On April 27, 2023, I soaked a piece of caraway-dotted rye bread in simmering chicken broth and tossed it into my new Vitamix blender with some homemade corned-beef brisket and a handful of wild leeks, foraged from the maple sugar bush a few steps from my Northeast Kingdom cabin’s front door.

I flicked on the machine, and, with a noise like an airplane motor revving up, it reduced the meaty combo to a thick, split pea soup-colored gruel. I poured it into a matchy dull green mug, took a sip and started laughing giddily — perhaps maniacally. I’ve been a food professional for decades and an aficionado since I was a toddler, and, at that moment, the ugly, grainy sludge seemed like the best thing I’d ever “eaten.”

Seven days earlier, at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., a surgeon had removed a cancerous tumor from the side of my tongue. As surgeons must, he’d also taken a perimeter of healthy flesh to reduce the risk of the cancer’s return. Flattened, the piece measured an inch by an inch-and-a-quarter.

Why was that puréed corned-beef sandwich so good? Because a week after surgery, on a diet of liquefied foods and alternating doses of Advil and Tylenol, I was starting to starve. Over the next two years — as I healed from my first surgery, was rediagnosed because the cancer had spread to a lymph node, had my neck sliced open and my lymph nodes scooped out, and then spent a grueling seven weeks doing chemoradiation treatment — I would lose my sense of taste and all the pleasure associated with eating, and happily regain it, four times.

From these seeds spring the shoots of dozens of stories I could tell: some about being dismissed by doctors; others about coping with pain; still more about the way people treat you when something undefinable about your appearance changes. This particular story is about how I altered what I eat, hoping to make cancer less likely to return. My docs, brilliant as they are, weren’t keen on nutritional deep dives, and I’m not a medical professional (although I love a good peer-reviewed study). The changes I’ve made to the way I eat are the ones that resonated with me.

Prior to my diagnosis, I was confident I had a healthy diet. Maybe I was even braggy about it. Yeah, I was definitely braggy about it. (Sorry.)

In my early twenties back in the aughts, when I learned I was intolerant of pasteurized milk and was trying to avoid it, I started reading food labels. What I saw there gave me pause.

At the time, I was just beginning to learn about factory farms and had a rudimentary understanding of some of the differences between various types of agriculture — in part because one of my best friends was studying organic farming. I’d also spent a few months making gift baskets at the Cheese Outlet/Fresh Market on Pine Street in Burlington, which was the genesis of a passion for funky, runny, weird-rinded cheeses.

I began haunting the Burlington Farmers Market, getting to know growers and learning about herbs, root vegetables and meat cuts with which I’d been unfamiliar. My fridge contained several kinds of Dijon mustard but no neon-yellow French’s or ketchup. I prepared food at home most nights using less processed, often organic ingredients, sipped small amounts of alcohol because I liked the taste, completely avoided soda and indulged in other sugary treats somewhat rarely.

We know a lot more now about the dangers of hydrogenated oils, refined sugars, microplastics and chemicals in food packaging than we did back then, and the new data bear out the wisdom of purchasing whole foods whenever possible.

For the next couple of decades, through my career as a full-time food writer at Seven Days, five years owning and cooking at Salt Café in Montpelier, and various stints as a caterer, I ate mostly gorgeous, fresh, seasonal ingredients.

I learned some of the ways these foods are prepared in far-flung places such as northern Italy, Oaxaca and Bangkok. I visited nearly every new farm-to-table restaurant that opened in central and northern Vermont. And because I adore everything about the way it feels to eat, from the weight of a fork in my hand to the sensation of fat on my tongue to the satisfaction of satiety, I consumed more calories than my body strictly needed.

As I dove into medical journals after my diagnosis, one blinding realization I had was that while something might not be bad for you on its own, if it incidentally replaces something else the body needs to repair cellular damage or fight disease, it’s doing harm nevertheless.

Similarly, if you’re consuming more than you actually need to do the work of the day — even if the excess is in the form of something otherwise virtuous — you start sliding down the wrong side of the mountain.

Simply put, each of us has a finite number of caloric slots we need to fill. According to my calculations regarding my own body, unless I go for a long run or cross-country ski for an hour or two every day, I barely have enough caloric leeway to fit in the nutrients I truly need, let alone extras. To give myself the best chance against future disease, cancer or otherwise, I needed to pare back and hone in on what is necessary.

