Food As Medicine, Rebalance Your Emotional, Physical and Spiritual Health: An Interview with Abbey Rodriguez and Jennifer Kurdyla, Authors of Root & Nourish

Through their spiritual journeys, Abbey Rodriguez’s and Jennifer Kurdyla’s paths crossed, and they couldn’t ignore what the Universe was telling them: that they had to embark on a creative project together.

After realising that they both had many shared expertise, they decided to combine their knowledge and write a book. That project became Root & Nourish, a book that embraces a holistic approach to feminine health, encompassing spirituality, nutrition, sleep, movement, and connection with ourselves and the planet. Root & Nourish is a spiritual guide as much as it is a very literal nutrition guide.

Abbey Rodriguez is a blogger, mother, wife, recipe developer, food stylist, and photographer. In 2018 she was diagnosed with Celiac disease and a hypothyroidism autoimmune disease. As difficult as this diagnosis was, Abbey remained optimistic about the future, and through the changes she made to her diet, she realised that food is powerful medicine. Her recipes are gluten-free and primarily plant-based.

“(The book) is holistic in the sense that there is something for everybody in there, and one aspect informs the other. It’s not just a reductionist way of thinking. It’s a very fluid intersecting web of all of these concepts and how they inform one another and how they need to coexist collectively together to allow harmony into our lives.”

Jennifer Kurdyla is an Ayurvedic health counsellor, yoga teacher, writer, and she has been a vegan since 2008.She has always been exploring ways to expand and enjoy her vegan lifestyle, and, as an editor for vegan cookbooks, she has spent years working on various vegan blogs and adapting them to print. Her passion is creating healthy foods that are accessible to more people.

“For me being plant-based and being vegan opened my eyes to a relationship with food that is beyond just me. I felt much more connected to nature and the process of self-nourishment.”

Both women have grown their understanding of women’s health, and their book focuses on digestion, mental health, and hormonal health. Jennifer says they saw this trend in spiritual femininity being lost or adulterated in our lives. Women are losing their ability to slow down, receive, and be deeply grounded and aligned with nature in its rhythmic cycles. These fundamental and straightforward rhythms like eating and listening to our intuition are drowned out by society, which, Jennifer says, has become more exacerbated and evident during the pandemic. Both women believe that they couldn’t have created this book at a more appropriate and necessary time. “Lessons about intuitive eating are coming back into the kitchen,” says Jennifer.

Many people are suffering from impaired digestion without knowing it. Root & Nourish talks about the imbalances we experience, both individually and collectively, that stem from a lack of connection with our food. The book intends to make sure that the herbs and spices that we take as medicine are properly used by our bodies. Plant medicine needn’t be a complicated concept; rather, it can be as simple as introducing more whole foods into your diet and understanding that they are plant medicines in and of themselves. Learning how to listen intuitively to what your body needs is the key.

“The lack of knowledge that we have about nutrition and what is nutrient-dense and what is not is quite surprising. We take our food for granted, and I think the spiritual aspect of connecting to the plants, connecting to the Earth, connecting to your food, and having a sense of stewardship over the Earth encourages a greater reverence and respect,” says Abbey.

Root & Nourish also comes from an environmental perspective about food, leading us towards becoming more responsible for healing the planet.

The recipes in Root & Nourish encourage us to reconnect to our food sources to preserve the Earth. A part of reconnecting with our Divine Feminine is to embrace a more expansive view of the world and practice being more mindful of the resources we have at hand and not just blindly using them. “There is an idea of cyclicality and rhythm that is inherent to the idea of the Divine Feminine that I think has been lost in our society,” says Jennifer. Embracing the Divine Feminine is part of a spiritual journey where we intentionally connect with the herbs we put into our bodies and reclaim our feminine power.

“We, as women, definitely have this opportunity to lead and take care of the planet and make the changes we need to save Earth. This is a real issue we are dealing with, and those who read this book can hopefully feel that and feel empowerment within the pages and the message we are sharing,” says Abbey.

Abbey and Jennifer hope that their readers will use Root & Nourish as a guide to becoming more connected to their emotional, physical, and spiritual health by listening to and respecting their bodies. Ultimately, empowering people to get into the kitchen, experiment, play, be inspired, and see food as medicine. They envision a safe place where people have access to support from other like-minded people where we all can bring Root & Nourish to life and share in rituals together.

“Even if we have helped influence one person’s life by helping them understand that the imbalances that they’re feeling are due to a lack of connection to themselves, to their divine feminine, to the earth, to their food…then we have done our job.”