A video was circulating Facebook a few years ago, and this video changed my entire paradigm of cooking and eating healthy. In the video, Swedish scientists tested families for a variety of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. They found hundreds in everyone from fathers to children. After having these same families eat exclusively organic food for two weeks, these levels dropped to nearly zero. One of the scientists said something that resonated with me deeply: “We know very little about the long-term effects of eating food treated with pesticides, especially if you consider that chemicals can be much more harmful when combined together than they are on their own.”

After this, I dove head-first into co-ops, growing a bigger garden, and sourcing as much organic as I could afford. Oh, to go back to the days when we all lived off our own plots of land and chemicals were nowhere to be seen.

Around this time, I wrote a historical fiction book that required a lot of research. Through this research, I realized that much of the cookware in our great-grandmother’s kitchens was quite different than what we use today. It did not abide by our current “buy-and-toss” mentality. In this time, cast iron skillets were passed down the matrilineal line. Cookware pieces were treasured as heirlooms. Everything was made locally, by hand, and was meant to last generations.