Sally Fallon Morell at her P.A. Bowen Farmstead farm
A gift with far-reaching consequences
Sally’s fascination with traditional nutrition began back in the 1970s when she encountered Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price. The book never let her go. While raising her four children, she continued to immerse herself in the knowledge of traditional cultures regarding nutrition—knowledge that was slowly threatening to be lost in the modern, processed food industry.
When her youngest child started school full-time, Sally seized her opportunity. With her background as a trained writer (she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English cum laude from Stanford University and a Master of Arts in English magna cum laude from UCLA) and her training in French and Mediterranean cuisine, she began work on a book that would combine rigorous nutritional science with delicious, practical recipes.
Nourishing Traditions: A Kitchen Table Revolution
Together with lipid and nutrition expert Mary G. Enig, PhD, Sally wrote Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats in 1995. The book dared to say something that was anything but mainstream at the time: animal fats and cholesterol are not enemies, but essential building blocks for growth, brain function, and energy. The Dutch translation of the book is freely available and can be downloaded on the Weston A. Price Foundation website. Click here.
The book was a bombshell. With more than six hundred thousand copies sold to date, Nourishing Traditions is regarded worldwide as the definitive standard work for traditional nutrition. More importantly, it set a movement in motion. Thanks to the recipes and ideas in the book, numerous small businesses emerged around fermented products, kombucha, bone broth, and authentic sourdough bread, and interest in raw dairy began to grow globally.
The Founding of the Weston A. Price Foundation
Sally did not stop at one book. In 1999, she founded the Weston A. Price Foundation, again together with Mary Enig: a non-profit organization that now counts thousands of members and hundreds of local chapters worldwide. As founding president, Sally has been at the helm of a foundation for more than a quarter-century that has radically changed the conversation about healthy nutrition, inspiring countless researchers, doctors, and writers to critically examine the established low-fat, low-cholesterol consensus.
As editor of the quarterly magazine Wise Traditions in Food, Farming, and the Healing Arts, Sally also ensures that the knowledge of Weston Price does not disappear into a drawer, but remains alive: practical, accessible, and constantly re-translated to address the questions of our time.
Beyond the Kitchen
Sally’s commitment does not stop at books and articles. In 1999, she founded A Campaign for Real Milk, with the goal of universal access to clean raw milk from pasture-fed animals. What began with a website featuring twenty-eight American raw milk farmers grew into a network of thousands. To legally protect farmers in their right to sell food directly to consumers, she also founded the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Rights Foundation in 2007.
And she did not just theorize. In 2009, Sally and her husband Geoffrey Morell purchased a farm in southern Maryland: P.A. Bowen Farmstead, a mixed, pasture-based operation that produces award-winning artisanal raw milk cheese, pork, poultry, and eggs, without soy, corn, GMOs, pesticides, or hormones. A farm that perfectly embodies what the Weston A. Price Foundation has been advocating for all these years.
A Writer Who Doesn’t Stop
In addition to Nourishing Traditions, Sally has written and co-authored an impressive series of books, including Eat Fat, Lose Fat (with Mary Enig), Nourishing Broth (with Kaayla T. Daniel), Nourishing Fats, The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby & Child Care, and The Contagion Myth. As president of NewTrends Publishing, she also brings the work of other authors in the field of nutrition and health to a wide audience.
What Makes Sally So Special
What distinguishes Sally Fallon Morell is not just her knowledge, but her tenacity: she took an almost forgotten piece of nutritional science from the 1930s and, decade after decade, turned it into a living movement: with a foundation, a magazine, a certification for raw milk, a farm, and an impressive library of books. The extent to which the legacy of Weston Price is still very much alive today is largely thanks to her.
Mother of four, grandmother of five, farmer, writer, editor, and the face of the Weston A. Price Foundation for more than twenty-five years: Sally Fallon Morell is living proof that one persistent voice can make the difference between knowledge that is lost and knowledge that lives on for generations.
