👩‍🍳 Meet Shara Cooper

My name is Shara Cooper, and I’m the founder and voice behind Recipes & Roots. I was born in Alberta, on the Canadian prairies, but have spent most of my adult life in British Columbia. Canada’s changing seasons, wild landscapes, and food traditions continue to shape how I cook and think about food.

Before settling into family life, I travelled extensively — experiences that influenced my relationship with food and culture. I lived in Chile for a year, where I grew curious about Indigenous ingredients and communal eating practices, and spent over a year in Japan, absorbing culinary customs rooted in precision, seasonality, and ritual. These cross-cultural experiences helped seed my interest in traditional food systems and the ways in which recipes carry stories, values, and memory.

I’m not a food historian by trade, but I might have been one in another life! I’m especially drawn to heritage cooking techniques, preservation methods, and the intersection of sustainability and food history — themes I explore throughout this site.

To see more about me, explore my personal site: Shara.ca

🌱 Why I Created Recipes & Roots

I created Recipes & Roots as a place to bring together the threads of my passions: seasonal cooking, food sustainability, and cultural food heritage. I believe that sustainable food systems will be essential in the near future — not just for the environment, but for rebuilding resilient, self-sufficient communities.

To me, the path forward lies in blending ancestral food knowledge with modern innovation — fermenting, foraging, baking, preserving — and sharing those practices openly and accessibly. Through this site, I aim to offer thoughtful writing, curated recipes, and historical insight that support a slower, more connected way of living.

This is the space where I can explore those ideas, share resources, and help build a community of people who care not just about how food tastes — but where it comes from, who grew it, and what stories it holds.