On April 27, 2023, I soaked a piece of caraway-dotted rye bread in simmering chicken broth and tossed it into my new Vitamix blender with some homemade corned-beef brisket and a handful of wild leeks, foraged from the maple sugar bush a few steps from my Northeast Kingdom cabin's front door. I flicked on the machine, and, with a noise like an airplane motor revving up, it reduced the meaty combo to a thick, split pea soup-colored gruel. I poured it into a matchy dull green mug, took a sip and started laughing giddily — perhaps maniacally. I've been a food professional for decades and an aficionado since I was a toddler, and, at that moment, the ugly, grainy sludge seemed like the best thing I'd ever "eaten." Seven days earlier, at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., a surgeon had removed a cancerous tumor from the side of my tongue. As surgeons must, he'd also taken a perimeter of healthy flesh to reduce the risk of the cancer's return. Flattened, the piece measured an inch by an inch-and-a-quarter. Why was that puréed corned-beef sandwich so good? Because a week after surgery, on a diet of liquefied foods and alternating doses of Advil and Tylenol, I was starting to starve. Over the next two years — as I healed from my first surgery, was rediagnosed because the cancer had spread to a lymph node, had my neck sliced open and my lymph nodes scooped out, and then spent a grueling seven weeks doing chemoradiation treatment — I would lose my sense of taste and all the pleasure associated with eating, and happily regain it, four times. From these seeds spring the shoots of dozens of stories I could tell: some about being dismissed by doctors; others about coping with pain; still more about the way people treat you when something undefinable about your appearance changes. This particular story is about how I altered what I eat, hoping to make cancer less likely to return. My docs, brilliant as they are, weren't keen on nutritional deep dives, and I'm not a medical professional (although I love a good peer-reviewed study). The changes I've made to the way I eat are the ones that resonated with me. Prior to my diagnosis, I was confident I had a healthy diet. Maybe I was even braggy about it. Yeah, I was…