My speaking abilities are the result of throwing an Ivy League English Major (read: nerd) into the crucible of the toughest audience on earth—whip smart restaurant workers, who bullshit for a living, are skeptical by nature, and often hungover.
I had to learn in a hurry how to tell a good story and keep things compelling.
Topics
Practical Sustainabilty
Regenerative Farming
Farming & Gardening How-tos
Farming & Gardening Life Lessons
Cyclically Integrated Business
Small Business Economy
Consumer Facing Business
Food Culture
Restaurant Culture
Future of Restaurants
History of Farming
History of Restaurants
Food & Technology
Restaurants & Technology
Technology & Food Culture
Tech Criticism
Memory has been my muse in restaurants.
I am forever chasing down remembered tastes, sense memories, and emotions that were intensified by food, trying to recreate them for customers. Because food is one way we remember. For some reason, it holds time better and helps us hold on to one another more than any other thing I can think of. Meals are how humans have bracketed time and marked occasions for millennia. Meals are to life what a stanza or meter is to a poem, what a beat is to a song. They are the form that makes the content sing—the structure that makes a poem a poem, and not just a jumble of words on a page. They are where you put life, memories, and emotions, so you can understand it all when you look back. Maybe that sounds grandiose. But I think it’s true.
The holidays, especially, are about food. Food traditions renewed and reaffirmed yearly, hopefully together—the process is as important as the cathartic moment of consumption. Restaurants, similarly, are about the food, but also about all the emotions that food catalyzes, and the moments and people that food helps us remember. The rituals and traditions that my mom created, I now know, came from her imagination and her insistence. But they felt as real as rocks to me then. And they became the pillars on which I could hang so much of my life’s meaning.
— Me, From “Ritual, Memory, Food, Tradition”
