My Food Journey Part 4: Lessons from the Apothecary

In 2015, I enrolled in the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition (CSNN) to complete a diploma in holistic nutrition. I wanted to understand the body more deeply, and better understand how food can shape health.

What I learned pretty quickly was sobering.

So many of the chronic health issues that plague people in North America are diet- and lifestyle-related. And yet, doctors receive very little formal education in nutrition. That realization was honestly shocking. While my diploma was nowhere near as in-depth as a dietetics degree, it became clear that you could walk away from a program like CSNN with more nutrition literacy than many physicians receive in medical school. That’s not a knock on doctors. It’s a critique of the system.

I remember once going to a walk-in clinic in Ontario and seeing a sign on the wall that said something like: “One symptom, one issue per visit.” That sentence stuck with me. Because the body doesn’t work that way. Everything is connected. But Western medicine, especially under-resourced and overburdened systems, is often reduced to symptom management. A prescription here, a band-aid there,  without the time or capacity to look at the whole picture.

During this time, I also became deeply interested in herbal medicine. An herbalist named Savayda Jarone, who runs The Bloom Institute in Nova Scotia, came in as a guest lecturer at CSNN. I was fascinated, and I wanted to learn more. So I enrolled in her year-long Level 1 herbal medicine program.

One weekend a month, for a full year, we met and learned everything from basic herbal medicine and plant energetics to foraging, cultivation, harvesting, and remedy-making. We made tinctures, salves, and teas. We visited herb farms. We learned how plants interact with the body. Not as magic bullets, but as supporters of balance and healing.

That education deepened my respect for plants, but it also sharpened my understanding of limits. After CSNN, I worked briefly in the supplement department of a health food store. At first, I was excited to talk to customers. But those conversations were short. People wanted to know what supplement to take. What mushroom, what capsule, what tincture they’d read about online. There wasn’t time, or often willingness, to talk about food, cooking, or lifestyle.

To graduate from CSNN, I had to complete 12 case studies with real clients. And it was during this work that something really clicked for me: most people don’t want to overhaul their diet or lifestyle. They want a workaround. A pill. A supplement. Something that lets everything else stay the same.

I saw this over and over again. People struggling with gut issues, inflammation, fatigue, often eating mostly processed foods, and rarely cooking. They would be resistant to spending an hour a day in the kitchen or a few hours a week doing meal prep. Many would say they didn’t have time. But after talking more, you’d realize they were spending hours a day on Netflix or Instagram. It was disheartening.

And I want to be clear: this isn’t about judgment. It’s about capacity, culture, and support. I also realized how much of nutrition work is actually therapy. People’s relationships with food are deeply emotional. For some, even being in the kitchen is triggering, tied to childhood, family dynamics, shame, or scarcity. I came to understand that I wasn’t equipped, nor did I want, to work one-on-one in that kind of clinical or counseling capacity.

One moment that really crystallized this for me was working in the supplement shop when someone came in who had cancer. They wanted medicinal mushroom supplements to fight the disease. I was a minimum-wage store clerk. I wasn’t prepared, ethically or emotionally, to hold that kind of weight. That was the moment I knew this wasn’t the lane I wanted to be in.

I left that job and eventually began working at Blue Apples: an arts and wellness centre with an herbal dispensary and a vegan café. Downstairs, there were herbalists, an Ayurvedic doctor, a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, massage therapists, and an acupuncturist. Upstairs, I worked in the kitchen. Sometimes I worked the herb shop too.

Watching herbal consultations day after day, I heard something that stuck with me. The owner, Daniel Wiseman, would often tell clients: “The medicine is just the vehicle. You’re the driver.” 

The herbs can help. But only if the person is willing to make changes in how they live. 

That was the lesson.

What became unmistakably clear to me during these years was this: people need to learn how to cook. If we want better health outcomes, we can’t keep treating cooking as optional or secondary. There is upstream work to be done. Putting cooking education back into schools, creating community spaces to share meals, rebuilding confidence in the kitchen.

You can’t supplement your way out of a broken food culture. If people want to be healthier, it requires more than visiting an herbalist or buying the right product. It requires real, sustained changes. And those changes are hard. They require time, support, skills, and community.

That realization didn’t push me away from food. It pulled me closer to education, systems change, and the question that keeps showing up in my work:

How do we make it easier (structurally, culturally, collectively) for people to feed themselves well?

This writing is always free to read.

If it nourished you in any way, you can buy me a coffee below and help fuel what comes next ☕️