About Tracey
Watch Tracey’s Story
Meet Tracey
Tracey is a Plant-Based Wholefood Chef who is passionate about creating, enjoying and sharing delicious and nourishing plant-based food with others. As a working mother of four fabulous young adults (and now grandmother to four!), Tracey knows just how important it is to create simple meals that taste awesome and don’t demand too much of your time. Her signature style is rustic, delicious, colourful and easy-to-throw-together.
Tracey instinctually stopped eating red meat at age 16. She has always enjoyed the creative aspects of cooking (like crafting her own dishes from scratch) and also making food look gorgeous! She credits her Mum for the latter passion as she was super-talented at making food look amazing while Tracey was growing up, and she admired and saw how much people enjoyed this. In her early 20’s, it wasn’t unusual for her to spend all day preparing a dinner party for her university friends, loving the ritual of creating an epic meal for her special people and connecting over good food. She connected and got together with strict plant-eater Jason Shon Bennett in her late 20s and making food for them both (and their kids) changed how she saw ingredients, flavours, mixes and dishes. Plants became everything and she began a new foodie adventure which was the catalyst to her love affair with legumes!
Cooking remained a big passion into family life and Tracey co-founded The Exceptional Health Company with now-husband Jason in 2009, based on sheer demand in their community. They have available their on-line programme ‘thelifeplan®’ (recently completely updated, improved and relaunched!), for people wanting to improve their health and vitality, overcome illnesses, drop excess weight, and extend their longevity. In this partnership, Jason is the inspiration, researcher and speaker (the ‘why’), and Tracey the recipe creator and provider (the ‘how to’), creating over 300 recipes along the way. Together, their vision is to educate and inspire people how to eat well, get well and stay well through simple changes to their diet, lifestyle and environment.
These days, Tracey takes great pleasure in sharing her love of food with others through teaching workshops in her community and sometimes further afield. She is currently teaching one-day Plant Based Cooking Workshops on a variety of delicious topics. However, her biggest passion is leading Fasting & Wellness Retreats with Jason, where together they take people on a 3/5 day journey deep diving into all things health and wellness as well as learning the powerful practice of Regular Intelligent Fasting®. These retreat experiences are incredible fun, deeply bonding, and completely life-changing for the attendees.
While Tracey considers herself an educator first, she has in recent years begun to dabble and delight in providing plant-based catering/nourishment for special events, mostly in the wellness/transformation industry. She is thoroughly enjoying this as Tracey loves to nourish people with delicious nutrient-rich food made with plenty of aroha while they go through deep growth and transformational work.
A people person through and through, Tracey loves connecting, creating and collaborating with others on a similar path so who know what is around the corner; and yes, there is definitely a long awaited cookbook (or 3) in the making…. Watch this space!
“I hired Tracey Bennett, aka The Reckless Foodie to cater for a five-day residential Tantra Training. Tracey was in charge of organising the menu, all the food, and being on-site for the five days to prepare, cook and clean-up the food. It was such a delight to handover all aspects to Tracey, trusting that she would deliver exactly what was needed. The food was outstanding; she delivered a wonderful nourishing variety, beautifully presented, and her presence in the kitchen and in the house was warm, energising and supportive. Everybody loved the food, and each meal turned into an event. The cake she made us for our final celebration was outstanding! Through the entire process of negotiation, delivery and invoicing, Tracey was easy to deal with. Her communication skills are excellent and she thoroughly understood the brief and what was needed at all times. I would highly recommend hiring The Reckless Foodie for your next event”- Kara-Leah Grant, Tantra Teacher, Presenter, Author, 2020.