I pulled into the driveway of a ranch-style home in the suburbs of Chicago, trying not to hit the chickens that wandered all around the yard. The home was halfway between the Glenn Ellyn Community Center, where I taught weekly children’s ballet classes, and the campus of Wheaton College, where I lived. Once I pulled around back, though, I could nearly forget I was right in the middle of town. I walked through the creaking back door with two empty, half-gallon mason jars, where a stern farmer greeted me with a grunt. He pulled pitchers of fresh, raw milk from the fridge and poured them into my jars. Each state has its own rules around the sale of raw milk, and its own way of working around those rules — somehow bringing the jars myself made it not illegal in Illinois.

Every Thursday afternoon I followed the same routine. On Friday mornings I got to work in my college apartment kitchen. I skimmed off the cream that rose to the top of each jar — some I’d ferment into sour cream and some I shook into butter. With the milk that was left, I made a big batch of yogurt and the rest I’d drink on its own. Along with the many forms of home-processed dairy, I had a crock of continuously brewing kombucha and a variety of homemade ferments: sauerkraut, whey lemonade, and more. My deodorant was made of cocoa butter and baking soda, and my hair I washed with baking soda and apple cider vinegar. It was never quite clean, exactly, but everything that touched it was supposedly pure.

It was 2012 and the options for “clean” foods and “clean” cleaning and “clean” hygiene products were more limited than they are today. Plus I was on a student’s budget, so everything was necessarily homemade.

Then, one day, I cracked. I didn’t have the energy to mix up another stick of deodorant, and I knew I’d never catch the attention of my crush with my hair looking the way it did — at least not the kind of attention I desired.

Is the conventional stuff really all that bad? I began to question. Does living like this actually feel all that good?

At 22 years old, hungry and exhausted by the limitations of my own body, I was determined to sort through the competing messages I read about health and environmental sustainability. I believed that if God was the creator of all, including our bodies as well as the plants and animals that sustain them, and God was truly good, then I would be able to find the dietary plan that best cared for my body and the soil and the creatures that fill the earth and seas, and that it would taste good, too.