I love you because you are here.

Welcome. I want to start by sharing the story behind the title of this blog -- I love you because you are here. It is a story that has been waiting 10 years to be told. 10 years. I hadn't actually realized that much time had past until I just wrote it... in some ways it feels like it was last summer and in other ways it feels like it never really happened. In the summer of 2015, I spent some time in a South African village eight hours outside of Johannesburg and just on the outskirts of Kruger National Park. The experience was both entirely foreign and perfectly familiar. I tasted food that made me feel as though it were the first time I had ever actually eaten real food and been truly nourished by a meal. Nothing exotic -- chicken actually -- but I mean chicken. The kind that lived the life a chicken is supposed to live, a life that ended just for that meal. And vegetables, with brilliant colors, perfect flavor, and all the nutrients of untouched soil. But what was even more impac...