Chef Stephanie White has more than a decade of professional experience, including roles in small businesses, high-end catering, pop-ups, high-volume cookery, farm-to-table restaurants, culinary education, and much more. Integral to developing and launching Escoffier’s Plant-Based Culinary Arts program, she shares where it all started with Dr. Amy Sapola.
During parts of her childhood, Stephanie was super into food with a foodie mom. A cherished memory is helping her grandparents harvest their raspberries, enjoying them warm from the sun, and selling them at a roadside stand. Her earliest restaurant memory is an amazing carrot cake. The bigger lesson she took away from all of this is how food connects us with visceral meaning for everyone.
Chef Stephanie confided in Amy about a significant event in her life that she doesn’t usually discuss. Feeling dismayed by the American diet, she transitioned to vegetarianism/veganism and then took it to the extreme. This led to a restrictive eating pattern, and she wasn’t consuming enough food. What was once liberating became self-limiting. As food had become closely tied to her self-identity, reintegrating with food posed difficulties.
Then, one semester, she was away from home during high school for an ecology-related work-and-learn project. She performed farm chores at an organic food camp, including harvesting vegetables. Volunteering in the kitchen, the camp’s chef became a big influence in her life as she appreciated the vibrancy of just-harvested vegetables and those from the root cellar. During this time of her life, Stephanie appreciated the experience of the farm, including when she created food for the other campers to enjoy. Through this, she learned to be okay around food again—not letting it control her anymore.
Returning to the concept of the vibrancy of vegetables, Chef Stephanie says that, although grocery stores try the best they can to present good produce, because of the supply chain, the food is already removed from freshness. The vegetables just aren’t the same as when they’re fresh.
To learn more about Stephanie’s experiences and insights, listen to her in-depth story in her own words in podcast #16: Romanticizing Food, Seasonal Eating, and Shamed Spinach.
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
- Episode Fourteen: Cauliflower, Potlucks, and the Joy of Food
- Episode Fifteen: Time Savers, Pickled Raisins and Cooking With Creativity
Stay tuned for more!