Raising Kale

In this week's episode, we hear from Lisa Gross, owner of League of Kitchens. She is one such human. She's the founder of a business that at every level values women in ways that are revolutionary. Packed into one company, she has managed to capture what America needs most right now: meaningful cultural exchange, putting women at the center of the story, celebrating diversity, celebrating immigrants, and being revolutionary by paying women for their talents (talents, I will add, that have been taken for granted historically as household “duties”).  As the daughter of a Korean immigrant and a Jewish New Yorker, Lisa Gross was raised on one grandmother's denjang-guk and the other's matzoh ball soup. Her company, The League of Kitchens, which employs immigrant women as in-home cooking instructors, is borne out of her passion for New York City, her love of cooking, and her connection to the immigrant experience. Lisa is an artist, educator, and social entrepreneur.

This week, I speak with Kara Heckert, a regional director at the nonprofit American Farmland Trust. Its mission is to save America's farms and ranches. Kara works there on agricultural sustainability and natural resource conservation in California. America's farmers are facing some very real challenges right now. Wildfires, drought, loss of farmland, and a history of discrimination. In this episode, we look more closely at all these issues. 

Today, we're talking about rice with farmer Michael Bosworth!  California grows 20 percent of America's rice, and nearly all of the country's sushi rice. Ninety-seven percent of the state's rice farms are located in the Sacramento Valley.  One of these farms is run by Michael, who comes from a family of farmers dating back to the 1870s. He went to college to study farming and has been a farmer his whole life. The man has rice in his veins! Michael is a different kind of rice farmer. While the majority of California rice is grown for sushi, Michael has shifted to nurturing unique varieties of grains grown less with a focus on yield and instead with a focus on flavor. His new company, True Origin Foods, was a small idea before the pandemic hit. Today, with the rise in home cooking and the growing consumer desire to buy local, Michael's business model is thriving.   

Dates are such a fascinating desert fruit. They grow on date palm trees, which may be one of the oldest cultivated trees in the world, dating back over 5,000 years. They're not only tasty, but they're a pretty cool food to learn about, too. Today's guest teaches us all sorts of fun facts. I learned so much talking to her!  Like, did you know that dates are considered a berry? Or that the dried fruit is more than 50 percent sugar?  Joan Smith runs Rancho Meladuco Date Farm in Coachella Valley, California. She's a CPA who shifted her career to date farming. She's a mother, a home cook, and a backyard gardener. Her dates are so delicious, they've been featured in Bon Appetite and Oprah magazines!  She shares her favorite date recipes, fun facts about date plants, tales of her farm dogs, and how she makes a point to give back to her community! 

As Americans search for ways to cook more at home with limited time, the blender provides easy answers. It's a useful tool in our search for healthier eating, too. What easier way to turn kale into breakfast?  In a recent study, 54% of consumers said they care more about the healthfulness of their food and beverage choices in 2020 than a decade ago. People want to eat healthy, and Tess leverages the blender to help them learn how. Tess Masters is an actor, lifestyle personality, and cookbook author. She's been featured in the LA Times, Washington Post, Glamour, and more. She was recently the spokesperson for KitchenAid. She runs the popular website, The Blender Girl. 

In one survey, 93% of respondents said they wanted to eat healthier. In another survey, 49% of people said they want to eat mindfully, rather than dieting.  Today's guest is one of these Americans--a busy mom who wanted to leave a better food legacy for her family, so she started a meal planning company, The Fresh 20. In this episode, we talk about her tips for being practical in the kitchen, how she raises healthy children, and how she feels inside her healthier body.  Melissa Lanz is a former marketing executive who quit her day job to focus on healthy food. She's an author of the book The Fresh 20, and runs a meal planning service with the same name. She's been featured in The New York Times, Instyle, among others, and as a contributing editor for Shape Magazine. She's also a wonderful cook, a mother, and a good human.   

I'm excited to introduce you to Beth Lee. She grew up enjoying her grandma's traditional Jewish baked goods, but they were never written down. So, Beth took a journey, interviewing people across the world to capture and publish a new cookbook based on essential Jewish baking from across the diaspora. It's a beautiful story of family, culture, and tradition. 

