Knowledge, Application, Practice

My goal is not to make chefs, but to build confidence, generate enthusiasm, and empower people by creating deliciousness together. I help families and regular folks, institutional teams, students, and professionals transform their work and lives with simple, accessible, experiential learning. I am straightforward, engaging, knowledgeable, and fun; I respect people and meet them where they’re at by giving smart, simple advice and sharing strategies and tools for making sustainable changes at home, in organizations, and communities. I believe in a straightforward, honest approach to teaching: telling the truth, giving information, and empowering people to make their own informed decisions about their food choices.

About Me

I love food and feeding people. I work at the intersection of food, health, sustainable agriculture, and justice. I believe that food and cooking have the power to transform personal, community, and environmental health. I am a mom of two teenage daughters and together with my husband Jon, a high school Spanish teacher, we are trying to support them in being healthy, compassionate and kind people, who know how to feed themselves! Being a mom, and recognizing the profound highs and lows of parenting, and the general challenges of creating balance in life gives me insight and empathy to help families, health professionals, educators, activists, and culinary teams integrate and apply the story of cooking and eating into their own work and lives.

I am also an athlete. I have run 7 marathons and multiple other distances. I also ski, bike and hike. I love pushing my body as far (and even farther) as I can, and experiencing the process of training and building my mental, emotional and physical strength to overcome challenges, and achieve the goals I’m pursuing. I am competitive enough that it motivates me to push hard, and committed enough to my own health and well being to do it in as balanced a way as possible. I understand the time, patience, focus and commitment that it takes to run a marathon, and can apply that to my work too! Nourishing the health of people, communities and the planet feed me, my work and my commitment to building a more just, equitable and healthy food system. I share a love of food, learning, and wellbeing and bring leadership, passion, skills, and experience into the kitchen.

Currently I teach 3 classes at the University of Minnesota:

• A Food Systems Approach to Cooking for undergraduates*

• Food Matters, Cook as If Your Life Depends on It for graduate level health professional students and Food Choices, Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves**

  *Through Food Science and Nutrition **Through the Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing

As a consultant, I partner with various organizations to train, school foodservice and FCS (Family Consumer Sciences) teachers, clinical and other health professionals, and to feed community members.

My Story