Today we’d like to introduce you to Sherry Hess.
Sherry, before we jump into specific questions about your work, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
When it comes to choosing a healthy lifestyle, I am thankful to be living in Colorado where food matters. I truly believe that timing is everything and that if it wasn’t for the rising awareness of the importance of using food as a healing modality, my story would have never even gotten started.
It really began shortly after finishing my culinary training at Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts in Boulder, CO. I found my passion for food late in life. Sure, I did the whole stint of working in restaurants before I “got a real job” and found a lot of joy in the entire experience. My preference was to work in places where the food was revered and not where you could just slam a burger in front of a TV. I was intrigued by the entire experience and loved seeing guests take time to delve into every morsel of flavor on the plate. It was then I realized that when we eat, it is one of the only times that we engage all five senses at once. This was an ah-ha moment that would later guide me into deep sensory work.
Fast forward to finishing culinary school, I was ready to take on the world. I had the classic French culinary skills in my back pocket. I was also armed with the organic and local food movement. I had been digging the sustainable dirt of the amazing farms in the North Fork Valley of the Gunnison River and I felt so good about my mission to feed people real food, from living soils. I was determined to bring to light all of the things that were broken in our food and agricultural systems. I was ready to start by feeding my family homemade organic everything including bread and pastas.
And then, I got sick. Not a cold or flu sick, but the kind of sick that the doctors don’t have a clue about. They threw spaghetti at the walls, sent me from the cardiologist to the endocrinologist to the “natural” health expert. Each one of them scratched their heads and told me I was fine. Mind you, this was nine years ago when autoimmune diseases were still only common if you were a celiac. I wasn’t celiac, therefore, they told me it must be a female thing, or in my head, perimenopausal, depression, anxiety, stress, etc. In other words, they had nothing that fit their prescription protocol, therefore they had no answers for me.
Suffice it to say, this wasn’t good enough. My aching stressed body needed help. My conviction around food made it easy for me to find the health answers I needed with food and supplements. This of course, meant eliminating some of my favorite foods, like the homemade bread and pasta I was so excited to make. Once I grieved my way through the loss of my favorite foods, I was able to step into healing.
Three years ago I decided to combine my culinary skills with my knowledge of the supplements that I had been taking in the form of my spice business. Legendary Spice was my pathway into combining the joys of delicious flavor with the healing benefits of the plants, herbs and spices themselves. I understood 2 things: The supplements that were full of herbs and spices made me feel better, and when you balance their flavor with food, they can also bring you back to delicious joyful eating. The joy of eating itself can get lost in a world where we are required to let go of foods that we once loved. I saw those spice blends as an easy way to bring me delicious health. Who doesn’t want that?
Although I no longer manufacture spices under Legendary Spice, (that’s a whole separate story about the challenges of competing to make food cheap in this world) the messaging is still very relevant as I have expanded the education around flavor itself.
Food and healing. It’s more than a staple philosophy in my life. I see it as a connection that can carry us from individual healing all the way to healing the earth. My consulting with The Flavor Remedy now invites people to not only follow my journey of healing and food but to dive deep into what their own bodies are telling them. I’ve come to recognize that the seemingly natural ability that chefs have to understand what makes food taste good should be an art that is combined with the science of nutrition. Our bodies are doing their best with what we’re giving it, but sadly the broken food and agriculture systems along with our overly stressed lifestyles are presenting more challenges to our immune system than ever before. As a result, we are being instructed by many (mostly well-intended) experts who are telling us what to eat instead of guiding us to listen to our own bodies. Instead of fixing what’s broken in the food, we are masking it with things like natural and artificial flavors and as a result, those instinctive taste buds that we were born with are being deceived.
No matter what, we as humans will inevitably choose a flavor to guide us to what we want. The message around health should be embracing this approach, not by masking poor flavors, but rather from a nutrient backed flavor approach. We have a long way to go. That is what I do. I guide people to reconnect with their love of food and guide them to realize that flavors speak to us when they come from the right source. It’s what I call Living Flavors™. This is the work I do now with The Flavor Remedy. Ultimately, not only do I see food as medicine for us as humans, but I also see how demanding Living Flavor™ can ultimately bring us back to foods that are grown in deeply healthy soils. It takes living soils to grow Living Flavors™
On a side note, nine years after being diagnosed with Hashimotos, I’m still not taking any pharmaceuticals and my bloodwork is pristine. I attribute most of this to my understanding of what has happened to food and how it is affecting my immune system. By listening to my own body’s needs, I can not only use food as the basis of my health, I can do it while making the delicious flavor a priority!
