Family and food are the key things that fuel optometrist Jess Perri. But, as she tells Insight, her passion for diet and nutrition is also benefiting her wider family of patients.
Ms Jess Perri never had a chance.
Carried into the optometry business even before she was born as her mother worked through pregnancy, and then adopted by that family of patients who saw her as one of their own, a profession in eyecare was practically in her DNA.
But it was a dusty old university tome that sealed the deal.
“I think it was Wolff’s Anatomy of the Eye and Orbit, with graphic images of what I recall being bacterial keratitis, and this huge ulcer on the cornea,” she says.
“I remember showing my mum and being like, this is kind of gross, and this is kind of cool, which is probably not a common thing for a six-year-old.”
“You can’t just look at diabetic retinopathy as an isolated condition of the eye. It’s a condition of the person. So that is a big element of the discussions I have.”
There’s little about the healthy, energetic 37-year-old’s life that could really be described as ‘common’.
Her roll-call of achievements and activities would have most collapsing into a couch and nursing a sleepy tea: busy optometrist, reality TV chef, avid pasta maker, teacher and company founder, passionate advocate for the role of nutrition in good health, distance runner.
Oh, and there’s two young children – seven-year-old Maya and Henry, who is five.
Family is at the heart of Perri’s story. It’s the focal point for so many of her endeavours, whether that family is the one she shares a house with, the people with whom she shares her pasta-making skills, or the wider family whose vision she is entrusted with at Dr Optical in Glen Iris and clinics elsewhere in Victoria.
Family, food, and the guiding, inspirational arms of strong women.
All were delivered in large and lively helpings in her grandparents’ kitchens, where her two Nonnas taught an eager three-year-old Jessica how to make pasta, instilling the gift of good food for the family and beyond.
“A lot of my childhood, after school, on the weekends, school holidays, was spent cooking with my grandparents, and I learned a lot of the basic pasta shaping from when I was very young,” she recalls.
“I learned the Italian alphabet before I learned the English one.”
The lessons continued in her “second home” – her mother Ms Elena Perri’s optometry practice in Huntingdale, Melbourne, which opened in 1983.
She practically grew up watching her mum caring for an extended family of patients while running a successful practice and pioneering early skills in myopia management.
Her mother was the “pinnacle of a successful woman . . . the child of Italian migrants who not only went to university but then opened two practices”.
“So she was a driven, career-focused woman who really instilled the value of education in us,” Perri says.
If that path to optometry took familiar, familial steps, life beyond her University of Melbourne graduation in 2010 was a little more of a lottery.
“My boyfriend at the time, Jason Korman, who became my husband, put down my name and I won a green card,” she recalls. “So a few weeks after we got married, we packed up two suitcases and we just moved to New York.”
Perri couldn’t work as an optometrist so took a role as an assistant to a corneal specialist. And she dived even deeper into the world of food over the four years they spent in the US.
“I started cooking more, educating myself about food, doing cooking courses at the Institute of Culinary Education, and I created a food blog.”
It would become a passion that Perri would take to new heights when she became pregnant with daughter Maya and the family headed back to Australia.
If optometry was the road that Perri was always destined to head down, food has always been another important destination on that journey and the fuel to sustain her. Perri regularly coaches others on how to make and shape pasta in her commercial kitchen at home – “When we built this house, I said to my husband, you can do everything else, do not touch the kitchen plan.”
That love of food and Italian legacy saw her compete on reality TV show Masterchef two years ago, and she now makes and markets her own pasta under the brand name Pretty Pasta.
There’s a website in the works, packaging is at the design stage, interviews to be conducted.
This and other experiences have taught her “that you can try new things at any age and nothing really limits you, other than your own ability to keep trying and keep going”.
It’s tempting to suggest that Perri, who regularly tells her husband “we’ll sleep when we’re dead” and who doesn’t have a great deal of downtime, might be spreading herself too thinly, like pasta rolled and pulled so tightly it might snap.
But she pushes on regardless because not only is the focus on food a passion and a business, it also became very personal when her father had a heart attack at the age of 53.
“It completely changed our lives as a family,” she says. “My father went from being an otherwise pretty fit and healthy guy to all of a sudden needing 20 different medications.
“So I went back and that’s when I studied nutrition and the purpose of that was really to help my dad.”
But she also saw the potential to help others – especially through diabetes management. When she returned to her studies in 2012, she undertook postgraduate studies in nutrition (diabetes management) at Deakin University.
Her passion – an intersection of nutrition and ocular health – has been taken into her work at Dr Optical, where she works with another optometrist and, in somewhat of a rarity in Australian optometry, an ophthalmologist on site, Dr Roland Bunting.
Patients frequently need help with macular degeneration, cataracts, and management of diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and myopia.
“We’ve got all the bells and whistles.”
But just as important as the latest technology and techniques is the opportunity to talk with the patients.
Like mother, like daughter.
“My mum was invested in people and her patients beyond just, ‘I’m just going to give you glasses’. There was always a relationship there. And my mum was adored by her patients. I can’t think of any other word than that.
“So I took it upon myself to open up those conversations with patients about food and lifestyle.
“There are many studies which have shown that certain foods, certain vitamins, certain minerals are beneficial against, for example, macular degeneration.
“Diet and lifestyle are such huge components in diabetes management and diabetic retinopathy.”
It’s a whole-body issue.
“You can’t just look at diabetic retinopathy as an isolated condition of the eye. It’s a condition of the person. So that is a big element of the discussions I have.”
Perri talks with patients about stress relief as well. For her, that used to be about long-distance running, including marathons.
That has gone by the wayside of late, although she likes to sneak in a good “semi-long run” at the weekends.
Something’s got to give, right?
Especially when you’re feeding and building a family that will become a village of support and sustenance.
Because there’s only so many hours in a day, and sleep beckons.
More reading
Nutrition and dry eye: evidence-based strategies and supplements
COVID-19 virus shown to breach retinal barrier and damage the eye
Visual test could predict dementia onset a decade before diagnosis
