Melissa Kagiyama from Key to the Mountain I buy all my food from local farmers and then cook it.

How do we connect with you?

I love sharing with everyone

so grateful you are all listening

again, my name is Melissa Kagiyama

keytothemountain.com

want to share

just hit the contact us

I respond to all emails!

I love getting requests for new food and flavors

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Are you a millennial born between 1980-1995?

Yeah Millennial!

Awesome!

Today is Friday August 2, 2019!

So I am so excited to introduce my guest today who I met at the Farmer’s Market when I was in Missoula for the 1/2 Marathon in June. And she gave me something that not only did I love but helped me complete the Missoula 1/2 Marathon standing up! From Key to the Mountain in Missoula Montana here’s rockstar millennial Melissa Kagiyama!

I have had guest come on and talk about food they cooked from the farmer’s market. You said when you first moved to Missoula, you were blown away by the quality of food available at the farmer’s market and then you started cooking with it. People often wonder about those things. I am more the organic eater at my house and I feel like you as we were saying the pre-chat that you struggle with water.

Tell us a little about yourself.

I really appreciate all our local farmers that are doing all that work. We cook it so we can preserve that amazing food that we grow for all year.

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

A brief background, grew up not cooking, eating everything from a can, not cooking dinner, which is a way a lot of millennials grew up, with both parents working, it takes a lot of time to cook fresh food so we didn’t eat a lot of fresh food.

When I got into college, I got really exhausted all the time, I felt like something wasn’t right, like I was sick, I went to the doctor.

I was sleeping like 16 hours a day because I was so tired. Going to the doctors telling me I’m fine and it was all in my head, was very discouraging and disempowering. I said, I’m gonna find something out and I’m gonna do something about it.

After much searching I found indian holistic medicine called Ayurveda what that is in a nutshell is directions on how to live and eat on a balanced life

Tells you how much to

• eat
• exercise
• sleep

Ayurveda: It’s really about entire lifestyle

Really for me, what shocked me so much was about the food I was eating, I thought for me if I was eating canned green beans, I was getting my vegetables, but that is not necessarily true sometimes its true it depends

I felt completely healed, I learned all this knowledge about how to eat. I finished my degree really great! I started teaching, so at this point I was

cooking all my food

basically really simple recipes

• salad
• spaghetti

But I was actually cooking my food. A book I really love is Mark Bittmans’

How to Cook Everything―Completely Revised Twentieth Anniversary Edition: Simple Recipes for Great Food

That’s where I learned how to cook

I really recommended that book

I started teaching and I taught music

I had all sorts of kids

• young
• old
• poor
• rich

whatever background

I noticed after lunch I couldn’t teach the kids, they weren’t focused. They were acting crazy bouncing off the walls. For me I personally decided it was because of what they were eating.

I felt the same thing happening to me in my childhood, eating food that wasn’t actually supporting me was happening to my students.

Then I moved to Montana, when I got to the farmer’s market I was like imagined! I was like:

This is what food is supposed to be! When you get something fresh from your garden!

I felt even better

We have such a short growing season and I wondered how can we take this amazing high quality food and keep it for the whole year?

So we’re a really high quality food manufacturing company

We believe everything we do we feel food should, that food should not just fill your belly but it should

• make you feel amazing!
• help you think clearly!
• empower you in everything that you do!

Everyone in the food chain should benefit from eating

Taking from the earth, so we source locally, we really trust our Montana farmers and organically that’s always better all the way! All the way through the chain till we get to the person who is eating the food so we are supporting that person to living a healthy organic life!

That’s sort of a long answer to my first gardening experience but that’s how we came to be!

That’s why I love millennials so much! I think that what you are doing is so important. It reminds me of this little cartoon I saw on Facebook it’s these 2 carrots talking to each other and the once carrot says, why do they call you food and me organic?

Also Andrea Catherine who used to come on my show and talk about Ayurvedic healing and taught us some of those tricks and how to eat from the Farmer’s Market. What I got fromMelissa was this EnerGHEE, and I also had this packet of gel I bought. I loved this so much more it was natural, it was easier to carry and just so fantastic for the half marathon!

I was surprised to hear you say, I find I have a hard time at 2-3 in the afternoon. I get a lot of sleep, I go to bed early and get up early. We have our first potatoes from the summer finally because we have been eating store potatoes and are so excited to have garden fresh food.

Let me start with that since you are talking about it.

The EnerGhee is like a snack bar but it’s actually food

• walnuts
• raisins
•  and GHEE which is clarified butter

Ayurvedically it’s actually super healing for your digestion

• heals your gut and 
• boosts your metabolism

Super healthy been around for thousands years. It’s getting popular with

• KETO
• Whole 30 diets

We’ve taken food and blended it in the proper proportions. Taken the food so you don’t need a ton of one thing to get you through the day

you get protein from the walnuts so you don’t need more protein

that’s just a misconception that a lot of people have

You also get the sweetness from raisins which are also natural!

Healthy

Get full show notes at the GREEN Organic Gardener Podcast 

Remember we’re giving away a copy of Melissa K. Norris’ new book The Family Garden Plan: Grow a Year’s Worth of Sustainable and Healthy Food