I try to find interesting projects working on food and agriculture that bridge culture and business and that promote environmental sustainability and prosperity at the community level. That’s a mouthful in more ways than one.

 I try to find interesting projects working on food and agriculture that bridge culture and business and that promote environmental sustainability and prosperity at the community level. That’s a mouthful in more ways than one. I do love food. It tastes good. It makes people happy. My own life feels full of joy when I can make a contribution to the world while also eating well, drinking great wine and traveling. Other people want really big bank accounts. I want my recipe notebook to be full to busting. I also chose food as the lever for my social-change work because it’s something in an increasingly divided country that everybody shares and where the confrontation of other politics is instead filled with joy. And, when you taste good food, you know it without the need for political considerations. All this comes from two things in my own life, neither unique. The first is that everything that is fully personal seems to happen around the kitchen table—love is kindled, jokes are told and rumors spread. In my own sped up life, finding my way back to the kitchen is a necessity. (Cooking after a hard day’s work also is one great avenue of creativity, mixing in the harvest of Midwestern earth with the approaches and aesthetics of Asia, Europe and Latin America that I hold in my head.) Also, food is one of the places where almost everyone I know can move beyond cultural tolerance and actually be interested in learning and experiencing the foods of Judaism, Islam, former Soviet states or even the currently scorned French. Bon appétit.