The Angel, the Devil & the Dinner Plate: Navigating Our Humanity in Food Choices | Sherry Strong

Why is it so easy to know what we “should” eat and still choose something completely different?

In this episode of Rooted & Wild, I welcome back Sherry Strong, food philosopher, chef, nutritionist, certified Live Blood Microscopist, and bestselling author of Return to Food: How Going Back Is the Way Forward, for a conversation about the wonderfully complicated relationship between food and being human.

Most of us have experienced the little debate at the dinner table. One voice reaches for nourishment, health, and the choice we know will make us feel good. Another wants the cake, the comfort food, the second helping, or whatever happens to taste irresistible in the moment.

The angel and the devil.

But reducing our food choices to simply “good” and “bad” misses something important.

Food is tangled up with pleasure, memory, culture, celebration, convenience, emotion, habit, biology, relationships, and sometimes rebellion. We don't make decisions about what we eat as perfectly rational creatures. We make them as human beings.

Sherry and I explore what happens when we bring more curiosity and less judgment to the dinner plate. How do we pursue health without becoming rigid? How do we enjoy pleasure without abandoning discernment? And what happens when shame, guilt, perfectionism, or moral judgment become part of our relationship with food?

Rather than another conversation about the perfect diet, this episode looks at the humanity behind our choices and how we might build a relationship with food that leaves room for both nourishment and pleasure.

Because perhaps eating well isn't about always listening to the angel or defeating the devil.

Maybe it's about understanding why they're both sitting at the table.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why knowing what is healthy doesn't always determine what we eat
• The “angel and devil” dynamic behind food choices
• Why labeling foods as good or bad can complicate our relationship with eating
• Pleasure, nourishment, and the tension between the two
• The roles of emotion, memory, culture, and comfort in food
• Shame and guilt around eating
• Perfectionism in wellness and nutrition
• Why willpower doesn't tell the whole story
• Developing greater awareness around our choices without becoming obsessive
• Navigating indulgence without turning it into moral failure
• How modern food environments influence what we want
• Reconnecting with real food while still acknowledging our humanity
• Finding a more sustainable relationship with nourishment
• Moving from judgment toward curiosity
• Creating food choices we can actually live with

About Sherry Strong

Sherry Strong is a food philosopher, artist, chef, nutritionist, certified Live Blood Microscopist, and bestselling author of Return to Food: How Going Back Is the Way Forward, featuring a foreword by Mariel Hemingway.

She is the former Victorian Chair of Nutrition Australia and former Melbourne President of Slow Food and has served on advisory boards consulting with the Australian Government on public health policy. Sherry has shared the stage with Jamie Oliver, cooked in Martha Stewart's studio kitchen, presented at TEDxTokyo, and appeared extensively across television, radio, and international media throughout Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.

Today, she helps individuals and families reclaim their health through real food, nutritional wisdom, lifestyle transformation, and live blood microscopy.

Connect with Sherry Strong

Website: https://www.SherryStrong.com
Sweet Freedom: https://www.sweetfreedomlife.com
The Clean Blood Protocol: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61581254851796
Book: Return to Food: How Going Back Is the Way Forward
https://www.amazon.ca/Return-Food-Going-Back-Forward-ebook/dp/B0B4F7RR9K

Rooted & Wild provides general information for educational and informational purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by guest speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Henry Hawk. The content shared on this podcast is not intended to replace individualized medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice, nor should it be used to diagnose or treat any health condition. Listeners are encouraged to consult with qualified healthcare professionals regarding any medical or mental health concerns.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Rooted and Wild. Food is never just fuel. It carries memory, morality, pleasure, shame, culture, and identity. Every meal becomes a negotiation between what we think we should eat and what we actually desire. In this episode, we explore the tension with Sherry Strong, a globally respected food philosopher and educator who has spent decades helping people untangle their relationship with food. Sherry's work spans public health, education, media, and global wellness initiatives. She has spoken on international stages, including TEDx Tokyo, where her philosophy known as the consumption concept reached hundreds of thousands of viewers around the world. She has served as well-being director to organizations such as Jamie Oliver's 15th Foundation, the Reach Foundation, and the Sustainable Women's Business Conference, and was the curator and co-founder of the World Wellness Project Summit. She has shared the stage with Jamie Oliver and cooked in Martha Stewart's studio kitchen, yet her work has always remained grounded in the lived realities of everyday people. This conversation looks beyond right and wrong, discipline and indulgence, angel and devil, and it is about reclaiming discernment, compassion, and humanity at the dinner plate. Sherry, welcome back to Rooted in Wild.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Thank you for having me back, Henry. It's such a pleasure to be able to flesh these things out with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Oh my gosh. I was telling you in the previous episode that you were on, which was all about food philosophy. This was probably, I think it was my my favorite episode we've had so far, to be honest. Because I'm such a food nerd. Like I love all things studying food and research and understanding, and you know, and your your whole ethos on it is common sense if we think of it from the standpoint of how creation is, you know, how our nature and environment is and how we are as a human species. It's so cool. So thank you for joining me again.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Oh, yay. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

So, you know, we had fun coming up with the the topic title for this, you know, The Angel, the Devil, and the Dinner Plate. Oh, navigating our humanity and our food choices. So, you know, we are faced with many choices. And it is, it does feel like we have that little devil and little angel on our shoulders whispering in our ears what to do.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

How did what was your journey in this?

