Wild at Heart
AUTUMN CULLEN wanted all five of her children — including her disabled daughter — to have every opportunity to thrive and explore. So when those opportunities didn’t exist, she set out to create them herself.
There is a girl who loves burrowing her fingers through Carmel-by-the-Sea's white sand. A girl who hikes through forests, chases waterfalls and glides on lakes. She basks in sunshine, sleeps under the stars and dances when fireworks fill the sky.
This girl cannot walk, talk, or eat with her mouth. She has chromosomal differences, is legally deafblind and medically complex. Life is not easy for this girl who has defied the odds and prevailed over her prognosis. But it's brimming with joy and beauty, because of her mother.
In 2014, Autumn Cullen was at the 20-week ultrasound of her fifth child – and only daughter – when she learned her baby was missing part of her brain. In the weeks prior, Autumn had happened across a scrap of paper where she’d scrawled potential baby names during a previous pregnancy with her twins. One of those names stood out to her. It was Story.
Not long after that ultrasound, Autumn was told by a doctor that her unborn baby was unlikely to survive.
“When that happened I was like, well, maybe she'll just be our little story of grace,” remembers Autumn, speaking from her home in California’s capital, Sacramento.
“We’re naming her Story Grace and we're going to start talking about it. She's going to be our story of grace, no matter what comes. We’re going to celebrate her and be thankful for whatever she brings to us.”
Story Grace is now 11. She's also the reason Autumn founded her business, Whole Story Meals, which offers nutritious, powdered real-food options for people who, like Story Grace, rely on tube-feeding.
Back when her brain anomalies first started showing in ultrasounds, potential feeding issues were flagged. But Autumn wasn’t buying it.
“I was just convinced that it didn't matter what was going on, I could nurse anything,” she laughs. “I had four boys within four years, okay? I was practically a human heifer at this point. We’re not going to have nursing issues – I am a professional here. But my gosh, that could not have been further from the truth.”
After seven months of feeding on pumped breastmilk through a nasogastric (NG) tube, Story Grace transitioned to a gastrostomy (G) tube. Once she was ready for solids, she started having commercial, synthetic formula. And near-constant diarrhoea.
“So I was like, this isn’t going to work,” says Autumn. “I started blending real food for her – making my own stuff – and I remember going into the doctor and saying, ‘here's what I’m making for her. Can you just take a look at it and see if everything looks okay?’”
That doctor told Autumn, “no”. She also said that if they weren’t going to follow her recommendation, their family would be “fired” from her clinic.
“I went home, sat in a chair and held my child. I was shaking, because I was afraid that the doctor was going to call social services on us,” says Autumn. “She didn’t, but that absolute terror went through me of, oh my gosh, I’m not following the doctor’s orders.”
Autumn kept feeding her daughter blended food. She found support elsewhere, through a dietitian and naturopath – and from fellow tube-feeding families as one of the first members of the Facebook Group, Blenderized RN.
Having grown up in Griggsville, Illinois, riding horses with her father through the Wyoming wilderness, Autumn was raised to be independent and self-sufficient. Traits she would muster even more so after becoming a single parent, when Story Grace was just one.
Autumn endured a “brutal” divorce while battling her own health struggles and caring for five young children – one with significant, around-the-clock needs. “I was mentally and physically at rock bottom,” she says. “I had zero confidence.”
At this time, even going on a walk with a friend through a section of their local town park that was “a little more wooded than the rest of it” seemed impossible.
“But I did it – I went on this hike,” says Autumn. “It was 6am on New Year’s Day and there was frost on the leaves. I remember the sun coming up and I was like, this is what I need, this is what is feeding and nourishing my soul.”
Slowly, with her four boys at her feet and her daughter secured to her chest, she started venturing into Sacramento’s forests.
“I took my kids car-camping first and we went on some hikes. Then we did one overnight hike about a quarter of a mile in, just a little way so we could get a feel and taste for it. And they loved it. It was the best thing that I could have done for my family.”
As their confidence grew and they wandered further, Autumn found that, in liquid form, Story Grace’s blended meals were a heavy load to haul. She sought out an equivalent, light-weight powdered meal replacement. Without success.
“Everything was ‘peas and oats and added vitamins’. And I was like, I’m not going to feed my kid peas and oats for her meal. Who eats that, right?”
Back in her own kitchen, Autumn began making powdered meals by cold-pressing raw whole foods like kale, berries, sweet potato and zucchini.
“I started doing research and saw that you retain 97 per cent of the nutritional value when you’re freeze-drying versus dehydrating, which was more like 70 per cent,” she says. “I was trying to figure out, okay, how much protein does she need? How much carb? I have all these chicken scratches of writing out formulas and changing stuff on paper.”
While hiking with her kids, Autumn began mixing her whole-food, freeze-dried ingredients with filtered stream water to make tube-fed meals for Story Grace. Then her entrepreneurial roots began to show.
“My dad was a third-generation chiropractor and my mum owned a nutrition store. I come from a background that was very much like, ‘your job is to meet your own needs’. So seeing there wasn't an option for Story Grace, I was like, okay, I'm going to create an option for us.
“And then it turned into, everyone else needs that as well, you know?”
It didn’t matter that Autumn – who was first employed as a combat medic in the Illinois Army National Guard at age 17, before a turn as a political fundraiser – had been out of the workforce for a decade while raising her children. She leaned into her network, ignored every naysayer and started building a business.
“I struggled watching my kid not being fed well and my heart hurts for other people that are in that same situation. So anything that I can do to help prevent someone else going through that same pain, I really want to do. And I get pretty fired up about it.”
In 2018, Autumn launched Whole Story Meals with the first of its nutrient-dense powdered meals for the tube-feeding community. Today, her company hires a team of workers who, like their founder, work from home. It also generates over $US1 million in annual sales.
“When I started, I was in line at the food pantry,” says Autumn. “There was some time there where I wasn’t getting child support. I couldn’t go to work because no one could care for my daughter and my church was helping feed us while I was over here creating a formula. It was hard to imagine that life would change.”
At the helm of a brand currently changing lives for countless families – including some being prescribed Whole Story Meals by the very same doctor who “fired” her – Autumn relies on her boys, now in their teens, helping out at home. The eldest, Kipp, began insisting on changing Story Grace’s G-tube when he was eight.
“The boys adore her and they do a very good job taking care of her,” says Autumn. “She does four feeds a day now and we all take turns. I don't want them to feel like they have to take all the weight of the work – but she can’t do these things for herself. So it looks a little bit different in our household and that's just part of how we function.”
This inclusive approach to family life remains central to Whole Story Meals, which Autumn hopes will one day reach global markets. She wanted her daughter to benefit from the same breadth of nutrition as her sons. She wanted her sons to not miss a moment of childhood fun. She wanted all her kids to live full, adventurous lives.
“I don't have just one child, I have five,” she says. “Five children that need to be loved, fed and given experiences. That’s why at Whole Story Meals we talk about freedom. We still get to go to baseball games. We get to go canoeing. We get to fly places and it makes everything easier. It creates freedom for a whole family.”