Dr. Geeta Maker-Clark is a nationally recognized integrative physician, educator, author, and advocate whose work is helping redefine medicine as a force for personal and collective healing. She serves as Director of Integrative Nutrition and Advocacy at Endeavor Health, Clinical Assistant Professor and Co-Director of Culinary Medicine at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, and faculty for the University of Arizona Integrative Medicine and Ayurveda Fellowship.

For more than two decades, Dr. Maker-Clark has worked at the intersection of integrative medicine, food justice, culinary medicine, botanical medicine, mind-body healing, community health, and health equity. She helped pioneer one of the first culinary medicine programs in a U.S. medical school, teaching future physicians to understand food not only as nutrients, but as culture, care, prevention, memory, and medicine.

She is the founder of Food Is Power, a program in Chicago Public Schools on the South Side of Chicago that empowers young people through decolonized food education, food sovereignty, health literacy, and food justice. Through this work, she helps students understand the connections between food, history, identity, policy, power, and health.

Dr. Maker-Clark’s work has been recognized through the Castanea Fellowship, the Mesa Refuge Michael Pollan Fellowship in Food Journalism, the Health Justice Award from Health & Medicine Policy Research Group, and the Integrative Health Symposium Emerging Leader Award. She speaks nationally and internationally on whole-person care, food as medicine, ancestral healing, community health, and the future of medicine.

Her book, Medicine for All People: Science and Ancient Wisdom for Revolutionary Healing, published by Chelsea Green Publishing, asks what medicine becomes when we expand it beyond the clinic to include food, plants, nature, dance, gratitude, play, service, trust, community, justice, and love. Rooted in science, ancestral wisdom, and collective care, the book invites readers to reclaim the medicines that have always helped people survive, belong, and heal.

At the heart of her work is a simple but revolutionary belief: medicine is not only something prescribed to us. It is something we remember, practice, protect, and make possible for all people.

Food is never just food. It is biology, memory, culture, attachment, ritual, identity, and care. For family therapists, food offers a powerful lens into the emotional lives of individuals and families: how people are nourished, how they gather, what has been lost or inherited, how stress lives in the body, and how culture shapes healing.

This talk invites therapists to think beyond food as “diet” and instead understand nourishment as a deeply relational practice. Food can be a doorway into family stories, grief, migration, shame, comfort, ritual, repair, and reconnection. Rooted in science and ancestral wisdom, this session offers a more expansive way to understand mental health — one that honors the body, the family system, culture, community, and the conditions that allow people to feel safe, nourished, and whole.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:  

• Describe the connections between food, mood, and mind, including blood sugar regulation, inflammation, the gut-brain axis, stress physiology, and nervous system resilience.
• Distinguish food as a relational and ancestral practice that carries memory, identity, attachment, culture, ritual, and family meaning.