Gustatory joy is important, perhaps even crucial to good health. But on a fundamental level, the job of food is to provide a set of chemicals — woven together in a complicated tapestry we don’t fully understand — that powers bodily functions and supports the work of the immune system.

My goal became to avoid additional damage to my body by not overindulging and not choosing foods that are less healthy. Cooking with the aim of creating incredible flavors from ingredients that happen to be the most nourishing seemed like the best of all possible worlds.

Over the years, my place-based meals centered on the meat of pastured animals and my beloved artisan cheeses. There were always fruits and vegetables on my plate. But in fall, winter or early spring, it was more likely that I’d serve a rosy-centered steak arranged atop roasted Brussels sprouts and farro risotto than whip up a mélange of plant foods. I saved dishes such as ratatouille and complex salads for summer, when cherry tomatoes of all colors and pink and purple eggplants glowed like jewels at farmstands. I limited seafoods because they don’t come from here.

The meat I ate and eat was sourced from farmers who are neighbors and friends and who treat their soil and animals with great care. I still don’t think well-cared-for chicken, beef and pork are inherently unhealthy. But instead of having meat most nights, and sometimes as leftovers for lunch, it’s now only on the menu a couple of times per week.

Why? It’s a problem of math. A four-ounce serving of braised and pulled pork shoulder — sauce not included — weighs in at around 300 calories, depending on the pig. How else could one consume 300 calories? Here’s a sample: a red-skinned apple, a large carrot, half of a golden bell pepper, one cup of boiled spinach, four ounces of blueberries and a half cup of mashed purple sweet potato.

For the same caloric cost as a single serving of carnitas, that’s a fruit or vegetable in every color of the rainbow and as much fiber as most Americans consume in an entire day — but less than half of what an adult body really needs.

Not only do the six plant foods listed above provide a wide assortment of necessary vitamins and minerals, like most fruits and vegetables they’re packed with phytochemicals, also known as antioxidants. In essence, phytochemicals are the things that make plants colorful, aromatic or strongly flavored. Scientists believe they help the body fight diseases, such as cancer.

In fruits and vegetables, these healthy compounds are concentrated in the skins, pith and pips, so nowadays I only apply a peeler if a vegetable’s exterior is too tough to chew and swallow. In my house, squash skin and seeds, watermelon rind, citrus zest, potato peels, and the outsides of beets and turnips make it into dinner instead of into the compost.

In general, ingredients that are the most fragrant, pungent, tangy, bitter and spicy-hot contain the highest percentage of phytochemicals by weight, sometimes by orders of magnitude. This means that herbs and spices — the things we use in small quantities to add zing to our meals — are some of the healthiest foods we can eat.

In 2018, the American Gut Project, now known as the Microsetta Initiative, showed that those who consumed more than 30 different plant foods per week had a healthier gut microbiome and, by extension, better general health. The scientific inquiries that followed are too numerous to summarize here, but the upshot is that the greater variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, herbs and spices we eat on a regular basis, the better. I aim for 50 a week and hit the mark surprisingly often.

To get there, I’ve stuffed my cupboards with jars of items such as Ethiopian berbere, homemade garam masala and jerk seasoning and filled the door of the fridge with complex condiments such as chile crisp. I work some sort of herb or spice — and sometimes more than a dozen — into nearly every meal.

Instead of just baking with wheat flour, I stir at least five different grains into my bread dough, plus nuts, seeds and dried fruits. And rather than putting hunks of meat at the center of my plate, I’m offering up stews rich in vegetables and legumes — so many legumes. Any time I have a chance to pack more kinds of plants into a meal without muddying flavors, I do.

These new practices mean that I rarely consume a corned-beef sandwich — and I hope to never need a puréed one again. But I do allow myself room to have an occasional indulgence and stay focused on having great everyday habits rather than aiming for perfection.

I don’t believe that my diet caused my cancer — although I do believe that a different diet may have helped slow or reverse the damage that did. And I don’t blame myself for the choices I made. Yet I do believe it’s my responsibility to use what I’ve learned going forward. My privilege and cooking background make it plausible to do so. Many people don’t have the opportunity to cook and eat this way.

All of this feels really weighty. The kind of cancer I have comes back more often than not. I’ve had scares with two other types of cancer since my original diagnosis. I had to quit my main job because teaching high school cooking didn’t mesh with my ongoing treatment schedule. Given all of that, it’s a solace to believe that a plate of spicy black bean chili might be part of a cure.