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Smooth road? No, thank goodness! Is that even a thing when you’re a business owner?
Considering my story, it’s probably already clear that it wasn’t smooth. Life takes us on winding bumpy roads to make it more interesting, to challenge us to dig deep. Without the bumps, ruts and curves life would be boring. Typically it’s the gaping potholes that force us to shift lanes that have the most impact. Smooth road….that’s funny.
Besides the previously mentioned health challenges, ambiguity from doctors and grieving of my favorite foods, navigating how to get a unique message to the world really comes to mind as a more unique struggle. When you feel like shouting to the world that we should be trusting our cravings, listening to our bodies, eating delicious food and evaluating nutrition advice with a fine-tooth comb, people are bound to look at you like you’re crazy. But the thing is, I’ve yet to find any health and nutrition device that works for everyone. We are all unique and therefore we are our own best advocates.
The biggest struggles when you have a unique message and an entrepreneurial spirit are in the ins and outs of developing a successful business. As a woman in her 50’s, it’s finally clear to me that I want to live a life of balance and still be relevant and powerful in my message. Not only do I want to break the rules of eating, I also want to break the assumed rules of what it takes to run a successful business. I struggle to find business advisors that don’t want to bring me the masses. I don’t want masses, I want clients that matter. Clients that want to know that flavor isn’t a guilty pleasure, but rather a message to our bodies. Finding support in business that doesn’t focus on your reach numbers is just as challenging as trying to find someone who buys into the fact that our sweet cravings can actually be telling us something important.
Please tell us more about your work. What do you do? What do you specialize in? What sets you apart from competition?
My business, The Flavor Remedy, is a flavor consulting business. I offer a unique approach to eating foods that are right for you based upon information that your body receives through eating real food-based flavors and our senses. I specialize in working with clients that have faced health issues of their own and understand the value of food as medicine. I help people to become more aware of the flavors we experience, the nutrition that should be behind those flavors and to help them understand that balanced flavors can equal balanced support for our bodies. It’s common for my clients to have experienced grief around food due to the necessary changes in diet. I can also offer an empathetic understanding of that process.
My offering and perspective are very unique. I’ve yet to find anyone in modern-day health circles that discusses flavor as a priority in eating healthy. Even though ancient societies like Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine include flavors as part of their daily health practices, modern-day diets tend to encourage us to avoid our cravings and the latest wellness products mask the current trend in nutrition with comfort flavors like chocolate. It’s not that people don’t see a need for food to taste good, it’s just that we don’t understand how a flavor is a form of communication to our bodies.
I offer my services in a variety of ways:
One on One personal health and flavor consulting
Speaking engagements in Nutrition/Wellness communities
Flavor workshops.
Product Development of companies that want to use real ingredients for flavor in their products.
One of my most valued accomplishments is the work that I do with Marivation USA. We have been developing products for cancer patients that are designed specifically for the symptoms and side effects of cancer and chemotherapy. We use real ingredients like ginger, turmeric and caloric dense nutrition to support them using small bites on days 2, 3 and 4 of cancer when their appetite is the most challenged. That product is a beautiful representation of the product development work that I do.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business
Well, let’s see if me being referred to Voyage turns out to be good luck or bad … I’ll get back to you. Haha!
I don’t know how I feel about luck. Luck feels like a dismissal of an opportunity. It’s a moment in time where fortune falls one way or another and we get to decide what to do with it. Opportunities and events in life can show up in ways that people would say is lucky or unlucky, but to me, it’s all just a part of our story. We can see it as luck, or we can see it as a turning point where an action is taken or not. But I can tell you, I sure do like to revel in gratitude when those opportunities show up!
I guess I believe in some form of the law of attraction, so perhaps I feel like defining something as lucky or unlucky gives our moments of opportunity a shallow description.
And if all of that is too existential, then yes, I’ve had good and bad luck along the way, but I do what I can to learn my lessons and make the best of it all.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.livingflavorrevolution.com
- Phone: 302-593-7866
- Email: sherry@legendaryspice.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flavorremedy/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/livingflavorrevolution
- Other: https://marivationusa.com/shop
Image Credit:
Silver Sparrow Photography (both images of me) All other photographs are my own.
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