Farming for Health Podcast #14: Kristin Donnelly

 Dr. Amy Sapola recently chatted with Kristin Donnelly, the co-author of The Chef’s Garden: A Modern Guide to Common and Unusual Vegetables—With Recipes. By the time of this collaboration, Kristin was firmly established in the culinary world with her journey starting in France—the place where she had studied during her junior year in college. 

Calling it a “cliché” to begin embracing the world of food in France, she nevertheless appreciated how the food tasted and how well her host family ate. This sparked her interest in food so much that, when returning to the United States, she started to take cooking classes. She then worked at a few jobs with a friend telling her that, to be happy, she should switch to working with food.

This resonated with Kristin, so she applied for scholarships for culinary school and attended the Institute of Culinary Education in New York. She followed this up by a Food and Wine internship, one she expected to last for six weeks before she returned to France to work as a private chef. The publication, though, kept offering her projects; then, a staff position opened up for her.

Kristin called this a “dream job,” one that she stayed for eight years until she had a child and needed something more flexible. She then took on a range of freelance projects, including writing and recipe development and testing, staying largely behind the scenes.

Her partnership with The Chef’s Garden and Farmer Lee Jones was her first collaboration of this type, and it created a special niche for her, opening up plenty of opportunities. Currently, she is working on a book about Indigenous North American food with Chef Sean Sherman and scholar Elizabeth Hoover.

To find out more about her journey, listen to it in her own words in our Farming for Health podcast Episode 14: Cauliflower, Potlucks, and the Joy of Food.

Past Episodes of our Farming for Health Podcast

If you’ve missed any of our previous episodes, you can find them here:

• Episode One: Keto, Cruciferous Vegetables, Salt and Your Mindset
• Episode Two: Cooking, Conviviality, and Preserving the Harvest
• Episode Three: Ferments, Food Insecurity, and Wasted Food.
• Episode Four: Anti-Cancer Diet, Food as Medicine, and Vegetables.
• Episode Five: Plants, Happiness and Mindful Neglect.
• Episode Six: Whole 30, Sustainable Habits, and Loving Vegetables. 
• Episode Seven: Iodine, Egg Yolk Enzymes, and Miso
• Episode Eight: Fungi, Bitter Foods, and Food Extinction
• Episode Nine: Understanding Food, Nutritional Healing and Farming
• Episode Ten: Enjoying the Process, Connection and Soup
• Episode Eleven: Monica Geller, Community and Limiting Salads 
• Episode Twelve: Nourishment, Creativity, and Full-Spectrum Health
• Episode Thirteen: The Joy of Cooking, Fermentation, and Seasonality 

Stay tuned for more!