Welcome to Season 2 of Raising Kale! In Season 1, I asked our guests what listeners like you can do to become "Kale Raisers" and improve your own communities. Their #1 answer? Eat local and get to know your farmers. So, in Season 2, Farmers & Families, I'll be talking to more farmers. We'll learn about what they're growing, and how they're innovating, and what they're doing to improve their communities in addition to feeding people.  We start Season 2 in America's Farm-to-Fork Capital, Sacramento, California. Our farmer, Sara Bernal, works on an urban farm that's run by the nonprofit, Center for Land-Based Learning.   Urban farming takes place in cities on small plots, not in the country. The average farm size in America in 2012 was 434 acres! But the majority of urban farms are just 5 acres or less.  According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, a quarter of the world's urban population gets their food from urban farms. 15% of the world's food is grown in cities. As more and more of the world's population lives in cities, our food supply and our farmers are moving there, too.  Urban farmers like Sara Bernal are keenly aware of the needs of their communities and are not only growing food to feed them, but also rising up to meet social needs like hunger. Sara Bernal is a farmer, a community activist, a rad human, and a true Kale Raiser! She has lived and worked around the world from Bangladesh to Italy, but it's in West Sacramento, California where she's transforming her community through food. She's the program manager for the nonprofit Center for Land-Based Learning, where she runs an urban farm program that trains new farmers, feeds the hungry, and tirelessly makes the world a better place. 

Rock stars have a history of creating change in our food movement. Food and music have a unifying quality--they can bring people together around issues that are complex and even depressing--and help fill us with hope.  When Rockstar Gavin Rossdale isn't singing and playing guitar with his band Bush, he's making delicious meals for his family with sustainable food. He admits that if he wasn't a musician, he would have been a chef. When Gavin heard about this podcast, he offered to lend his celebrity status to help us get the word out. We're so grateful to him for this support. 

David Lebovitz started his culinary career at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, working with Chef Alice Waters (episode 4 guest). He's been featured in Oprah, Bon Appetit, and many more culinary publications. In 2019, Saveur magazine awarded his website their first-ever Blog of the Decade. David shares his journey from washing dishes in a strip mall steakhouse to living in Paris.

In an era of fake news, information about our food is not immune. Myths and misinformation abound. 21% of respondents in one study said they get their nutrition advice from social media. At a time when rates of hunger are rising, farm land is disappearing, and over half of Americans are sick from their diets, we can't afford to get this wrong.  Lucky for us, there are thoughtful journalists like Danielle who are breaking through the noise.  Danielle Nierenberg is the president and co-founder of the nonprofit think tank, Food Tank. The nonprofit focuses on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters. In other words, they keep consumers informed about issues affecting our food. Danielle has traveled the world to learn about solutions to our broken food system.

This week we hear from scientist Michael Mazourek, who's designing new vegetables as a seed breeder with Row 7 Seed Company. He's doing something radical with our food--he's making it taste better! He is an actual kale raiser--as in, he breeds the seeds that grow vegetables! It all started with a challenge from chef Dan Barber to build a better butternut squash. The result is the delicious and widely available honeynut squash!

You may have heard the rumors that school lunch is broken. But have you heard the one about how school lunch is being done RIGHT?! Today, you're going to hear how school lunch is supposed to be done! My nonprofit is fortunate to work in a school district alongside a school lunch program that breaks barriers. I can't wait for you to meet their leader. Diana Flores wants to transform school kitchens into school restaurants. She serves as the director of Nutrition Services for California's 3rd largest school district, Sacramento City Unified. It's a low-income school district that's cooking up 30,000 school lunches per day! Forget what you think you know about school lunch. Flores and her team are on a mission to make school food not only taste great, but to also meet high health standards.

There are currently an estimated 42 million Americans who are food insecure, or hungry, according to Feeding America. Of those, 13 million are children. What is the #1 cause of hunger? It's not a lack of food. It's a lack of jobs, or jobs that don't pay enough. It's about money. In order to truly end hunger, we have to overturn the traditional model of food distribution and attack the problem at its source. Robert Egger made a career of doing this very thing. He started DC Central Kitchen in 1989 to work with formerly incarcerated and homeless Americans to create jobs and feed others. He served there for 24 years, and has since worked to tackle issues of food contracts in government institutions, senior hunger, national food policy, uplifting the nonprofit sector, and so much more.  This episode goes out to all the O.G. kale raisers who paved the way for the work this podcast celebrates today--getting into good trouble using food as a tool for change. 

