S2-Episode 5: Joan Smith-The Date Farmer

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.