Starting here & now
Welcome to the first post of this blog! I’ve been thinking for a long time about how to start, and then I decided to just take a cue from the title of this project and just start here and now. At the time of writing this, it’s the middle of January 2026, and I’m in the south of Sweden.
It’s been a little over a week since I moved here from The Netherlands. This time of the year might not, logistically speaking, be the best time to start writing this blog: it’s still the middle of winter, I just moved here and know very little about this place I moved to, and for the past week or so since moving I’ve been housebound with a terrible cold that just won’t seem to go away. I moved here to be with my boyfriend after doing 2 years of long distance, which is why I didn’t feel as daunted to do a big move like this to a place I hardly know because I’m here for love and I trust I’ll figure things out as we settle into our new life together.
One of the things that has kept me from starting before (because I’ve been wanting to do this project for a while) is a fear of being seen “trying in public” (as Lexi Merritt so aptly calls it). Eating Here & Now is essentially a research project as well as an attempt at changing my life from the ground up. I’ve had a desire to eat more local and seasonal for a long time, but it’s actually been a lot harder for me to really get the hang of than I had initially anticipated.
To eat smaller, slower and closer to home, some fundamental changes and commitments are necessary that a lot of the time feel very hard to do in my part of the world. For the last two years I’ve worked as a chef, even starting a shared farm-to-table event and catering company with a friend and fellow chef, and this has only shown me how much I actually don’t know about truly eating local, seasonal and sustainably. It feels almost embarrassing that, as someone who works with food on a daily basis, who has worked closely with farms and market gardens that work in a sustainable way, I still have so much to learn.
But I choose to embrace this humbling realisation and instead use it as the angle for this blog, because maybe that’s what’s necessary: instead of feeling silly for not knowing, let’s embrace this “beginner’s mind”! I’m sure a lot of people might feel the same desire to want to eat in a slower, more sustainable way that honours the seasons and the planet we live on with all its inhabitants, but (like me) they might have felt it was a little hard or a little embarrassing to start! Or, like me, they might not know where to begin looking and learning, because (even if you already have some knowledge) knowing where to start can be really difficult to figure out!
So, welcome to this project, and thank you so much for joining me on this learning journey!
If you want to support this project, you can make a one-time or a monthly donation HERE to keep Eating Here & Now alive, or recommend the blog to a friend who might like it to support it for free!
And if you’d like, tell me in the comments what struggles you have faced in learning to eat more sustainably, and if there are things that have made it easier for you to get started!
Lots of love,
Phaedra
