- The Detwieler family
Rachel Detwieler ’03, says she was happy with her accounting degree and enjoyed working as an accountant, but changes in her eating habits have led her to a new love – trying and testing new recipes.
“I’m blessed with a husband and children who are willing to try anything and don’t make a face when I put something new in front of them,” she says with a laugh. “I’m an experimenter.”
Rachel and her family are vegans, so she likes to try new things that are not animal products or animal-related products.
For them, it’s all about healthy eating and not necessarily animal advocacy, Rachel says. When she became pregnant with her first child about six years ago, she was already a vegetarian, but she decided to change to a vegan diet and has never looked back.
During her pregnancy, she commuted to her accounting job in Kansas City and sometimes worked 12 hours days. But Rachel never missed a day of work and had a healthy baby. “My boss used to make fun of me for not eating meat, but she realized I never missed work throughout my pregnancy, and later said she thought it was due to my diet,” Rachel said.
She and her husband, Keith ’05, and their three children, Sean, Zoey and Izak, live in the country outside of Savannah, Mo., and they try to grow as much of their food as possible, canning and freezing the garden produce. They also try to use as many heirloom seeds as possible, which are original, non-hybrid seeds. And, they use no chemicals in their raised bed gardens.
Rachel calls their diet, “a very mixed approach,” where the family eats a wide variety of foods to ensure they are getting the nutrition they need.
Rachel said she has always been interested in a healthy lifestyle and probably started on the path to veganism as a young child. She remembers reading the Book of Daniel in the Bible as a child, and being struck by the reference to Daniel’s healthy diet as opposed to the king’s “rich foods. That has always been an inspiration to me, but it never really kicked in until college.”
When she was pregnant with Zoey, her second child, a college friend got Rachel interested in raw foods, and she enrolled in a class on raw food preparation through Missouri Western’s Western Institute. Although her family’s diet is not exclusively raw, she and a friend have been offering classes once a month for almost two years in St. Joseph for anyone interested in the vegan and/or raw diet.
“I love accounting but cooking and healthy eating are my new passions,” Rachel says.