🍳 Communications Nourishment from Chefs and Food Storytellers
5 Resilient, Empathetic and Creative Food Entrepreneurs to Inspire Your Work and Life
Before I dive in, I want to express my sorrow for the people of Türkiye and Syria. The catastrophic earthquake this week has been devastating. As rescue crews race around the clock to save lives, the Chefs are also activating to help feed the helpers and people in need. That’s what this article is about — the nourishment that Chefs and Food Storytellers give with food and more. I hope these five profiles on resilient, empathetic and creative food entrepreneurs can bring us some hope and inspiration, especially during difficult times, but also in our daily work and life.
As a Julia, I’ve always gravitated to cooking shows since discovering at a young age that I shared a name with an iconic television chef — Julia Child. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what today’s well-known food leaders who host shows, produce podcasts as well as manage restaurants and bakeries can teach us about communications and community.
While watching, listening and reading, I realized that cooking, communications and community share a lot in common. Here’s some food for thought on the topic.
Audience: Knowing who to cater your dish to or your message to results in happy customers, employees or fans.
Strategy: With a recipe, there are specific steps to follow. While working on a communications project, there are often templates to guide your work, but sometimes you’ll need to go off script and improvise, which happens in cooking too.
Teamwork: Collaboration is needed when cooking together as well as working on a communications or community project with many constituents.
📷: World Central Kitchen: Response to Hurricane Fiona in Puerto Rico In the communicator’s kitchen, we also have utensils — an Intranet for internal communications and social media for external communications. We pivot quickly like spatulas, prevent messes like a splatter guard and remove layers of complexity like a peeler. Analogies aside, what can communicators learn from bakers, chefs and food storytellers? Here are a few of my favorite prominent food-focused leaders and the lessons I’ve learned from them:
🥘 World Central Kitchen’s Chef José Andrés | Give Kindness
🍊 The Orange Bakery’s Daughter and Dad Duo, Kitty and Al Tait | Support Mental Health
🥨 Somebody Feed Phil’s Philip Rosenthal | Embrace Wonder
🧁 Molly Yeh | Seek Joy with Sprinkles
🍝 The Sporkful’s Dan Pashman | Think Creatively
Now, let’s visit their kitchens to meet some of the creams of the crop whose inspiring culinary and confectionary impact also sparks ideas for creating communications and community at work. 🥘 #1 World Central Kitchen’s Chef José Andrés | Give Kindness
When disaster strikes, Chef José Andrés and his team from World Central Kitchen arrive, establish local connections and cook for everyone. Earthquakes, fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, landslides, snow and war can’t stop their commitment to helping people who are hungry and in need. Immediately after the earthquake hit Türkiye and Syria this week, Chef José Andrés and team activated to help.
In 2022, World Central Kitchen provided 195 million meals in 31 countries, including the majority in Ukraine, and also Pakistan, South Africa, Mexico, the United States and more countries.
Through a community of volunteers — Relief Team members who serve the food and Chef Corps leaders who cook it, World Central Kitchen shows up to care for communities, posting about the poignant and distressing moments for the world to experience the high’s and low’s with them. Their kindness and generosity bring hope to the people they serve.
📘 Lessons Learned: Drop everything to help someone in an emergency. Show up for people in need. Empower your team to tap into its strengths to help others. Give your people time to volunteer. Tell stories authentically and from the heart.
💡 Idea: Consider watching We Feed People — the Ron Howard-directed documentary about World Central Kitchen for a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of WCK’s work. Then, discuss the film with your colleagues to talk about the global impact.
🍊#2 The Orange Bakery’s Daughter and Dad Duo, Kitty and Al Tait | Support Mental Health
Kitty Tait experienced a drastic mental health challenge — she went from living life with a smile to falling into severe depression at 14 years old. Ultimately, baking bread with her dad brought her back to life. Next, they began baking for their neighbors, started a subscription bread service and eventually opened The Orange Bakery together. Learn more about their journey.
The bakery has transformed their lives and their community outside Oxfordshire where there’s a frequent line for their pastries and loaves of bread. Last year, Kitty and Al published recipes alongside a memoir sharing their story of resilience in Breadsong: How Baking Changed Our Lives. The book was named one of the best cookbooks of 2022 by The Sunday Times Food. This year, they’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign for Kitty’s Kits — bread baking boxes with a social-good mission to buy a kit, and give a kit to a school, food hub, prison or community group.
📘 Lessons Learned: Support the people you care about no matter what. Stick with your family, friends and colleagues during difficult times. Normalize talking about mental health. Encourage people to seek help and support by sharing their stories, if comfortable. Inspire yourself in unexpected ways by trying something new.
💡 Idea: Order one of Kitty’s Kits and bake together. Talk about Kitty and her dad’s story, and what we can learn from them about mental health and resilience. Foster a safe space for employees to share their personal experiences with mental health.
🥨 #3 Somebody Feed Phil | Embrace Wonder
The expression on Phil’s face when he tries new foods shows his authentic awe. He jumps for joy, waves his hands with enthusiasm and dances with delight as he samples Croatian bourekas, Hawaiian shaved ice, Chilean sea strawberries and more. In this series, he travels the world with his crew to discover unique foods, cultures and stories.