Rates of both poverty and hunger are rising in America. The statistics are dire. The number of people living below the federal poverty line in the United States remains stuck at recession-era record levels. Poverty rates have grown even higher since the pandemic hit last year.  A Northwestern University study in June revealed that food needs have doubled nationally. For households with children, food insecurity tripled!  One nonprofit in San Diego, California, Kitchens for Good, has created a dual solution for this double-edged problem: train community members who are food insecure in culinary careers. By training them for better jobs, their families will no longer suffer from poverty and food insecurity. For every person they train and help find employment, that is one less family living in poverty and going without food. In this episode, we talk to one of the nonprofit's founders, Aviva Paley, as well as one of their trainees, Tony Estrada. Tony tells me that his life has never been a fairy tale. But when he started the training at Kitchens for Good, his life was transformed.   

Two generations of Americans don't know how to cook. We have to look back to our grandmothers and mothers to learn the recipes we grew up eating. In the current pandemic, people are returning to their kitchens. When mom or grandma are not around, who do we turn to for help? To the Internet--and to food bloggers like Lisa Lin.  Her recipe site, Healthy Nibbles, features delicious recipes that turn farmers market crops into healthy meals. A few years ago, Lisa started including something special on her website: her mom! Some of Lisa's most popular recipes are classic Chinese dishes she's learned from Mama Lin, like scallion pancakes.

This week's episode we talk to we talk to Alexandra Garcia, Chief Program Officer for the World Central Kitchen, a non-profit whose goal is to change the world through the power of food. She talks about building resilient, local food systems in countries like Haiti, Honduras and Costa Rica, and introduces us to Bread Fruit!

Can our food teach us values? Can eating seasonally change you? How is fast food harming our kids? The Pioneer of both the farm-to-fork and farm-to-school movements, Chef Alice Waters, shares her insights on the deep connection between our climate and our farmers, and how school lunch offers a solution.

How does food connect to social justice? And what does that have to do with school lunch? This episodes looks at the connection between hunger, school lunch and food justice. Krystal Oriadha is the Senior Director of Programs and Policy for the National Farm to School Network, and served on President Barack Obama's Presidential campaign. She shares the harrowing personal stories that drove her to commit her life to social justice.             

Raising Kale's premier episode starts in the kitchen. Cooking is a radical act in today's fast food world. In fact, we have two generations of Americans who do not know how to cook from scratch. If we want to improve the health of Americans, we need to learn to cook again. For the large percentage of Americans who are still learning to cook, food blogs have become as popular as ever, with over two million to choose from online. Elise Bauer is one of the most successful food bloggers in the world. In 2003 she started Simply Recipes, a site that today has thousands of recipes and more than 8 million visitors a month. We start our food system journey looking in depth at one of the worlds most popular food blogs and learn how you can create change and raise kale in your own kitchen.

Increasing your knowledge about food is an act of Kale Raising. What we eat affects our health, the planet and our economy. What would happen if we knew the impacts of the food we eat on our planet and on our health. Would you make a different choice if you knew? In this episode, we talk with Ken Myska, a chef who worked in elite restaurants around the country, until he woke up along his culinary career path. That awakening caused a critical shift in the way he works with food, and led to his new journey as a CheFarmer.

Kale Raiser: /kāl/ /ˈrāzər/ noun. A person who gets in good trouble, using food as a tool.  Host Amber Stott speaks with Kale Raisers across the country. In Season One, we learn what a Chefarmer is, how to use breadfruit to build resilience, and how a recipe for oxtail stew turned into one of the biggest websites around!  One Kale Raiser took her experiences as a Black youth in Texas to fuel a career of raising kale. Today, she's pressuring the federal school lunch program to create racial justice. We also talk to a guy who develops seeds for a living. He shares his mad science experiments with purple peas. His formal, lab-tested methodology for determining taste profiles? “Yuck” and “Yum”!  Do you plant seeds? Raise kids to eat healthy? Read food labels? Eat your vegetables? Then chances are, you're a kale raiser, too!