“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.” –Atomic Habits by James Clear

Most of us carry an image within ourselves of the kind of person we’d like to be (or not be). It might change and evolve throughout our lives, but it’s always there. This applies to important concerns like our character and virtue, as well as seemingly small, practical things…like food and its preparation.

If you’ve been following along you might have noticed I like talking about food. That’s because food is not simply a necessary biological requirement. It is a hallmark of our humanity. No other creature devotes so much of their time, energy, and resources to the preparation, presentation, and consumption of their daily sustenance. Yes, man is a philosophical, moral, theological being, but he is also a culinary one.

Food strikes me as a sort of microcosmic model of life itself. Indeed, I am of the mind that the care we take in choosing and preparing our food is a reflection of how we care for ourselves, and by extension, the people entrusted to us.

2024: A Year of Big Food Changes

While reflecting on changes I want to make to our family’s food intake in the new year, I came to a happy realization: We made a lot of big changes in 2024 – way more than I realized before I sat down and reflected on it. Here are just a few of those changes:

• We decreased our meat intake from 15-20 pounds of meat per week to an average of 1.5 pounds per week, at most (with exceptions made when we have visitors who eat meat). (As you can imagine, that took our food budget line down quite a lot!)
• We went from consuming almost one large container of greens per week – and often throwing some of it away – to eating at least 2 large containers of kale, 3 bags of spinach, and a pound or so of other assorted greens in a week (and never having any spoils to discard).
• We started eating beans and legumes at least once per day, as opposed to maybe once or twice per week.
• We almost completely stopped buying hummus, salsa, salad dressings, and other condiments (with the exception of when we have company and need larger quantities).
• We consume a smoothie every day, which contains a combination of fruits, greens, yogurt, and healthy fats from nuts and chia, flax, or hemp seeds (or all three).
• We enjoy sourdough and homemade bread and tortillas a few times per week, and no longer purchase these products from the store unless we have company (with the exception of two loaves of Simply Nature Seedtastic Organic Bread from Aldi, which the kids like to eat with a fried egg on top for lunch).
• We make several batches of vegetable stock per week.
• We make our own granola.
• We eat at least three different fruits per day, and snack on dried fruit and nuts instead of our old less-nutritious favorites.

I share this list because it dawned me that if I were to have seen it a year ago, I would have said there was no way our family could make so many changes in one year. I was happily surprised at how many good habits we had established in 2024, especially because it didn’t seem like we were making drastic changes, even though we were. That’s because we made the changes so gradually that it didn’t seem like a huge shift to any of us, including the kids.

Which brings me to the point of this article. Sometimes a drastic reset is necessary, but for the most part, the key to making most kinds of change is a lot of slow, non-exciting baby steps that add up to a big result.

On the surface, it might not seem like you’re making any difference at all. But if you step back and zoom out to see the big picture over time, you see all those tiny steps have brought you a long way.

A Calendar of Baby Steps for 2025

Since these small changes have been so beneficial for our family, we thought we would share one new kitchen habit focus per month in 2025 for anyone who might also be wanting to create new cooking habits. If you focus on adding just one new habit per month and maintain that new habit into the months after, by the end of the year you’ll be amazed at the transformation in your cooking skills – and hopefully, your energy and sense of wellbeing.

Here’s the list of kitchen skills we’ll be sharing more about starting in February 2025:

February: Broth

March: Beans and Legumes

April: Smoothies

May: Hummus, Salsa, and Other Dips

April: Salad Dressing, Mayo, and Other Condiments

May: Rice and Other Nutritious Grains

June: Homemade Bread and Tortillas (non-sourdough)

July: Pickled Vegetables

August: Easy From-Scratch Soups

September: Fermented Beverages (non-alcoholic)

October: Homemade Granola and Oatmeal

November: Nuts and Seeds

December: Sourdough Bread and Its Relatives

Baby Steps to Big Change

It’s human nature to focus on the big, lifechanging moments – the new job, the move, the new baby – so much that we forget how much more potency lies in the seemingly small, even monotonous choices we make each day. Far more than the big moments, those humble and relatively boring choices make up the picture that is our life.

Dinner is just one illustration. A delicious, nourishing meal that would have seemed a year ago like it took hours of effort takes less than 20 minutes of actual work now that we’ve dialed in some simple, easy habits.

We hope this series of articles takes away some of the overwhelm you can feel when trying out a new way of eating, and we wish you many tasty and truly satisfying meals in 2025!