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Well, as I've, you know, discussed before, I was twice my size at one point, not 10 foot four. I haven't had a massive height reduction. Um, I used to start off the morning with half a liter of Cerulea ultra chocolate ice cream, and I didn't stop eating until I went to bed and would go into a sleeping coma and wake up eight to ten hours later feeling like I hadn't even slept because my body was so toxic and digesting, you know, a lot of uh foods I would never consume if I had to source them myself in nature for sure. Um so I had a very unhealthy relationship with food. And that devil and the angel on the shoulder was, it was always, you know, kind of this ever-present battle between um wanting to feel good, but also really wanting to consume a lot of things that numbed me, right? So there was a big kind of numbing process around that. As I started to teach other people, so when I first had my cooking school, my first dualistic cooking school called the Food Lovers Workshop, I was twice my size and I would be teaching low-fat, quick and easy meals. And I was very aware of wondering whether my students thought, is she actually eating any of this stuff or perhaps she's just eating all of it? And uh as I started to teach and as I started to, you know, really observe my clients and learn from them and be present with them. So I started to ask intuitive questions that you know we both learned from. I I started to change my relationship with food. And then as I got into the philosophies, it it helped change a lot of things. And so I've that's you know, we're talking 30 plus years ago. So it's been quite an evolution for me. And I still, if I had ice cream in the house, you know, I would I would eat ice cream all the time. I, you know, people will say things like, oh, you know, I'm I've become really healthy and I don't even like those foods anymore. Yeah, no, if I had ice cream, I would eat it every day. And if it didn't make me feel bad, I would eat it all the time. I just love it, right? Good ice cream. The the crap stuff, you know, that's made with styrofoam and all those kinds of things and cement doesn't tempt me, but good ice cream does. But I have come to this place of actually making the bulk of what I'm consuming highly nourishing, energizing, and protective. I don't eat, you know, when I do have foods that are indulgence foods, they're real versions of it. They're made with real, natural, whole ingredients. So they're much more satisfying. So I tend not to eat less of them. But I live on a philosophy that I'd rather live to 100 with chocolate than 120 without chocolate, right? And I still am this human who, like I said before, I don't know about past or future lives, but if there is such a thing, I came to this incarnation for the food. And I still enjoy it. And even though as I'm evolving kind of spiritually and I'm healing a lot of, you know, wounding, I am, I am less attached to food. It doesn't have this kind of hold on me that it once had. And the less I have of them, the less I crave.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Yeah, it's true. And that a lot of that is um what what we eat ultimately in our gut microbiome, it changes things and it communicates to our brain what we want more of. Yes. And and that's why people are like, oh, I don't like, I don't like eating healthy food. It's gross, but it's like because you're you're literally your your gut flora is craving what you've been giving it, and you can shift that completely.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Yeah, and parasites, parasites can actually, you know, it the parasites are like candida, like cancer cells, they're they're all part of the inverse of the body and they have a place. They only become problematic is when our terrain is out of balance and and they've been given free reign. And the, you know, parasites can actually control your craving, like candida, the overgrowth, just as begging to be fed, and it can actually control, you know, what's going on. So it's a big part of that kind of devil angel conversation is just flicking them both off the shoulders and go, okay, you guys, thanks. I appreciate your opinion. You're in the backseat. I'm driving, I'm in control.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

I I find for me, you know, in numerous stages of my life, uh, I had what I would consider like working with the devil than working with the angels. You know, essentially, it's like, oh my gosh. One for months on end, I was eating unhealthy and gaining weight and just miserable. And but I'm just like, uh, and then I'm like, I'm gonna do healthy, and I'd be healthy for a month or two or a couple weeks, and then I'd go back to be eating unhealthy. And at some point, it took me having liver cancer, literally, being to being like, enough is enough, right? And I just started making choices that were oriented around a lifestyle. The most important thing I found for me was not having those things in my house.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

