My relationship with food has changed radically throughout my life. As I child, I used to throw away out the window the food that I was supposed to eat while my parents were at work. I hated vegetables and took them out of the soup and I have always asked my mum to use less onion.
In college, I started cooking in the badly equipped common kitchen of the dormitory. During an ERASMUS stage in Nantes (France), I started to integrate vegetables into my diet, due to food waste and financial concerns (students could benefit from an anti-food waste project that was redistributing nearly expired products for very little money).
A few years later, food waste and food in general would become a subject of my articles. As a CSR and environmental journalist, I have written about dozens of studies related to the impact of food throughout its life cycle: production, processing, transportation and disposal. I have organized several conferences on food waste, I have analyzed the sustainability reports of agri-food corporations, and watched heartbreaking documentaries about the animal industry and industrialized agriculture.
What I discovered had greatly impacted my lifestyle. I became ovo-lacto-pesco-vegetarian at first (around 2013, I think), then I adopted a vegan diet (around 2019). Since then, I have also had a few deviations: during one of the depressive periods I faced during the pandemic, I used to buy already cooked, ovo-lacto-vegetarian food from the supermarket;also, during my internship at a plant based restaurant, I ate desserts made with honey, which attracted criticism of hypocrisy, because I was advocating to give up using it altogether.
Moving closer to the present moment, I graduated in 2023 from a course for professional chefs with vegan chef Day Radley from the UK, a course accredited by the Independent Cookery Schools Association "ICSA" (the only UK cookery school accrediting institution). I'm currently close to completing a food photography course at the same school and really struggling to progress with a nutrition course as well.
In a nutshell, these are the experiences that led me to cook the way I do today. I should also add that I strive to stick to the principles of zero waste cooking and living. I was better at it a few years ago, but I am still managing to avoid most of the packaging, by buying ingredients from the only zero waste shop in Bucharest, but also from local producers of organic or regenerative vegetables, such as bio&co and Sol si sufet. I am really proud that I manage to avoid sending food scraps to landfill, instead turning them into compost.
I hope to inspire you and maybe determine you to integrate more plants into your diet, but also to transform your cooking and eating habits into more sustainable ones.
I love to cook and also enjoy vegan food prepared by others. So I thought I'd share with you both my own recipes and my thoughts on what I find to eat around town.
