Welcome!
I'm Christina Bailey, CCMP; the post-nominals stand for certified culinary medicine professional. My other fun credits include Michelin-star restaurant alum, Culinary Institute of America graduate, and cooking instructor. My certification in culinary medicine, or food-as-medicine nutrition, is through the American College of Culinary Medicine. Beginning (again) in the fall of 2026, I will send a monthly newsletter with a half-scratch affordable recipe and food and nutrition literacy tidbits. For paid subscribers, I will debunk the endless nutrition nonsense online, dive into our food system’s failings and how to best them, and occasionally touch on food economics.
Most importantly, I don’t do influence. Unlike countless blogs and other Substack food writers, I take no money from advertisers or brands. I don’t insert paid links or subject you to pop-up videos. This approach isn’t profitable, but I haven’t quit my day job yet. Please consider a paid subscription if you want to be informed rather than influenced about food. The discount below brings the price to around the cost of a cookbook (and you get real-life recipes from a classically trained chef).
Free Subscription
An affordable, half-scratch (50% fresh ingredients) and nutrient-dense recipe will land in your inbox on the first Friday of every month. It will be versatile enough for most diets and allergy concerns. And include a simple technique or cooking formula chart to add to your repertoire. Free subscribers can comment on recipes and newsletters (and I hope you do).
Paid Subscription (Highly Recommended!)
For $2.50 a month with the current discount, paid subscribers receive every newsletter, including:
Access to French Macarons: Simplified, a newly revised (in 2024) tutorial series on how to make French macarons, complete with exclusive recipes and plenty of myth-busting. Only paid subscribers will have access to new macaron recipes.
Desserts and baking recipes with less refined flour and sugar.
Editorials and investigative writing concerning food and nutritional literacy.
Eat to Thrive: tips on eating to prevent and cure diet-related diseases.
Ability to email me directly to request recipes or ask questions about our food systems and nutrition.
With enough contributing subscribers, I can keep most of the content free for everyone. No one should have to sift through ads and junk food promotions to find reliable recipes and unbiased eating advice.
My Credentials
A zigzagging career path from Broadway in Chicago to a Florida news reporter to a Los Angeles private chef to a certified culinary medicine professional hailing from Boise, Idaho, led me here: to share chef-developed recipes and insights about our food. With a sprinkle of snark and a dollop of drama.
My recipes, culinary expertise, and food photography have been published and featured by HuffPost, the Redfin blog, Insider, AskHer, Cozymeal, Yummly, Allrecipes, and the Culinary Institute of America. My coverage of the 2008 foreclosure crisis and consumer reporting for WFTX-TV in Fort Myers, Florida, was featured on CNN's Headline News (HLN) more than once.
For my complete, free-from-ads online recipe collection, check out my website, Edible Times. It was one of the original food blogs (circa 2010) before the niche sold its soul and sense of responsibility to Google’s oscillating algorithms and salivating advertisers. In 2026, I started running in-line ads to try and recoup the monthly web hosting and plugin costs. So far, my ad revenue is keeping its options open. If you want to tip this newsletter, feel free to click around.
So Why Substack?
I am determined to break the mold of the modern online recipe platform. Whether published by a corporate entity or amateur home cook, all recipe websites compete for the top spot in Google’s search and AI results. It is a shameless game to observe, and the competition is dirtier than your stove on Thanksgiving.
Thanks to a practice called search engine optimization, or SEO for short, most of the recipes at the top of your search results are mediocre at best. They are often unreliable, unhealthy, or uninspired—or all three. And now these are the sites Google is sourcing for its AI response. There is even an entire industry making money off passionate home cooks who want to learn how to start a food blog, join premium publisher networks, and maximize revenue amid plummeting search traffic due to AI.
Which is precisely why I am here.
I will never tell you how delicious my food is with multiple exclamation points. Taste is subjective, after all. I never type in all capital letters because I think you’re smarter than that and prefer well-written sentences.
I want to empower you to become a more informed shopper and a confident cook, and to increase your nutrition literacy. When relevant, I will also unpack Big Food's influence on what we eat and on what we pay for groceries. And dive into those mysterious ingredients on processed food labels (some are worse than others). I want to equip you to live your best food life.
And no, this newsletter has nothing to do with cannabis (sorry).
Through my work, I hope to inspire healthier families and strength in longevity, and inform and entertain along the way.
Eat + be well,
Christina
