This is Now.

When we launched Yumi in 2017, there were more fresh dog food companies than there were baby food options. Despite hundreds of noes from investors, we were steadfast in our thesis: people care as much about babies as they do about Fido — hopefully, more.

Three years on, millions of meals delivered, our thesis is more than holding up. The movement to raise the standards of baby food and kids food overall has hit an inflection point. Families across the country are now demanding more nutritious, freshly made options that fundamentally register as real food.

Real to this generation means something entirely different; today’s parents embrace the notion that food is thy medicine. They may not eat perfectly, but they’re more aware of the dangers of unfettered access to sugar. And while they may have been raised on rice cereal as babies, when they learn about the link between rice and higher levels of arsenic, as laid bare in recent headlines, they push big food to do better.

So as we thought about our first campaign, we kept circling back to this idea of celebrating the “Now” and the power of this generation of parents to define their now. For decades, parenting has largely been defined by narrow terms and by the preceding generations, creating cliched representations of identity — who gets to be a parent — and what it means to parent. These containers have now busted wide open. Parenting has never felt more inclusive, unvarnished, imperfect, and weird.

Our campaign, “This Is Now’ takes an intimate, crowd-sourced look at what it means to be a parent today and celebrates the power of this generation as the Definers. This concept of “now” exists as both a celebration, and a rallying cry. This is now, is a demand as much as it is a feeling.

As a part of our launch, Yumi shipped cameras to real families across the country and had them document their everyday lives, against the backdrop of a global pandemic. The resulting images are nuanced, raw snapshots of real moments and real parenthood — a single dad from Chicago who is also an activist, a child sharing an ordinary moment with one of his two moms who happens to be a goth rockstar, and more. You’ll find them plastered on our site, in our commercial (see below), at your nearby bus stop and in billboards across America.

These images beautifully capture our ethos of keeping it real. It’s our love letter to the modern parent, who’s doing their part in defining their now.

It is today’s decisions, after all, that will shape the future. The next generation is literally in our (very tired) hands. What we decide to demand of our food industry, of our society, and of our earth today, will stretch into tomorrow.

So here’s to the Definers — the now is yours.

Co-founders, Angela & Evelyn & the entire @Yumi fam.

Read on helloyumi.com or post your #thisisnow @yumi.

*Editor’s note: We also love Fido, no offense to our four-legged friends (Raja, Miko & George).

He wasn’t sure about the meaning, he said, half shrugging, but it didn’t matter. Rusli, he explained, wasn’t our family’s real last name. It was changed during the era of president Suharto, when the ethnic-Chinese were pushed to adopt “Indonesian-sounding” names.

“Li” became “Rusli,” obfuscating the oriental root.

A name is supposed to be fixed, absolute, an integral part of identity. For an obnoxious, know-it-all 16-year-old, the sudden subtraction of three letters was jarring. It was a reminder that I didn’t know everything, that even the most basic truths can be vulnerable.

I spent my childhood in New Jersey feverishly trying to blot out my Indonesian-ness, in a bid to feel less “other” and assimilate into American culture.

I resented my mother for cooking the food of her mother, laden with thick coconut milk, galangal and turmeric. I wedged myself into my friends’ dining tables, feasting on their American customs between plates of roasted meats and potatoes. I cried when my mother told me I could not have a bat mitzvah or attend the Solomon Schechter Day School and when a boy, who I thought liked me, tauntingly called me “Bruce Lee.” I tried to push away all the things that made my family seem “strange,” to achieve a sense of belonging.

My father’s disclosure made me realize how successful I had been — and how little I knew about my parents’ homeland.

I soon became obsessed with the notion of learning about the country and culture. So a few years later, when I was a 19-year-old college student, I hopped on a plane bound for Jakarta to be a freelancer for the New York Times. Over the next three years, up until graduation, I spent every winter and summer with my mentors, Jane Perlez and Raymond Bonner, to make up for lost time. We crisscrossed the archipelago, talking to villagers about the nation’s first free presidential elections and listening to the harrowing tales of orphans whose families perished in the 2004 tsunami. In my father’s hometown, I held the deeply lined hands of my grandmother as I learned about her ancestors who bound their feet and the quirky superstitions of this land.

I fell in love with my parents’ country and the profession.

All that my career has been, I can trace to that time.

It solidified my desire to be a journalist, eventually leading me to work full time for the Times and later the Wall Street Journal, where I’ve been a technology reporter since 2012. It convinced me of the importance of this work, the necessity of doing all that I could to collect the fragments of stories. My byline, “Evelyn M. Rusli,” my not-quite-real name, was a symbolic reminder, pushing me to search for less obvious truths, to embrace the grey areas and, perhaps most importantly, to never assume that I had all the facts.

Lately, however, I’ve realized that I wasn’t properly applying that lens to my own life.

When I was 19, I thought I was going to spend my entire life as a journalist, and that became another fixed truth, blinding me to alternatives. As my career progressed, I kept a white-knuckled grasp on this romantic notion of myself — a girl who found her passion as a teen and would spend her entire life devoted to it. The mere thought of trying something new threatened this identity and made me feel fraudulent.

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to embrace evolving narratives. Change doesn’t discredit past narratives, it just gives us room to grow and prevents us from standing still.

This year, I realized that as much as I still love journalism, I am hungry for a different challenge and the chance to apply a new skill set. I am hungry for every day, every effort to build towards something big, a singular movement.

I am under no illusion that I’ve learned everything from this profession — this is not a “drop the mic” moment. And I am not completely giving up on writing, though I will write less frequently and more personally than I have in the past.

But I’m hungry to be terrified.

So after an inspiring decade, I am stepping away from journalism. I feel grateful for all that I have learned, everyone that I have met and all the ways journalism has shaped my life and character.

I am leaving to start a company (I know, I’m a San Francisco cliche). I’m not ready to disclose plans yet, so I’ll just say, in editor parlance, “more TK.” Only time will tell if this ends in happiness or a pool of tears — hopefully both. The not-knowing of course is part of the fun.

It’s time to let go of the byline as I know it.

Recently, during a brief trip home, I prodded my father to tell me more about his family and his family’s family, urging him to stretch back as far as he could go. He sighed. He lacked some basic details to sketch the family tree. But he said based on the spelling and pronunciation of our last name in Chinese, we were likely descendants of a Chinese general.

“Li — L-I- right? A truncation of Rusli?” I said.

“No.” He smiled. “L-I-E. Lie.”

Special thanks to Daniel Gruneberg, Om Malik, Ross Schneiderman, Ashley Mayer, Scott Austin for their feedback here, and thank you to my family — especially Ray and Jane for your love, support and for taking a chance on the overeager, awkward teen that you met for tea at the Algonquin so many years ago.

My Byline Is a Lie was originally published in In Asia. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.