As long as I don't buy them and they're not in my house, I can't eat them.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Because I'm like you, I can put up the ice cream away.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Yeah. And that's exactly that's such a big thing. And I have an added layer of protection. I'm an hour away from anywhere that I would actually shop for food. So if it doesn't come into the house, it's there's no temptation of, you know, I'll just run to the store and grab it. Um, so you're absolutely right. That is a very important tool. And that's with parents who are like saying, but how do I get them to stop eating it? Well, you can't control necessarily when they're out of your environment. Um, but you can absolutely control what's in the environment and stop buying the shiny packages with all the crap in it. Um, and that's a big part of their life where they don't have access, you know, to those things. We get to be in charge of our bodies. And while we're given the gift of guardianship of our children, we we get to control that. And, you know, um, that that job is a sacred job. It's not a popularity contest, right? You get to be in charge. And when you do, especially from a place of love and not fear or punishment or things like that, I'm gonna give you some loving options. Like I I've helped raise a little girl. Um, she's almost five. I helped since she was a month old. And when she comes here, this sucks this is detox bill for her compared to what she eats, you know, in her primary environment. And so she gets raw goat's milk, you know, we make smoothies from it, but she never complains about the food because the food always tastes good. She never says, Oh, so you know, I can't have this or whatever. She never complains because she gets lots of delicious and good foods, and there's no shiny options here for her to, you know, go out and sneak off and eat. And she's she's well fed and she's happy here. And I can't tell you how many times where she'll come to me and she'll be grinding her teeth and having nightmares. And by the time she leaves, those behaviors, you know, aren't aren't actually happening. I see that as a honor and a gift to be able to, you know, inspire her to to love real food.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Yeah, absolutely. You know, my my daughters, you know, were learning a lot. They know a lot about food. They have a chef dad, you know. So they know a lot about food. But when it wasn't until I had a vegetable garden that they really started to understand food because they were involved in every stage. And it was the idea of planting it and then you know, tending to it and then harvesting it and then preserving it and preparing it, and there was this greater appreciation for it. You know, you start to make choices less about instant gratification and more about honoring the food itself in biosmosis, honoring your body. When I when I had liver cancer and I shifted my diet to being very health conscious, I realized I didn't have time for a lot of other things actually. If I was gonna do food the way I wanted to do it, it meant that I I had to take some time and effort into it. And yes, you can simplify it as you go, and you can, you know, like I said in one of the previous episodes, I will make things in bulk that way I don't have to make them all the time, right? But like you start to realize, like, actually, like I have to tend to my garden. I I actually I need to harvest that or it's gonna go bad, and all that work would be no good. We harvested a lot of tomatoes or a lot of whatever it is, and probably preserving it as the route to go because we will never get through all of these, or we're generous with it. And all of a sudden your time is moving. You're moving your hands, you're moving your body, your feet, you're bending, you're squatting, you're getting up and down, and you're getting exercise without even going to the gym. And then you you take the time to really savor your food. And so, in a way, it's like, huh. You don't even how could you want the other things anymore? Because you're actually getting to enjoy the entire process from start to finish. And it's it is so heavenly when it's done right.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

It is, it's earthly heavenly, right? Both, and especially if you're out in your garden without your shoes on and grounding. But one of the things that came up for me, not but and that came up with uh for me when you were speaking is I thought of Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Foundation in Australia, where they have in schools, and Alice Waters done this, uh, Stephanie and Alice are good friends, where they'll go into schools and kids will plant gardens and then they will go through the process of growing it and they will prepare meals in kitchens in schools from their garden. They'll set the table, they have, you know, social connection, and parents will come in and just marvel and say, Well, my kid doesn't eat this, or they never ate that. And because they saw it from a seed to germination to growing, there literally were no vegetables they didn't eat. Um, and that's that's what happens with a lot of kids because there's such a disconnection. They have a natural tendency, a neophobia, to to kind of push away from something foreign. I don't like that, right? And even with the little one that I help care for, she's eaten everything from the beginning. And now when she'll come over, there'll be a gap and she'll say, No, I don't like that. I said, Oh, you've always liked that, you know. And what you'll find more often than not is kids don't like foods that are kind of different. But if you expose them to 11 different ways, you know, of cooking them or foods that they like, you can develop a palate for anything. Children can develop a palate for anything. But if we're given the more addictive option and a choice, our natural physiology that's being hijacked by our present system will choose the more addictive option, even if it has toxic chemicals in it, than the natural, like the alkaline things we talked about before, aren't the addictive things in nature. It's the acid-forming ones that are. And so our natural proclivities that kept us healthy in nature being hijacked and weaponized against us in the supermarket.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

