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Anne-Marie Scott started out in the same dietary and culinary ruts many Americans find themselves in today: eating frozen dinners, fast food and processed snacks because it seems so much easier and cheaper than cooking from scratch. And Scott is a dietitian, someone who gets paid to help people eat healthier.

Now Scott, a foods and nutrition professor at UNCG, buys most of her food directly from farms and prepares homemade croissants and risotto in her kitchen. She wants to help other families learn how to do the same.

"I'm just happier and healthier and feel like I'm part of a solution with the locavore lifestyle," said Scott, a former leader of Slow Food Piedmont Triad.

Scott wants to help a fast-food eating Greensboro family or couple convert to a local, whole foods diet over the course of a year. She wants to document the process and would like a family open to writing about their experience online. This is a personal "labor of love" for her and involves no outside funding, she said.

"I really just want to guide them," she said. " I want to teach them to cook, how to shop. I want to take them to meet farmers."

You can find out more about the project at her new blog, where you can contact her and sign up. She also was featured in the summer edition of the UNCG Alumni Magazine. I met Scott today and took a brief tour of her Sunset Hills backyard, where she planted blueberry bushes and raises three hens all named Henrietta (they're a rare heritage breed called Dorking, if you're curious).

"In a shady yard my choices were mushrooms, bees, rabbits or chickens," she said. "Chickens just seemed like a good idea."

Scott's had her share of cooking blunders ("I tried to make salmon mousse and I made salmon Alpo") and frustrating experiences, such as shopping at a crowded and confusing downtown farmers market. 

Scott considers herself an oddball in the dietetics field, one who prioritizes whole, fresh foods over counting calories and buying processed foods that happen to be low-fat: "Real food is not low-fat or low-carb. When you enjoy slow food your body is so viscerally satisfied that you don't need to overeat."