is a category menu at the right side of her pages that has topics covering specific meal times, family nutrition, gardening, supermarket help and inspirational posts, just to name a few. Everything that a visitor needs to search through the endless posts is right at their fingertips. This is one of the most viewer-friendly sites I have ever visited.
In conjunction with the functionality of this forum, Haugen speaks in a very honest and sincere manner. Her voice is clear and strong in all of her posts as she encourages people to try her recipes and adjust their dietary habits. She speaks from the heart, mentioning her family in her posts, however she remains professional as well. In many of her posts, Haugen discloses when different companies sponsor her to try different ingredients in her recipes. In these instances, Haugen reveals the motives behind her trying new recipes, however she remains true to her principles and always states that the opinions she expresses and her ideas are solely her own and are not altered by the companies that encourage her to explore new ingredients.
Along with each post, Haugen provides links to supplemental material, such as the research behind different product development, or printable versions of her recipes. In addition, she often features other recipes of similar themes that her friends create as well. Her combination of scientific principles with recipes that have personal meaning create a sense of an educated, welcoming community, that encourages visitors to explore different mentalities and processes.
All of these features, combined with visual depictions of each recipe or of images related to each post subject, make her site very appealing to anyone looking to change their food mentalities. In my own blogging, I hope that I can entice viewers with an appealing look and easy-to-understand, reliable information, to encourage people to listen to what I have to say.
Haugen’s blog isn’t just about nutrition and new recipes, it is about changing one’s life to be the happiest they can be with the people around them. It is about making memories that will last a lifetime. It is about feeling empowered to have control over your life. I hope to be able to play similar roles in my future, along with the principles that Haugen exhibits throughout her site: you can still have a career and pursue your dreams, without compromising the quality and healthfulness of your life. If that isn’t empowering, than I don’t know what is.
Interested in learning more? Please visit Jen Haugen’s site here: http://www.jenhaugen.com to discover food as an experience, not just as a single meal.