Along the way, Phil makes meaningful friendships with the people who show him the cities and the people who make the food, from the food truck owners to the award-winning chefs. While the crew is behind the scenes in most shows, Phil includes them in the action, feeding them on camera along the way. Experience the delight of filming an episode with Travel and Leisure’s Paul Feingtein who wrote: “I Went to Chile With Phil Rosenthal of 'Somebody Feed Phil' — and Learned His Greatest Travel Secret.”
Well known for creating and producing the show Everybody Loves Raymond, Phil incorporates humor and family into his work, featuring his parents in several of the early seasons. In an interview with Variety, Phil shared:
“What I borrow from sitcoms is I’m always looking for characters. I understand that I am a character. My brother [Richard Rosenthal] who produces the show with me, understands by putting me in certain situations that, for instance, Anthony Bourdain would be very brave and fearless in. He understands that I would not fare as well as him. And that’s fun!”
Family values inspire Phil to give the gift of food through Somebody Feed the People, his philanthropic initiative that supports many causes, including ALMA Backyard Farms helping formerly incarcerated people work on urban farms, Food Forward reducing food waste by “recovering unwanted fruits from backyard trees,” World Central Kitchen providing meals during emergencies and several other organizations.
📘 Lessons Learned: Approach your work with wonder and curiosity. Find a passion and pursue it, it’s never too late — Phil launched his food show in his 50s. Experience other cultures. Eat delicious food and share it with others! Treat your crew like family. Give back to help others.
💡 Idea: Host a virtual lunch or breakfast where everyone brings their own food to enjoy. Invite one employee to share a cultural food that brings them the same sense of wonder as Phil’s experience in the show. For 5-7 minutes, a presenter will share a short story about their food with photos or videos. The food-focused talks could spotlight food enjoyed while traveling, a local small restaurant in their current neighborhood or food from their culture.
🧁 #4 Molly Yeh | Seek Joy with Sprinkles
Molly is a Julliard-trained musician turned food blogger, two-time cookbook author, Food Network cooking show star and restauranteur. Her blog, My Name is Yeh, started in 2009 as “a diary about food, farm life, and adventures” when she moved from New York City to her husband’s family farm in Minnesota. Since then, she’s been sharing comfort foods, taking creative twists on classic dishes and celebrating her family’s culinary traditions blending Jewish and Chinese cultures.
Famous for her sprinkle collection, Molly finds a way to incorporate these bright color toppings into baking in unexpected ways. Try searching sprinkles on her blog to find fairy french toast casserole, pony piñata cake, marzipan hamantaschen, pretzel shortbread cookies, ras el hanout loaf cake toast with sesame sprinkles and more recipes. Sprinkles bring fun, color and creativity to her confections. Molly brings that same sense of enthusiasm and genuineness to her comforting cookbooks Molly on The Range and Home is where the Eggs are as well as her new hospitality venture, Bernie’s.
📘 Lessons Learned: Embrace unexpected twists and turn them into something sweet. Find simple joyful moments in the tiniest of ways and share it with others — spread the sprinkles. Lean into your superpower. Dream big with your creative ideas. Cherish your family traditions and share them with others.
💡 Idea: If you have a lot of time and budget, invite a group of employees to pick a favorite dish from her blog and host a potluck meal. If you’re in a pinch, invite people to pick their top recipe and share what inspired them to choose it.
🍝 #5 The Sporkful’s Dan Pashman | Think Creatively
The tagline for this podcast sets the tone for the stories it tells — “The Sporkful isn't for foodies, it's for eaters.” The show tells compelling food stories about science, community, current events, history, race, culture and economics. Learn about How To Export Coffee In A War, Celebrate Shabbat At Wendy’s, Travel to the Consumer Reports Test Labs and more.
Dan Pashman is the creator and host of this James Beard and Webby Award-winning podcast. He shares his story of launching after getting laid off from six radio jobs in eight years. But, he didn’t give up on his passion. Years later in 2021, he pursued a lifelong dream of creating a pasta shape to soak up as much sauce as possible. The story captivated audiences with a series of episodes called Mission: ImPASTAble. You can find the pasta in select stores and online with the Sfgolini brand.
📘 Lessons Learned: Pursue what makes you curious. Think outside the (pasta) box. Ask thought-provoking questions. Bounce back from being let go. Try inventing a food, but bring a side of patience.
💡 Idea: Listen to one of The Sporkful’s episodes and host a conversation with colleagues. There are some work-related episodes such as Cold Case: Office Fridge Food Theft Edition and Will The Library Of Congress Cooking Club Rise Again? If it goes well, consider starting your Office Podcast Club. Here’s a guide.
I hope these food leaders inspired you with kindness, mental health appreciation, wonder, joy and creativity. The next time you watch a food show, listen to a food podcast, visit a restaurant or bakery, let me know what you learn about communications and community at work. Thank you for reading The Switchboard. ☎️ Every edition is personally written by me — Julia Levy. Learn more about why I write. Review the Index of past posts.
If you enjoyed this article, consider sharing it, giving a heart below ❤️, commenting or posting on LinkedIn and Twitter.