Our Mission
At Journey Home Vitals, our mission is to build connection and access to nutrient dense, locally sourced, wild harvested and regeneratively raised, nonperishable, quick-prep, health transformational foods.
We are bridging local ecology by way of hunters, gatherers, and small scale farmers to the greater community. We source and utilize under-appreciated, nutrient-rich superfood ingredients that would often otherwise go to waste. These same ingredients that our modern food system throws away are the ingredients that our Ancestors prized the most for the nourishment they offer.
This is for the travelers, the adventurers, the parents tight on time, the young picky eaters, the quality seekers, the folk, the people, you.
Our Story
Peace Y'all!
We are the ShepsuMa'at Family.
Lev, Ife, and our 2 sons – Pèlé (4), and Aiyé (1).
With the realization that every choice we make, the foods we eat, the way we live affect not only ourselves but the lives that come into the world and build there bodies by way of us, we gravitated to the nutritional science and wisdom of healthy Ancestral Indigenous cultures all across world. Over the course Ife’s pregnancy with our first son, Pèlé, it was as if a voice inside her was calling for deep nourishment in a way that we never understood up until then. We stopped eating out almost completely, stayed away from any food-like substances that we couldn’t pronounce or make in a basic kitchen, eliminated industrial foods, began sourcing our food from local farms over grocery stores when possible, and started our journey cooking as our Ancestors’ did from scratch. A week before Pèlé’s birth, we made our first bone-broth.
Having experimented with different diet dogmas for the majority of our adult lives, we began reintroducing certain ancestral foods that we fasted from in the past and instead ate those foods in the highest quality we could find and afford, and prepared it in the most nourishing way possible. We began eating nose to tail healthy animal foods like organ meats, marrow, and raw dairy. We started baking sourdough breads and fermenting our own veggies, sauces, and drinks. We started sprouting and soaking our grains, beans, nuts, and seeds. We got outside, harvested our own wild spring water and foraged whatever wild foods we could find. Anything we craved from our past that we wouldn’t buy now, we made it ourselves.
We found this way of eating not only benefiting the health of our family as a whole but also very healing in knowing where our food was coming from, being able to connect directly to our food sources, and share with others the beautiful story that each meal told. However, it also came with it’s challenges, being labor and time intensive, lots of trial and error, traveling long distances to source our food directly from farms, etc… In 2021, when we left our home in South Carolina and lived full-time in a small skoolie, the challenges grew immensely. It takes a lot of networking and connecting with different lands, farms, foragers, and hunters to really know where your foods come from and to find the staples of a nourishing lifestyle. Staples like regenerative bone broth, pastured soy-free eggs, raw milk, etc. So we produced those staples as a response to that, so that we could know that wherever we found ourselves we could bringing the nourishing taste of home with you.
We realized while doing it that this was in perfect alignment with our family’s fundamental values of:
integral wellness
symbiotic abundance
& intercultural connection
And it also was in alignment with the meaning of our family name.
So that’s who we are and we love to share our abundance, through what we create tactilely and also what we create in the media realm. Stay tuned for that work soon!
Thanks for reading, much love!