You brought this up in in the previous episode you were a guest on. And when you start to have to make your own meals and harvest and you know, sow and plant and harvest and and or hunt and gather, there there it is a beautiful thing for the nervous system. It's a beautiful thing for the body, it's a beautiful thing for the community, for the family to partake in it. And to me, because I look at everything so holistically, right? Mind, body, soul, spirit, you know, I I I find for myself that if I start to slip on the what I eat realm and make an exception, it tends to be a slippery slope for me. For me. Okay. So like, oh, I'll have I'm gonna have that cheesecake, you know, and I'm eating out, you know. And then I go, well, I think it's not a big deal, you know. It's not a big deal. And the next thing you know, I stop working out, I am cooking less, I'm looking for convenience and ease. So for me, and I'm not saying that's for the case for everybody, but for me, I'm that way. I have to be very careful because because I do love food so much and I love eating and I love cooking, if I don't keep that lifestyle, and it really is a lifestyle where all of these things are conducive to the to the whole, and I make these most exceptions when I'm traveling for work.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

Well, you know, I'm out and about anyway. So but then I'm like, man, I don't feel good anymore. My gut's crying out for help. I don't I'm sluggish, I'm inflammation in my face, I can't sleep, I have insomnia, I'm achy, my joints hurt, um, I feel nauseous and I feel lethargic. And like that wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth it.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Yeah. And I can relate to that somewhat, although my environment now is pretty much set where it's not the problem. For me, it's the emotional piece. It's, you know, what I'm processing. So in the last, you know, four years, five years with COVID, coping with that whole what went on globally, I found very traumatic. And what happened with that was I moved from beautiful Vancouver to northern Alberta where I didn't know a soul to care for my parents first time, uh, full time in their last years of life. And so I was in a lot of fear around that. And it was that fear that drove me back to those patterns of behaviors where I was eating things I never would in Vancouver in my natural kind of environment. But the fear and seeing my parents essentially dying every day, one of the things when my mother passed, um, my brother said, I expected you, of all of us, to just be a wreck and fall apart. And I was like, I've been seeing her die and suffer for three and a half years. So, and we've had lots of you know closure conversations. So even though I was devastated, all those years I was processing, but also stuffing down a lot of those feelings and fear with food and not the good kind of food. So, so coming, you know, here I now live an hour from the city, away from, you know, the city in a much more natural environment. And I'm very careful about what comes into the house, I can still find myself, even with natural foods, I can eat things out of context that I would in nature in amounts that I wouldn't for emotional eating. And so I have to like safeguard on that level. For me, that's that's what will do it. So, and that's the thing, working with people is what I found is for most people, if you start to excavate and go, okay, why am I deviating here? There's usually always a mental, emotional, or spiritual reason of what's actually going on. And as we um spoke about before, you know, we started to record, I realized a lot of my emotional eating was in part due to my addiction to suffering and victimhood and how I'd actually really m had this epiphany today and a line in the sand moment to say, you know what, I'm giving up my suffering for 200 sort of 2025. I'm gonna leave it in that year. And like when it comes to grief and loss, I'm just going to celebrate the heck out of the fact that I did have my mother for 57 years and we had a great relationship. And I got to, you know, take care of them the last three and a half years of their life and hold both of their hands as they, you know, moved on to the next as they passed. And I'm just gonna look at the gift and the honor in that and end this addiction to suffering and victimhood. And in that shift, it really felt like, you know, oh it felt like these guys could be flicked off my shoulder. Yeah, it's very liberating.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

Oh, amazing. Amazing. No, I mean, we all have triggers, we all have seasons of life, and the biggest thing is, you know, have compassion on yourself. Uh, that if you are struggling with your diet or your food and what you eat, and you're just like, I don't know if I can do this, it's too much. This is where people like Sherry and myself actually come into play. We we both help people figure out their nutrition and their health, you know, and and to walk forward in it because we're human too. And we have listened to the little devil on our shoulder many times. Being like, eat that. It's gonna make you happy, you're gonna love it. And then being like, no, what did I do? But there's there is grace up to an extent, but at the same time, there does need to come a point where, like Sherry was saying, we draw a line in the sand, and sometimes that requires support from an external source. And I knew I needed that in my life. And I've had different individuals in my in my journey who have stepped in in very opportune moments to walk with me and navigate my health journey, which then became a lifestyle for me. So for those listening, don't be discouraged. Uh, you're not alone, and there are resources. And Sherry, you're offering uh, I believe a chapter of your book to those listening.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Yes, yeah. Um, so the nature's principle from return to food, how going back is a way forward, I offer that. And um, based on this conversation too, and because I work and you know, do coaching with people, if it is something that you're interested in exploring, whether I'm a good fit for that, I offer a 20-minute free consult just to kind of get a sense, are we the right fit and do what I do and what I offer, does that actually feel like something worth exploring?

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Love that. Love that. So we include all the links in the description box for those listening. Sherry, it's been an absolute pleasure. I would definitely love to have you back on at some point and we can dive deep into some topics and nerd out together. And uh thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Well, thank you, Henry. And what I would love to do is to interview you at some point and pick your incredible and marvelous mind.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

Anytime you say it, I'm ready. Uh, for all of those who are with us, thank you for joining us and stay healthy until next time.