In the Season 1 finale, host Jess Baum talks with chef, writer, homesteader, and educator Georgia Pellegrini. Her critically-acclaimed books include Food Heroes, Girl Hunter, and Modern Pioneering. Georgia has written for The Wall Street Journal and hosts the television show “Modern Pioneering” on PBS. She has appeared on “The Today Show” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, and has been featured in Food & Wine magazine and The New York Times. Georgia works to empower people to learn manual literacy, find their personal strengths, and pursue their life passions.
Soil to Soul: Farming, Food, Wine, and our Collective Future is dedicated to exploring diverse voices and perspectives as they relate to farming, food, wine, and the future we’re working to build. Soil to Soul is brought to you by Bonterra Organic Estates and is hosted by Jess Baum, Bonterra’s Senior Director of Regenerative Impact.
This episode features chef, writer, homesteader, and educator Georgia Pellegrini. Her critically-acclaimed books include Food Heroes, Girl Hunter, and Modern Pioneering. Georgia has written for The Wall Street Journal and hosts the television show “Modern Pioneering” on PBS. She has appeared on “The Today Show” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, and has been featured in Food & Wine magazine and The New York Times. Georgia works to empower people to learn manual literacy, find their personal strengths, and pursue their life passions.
Listen in to our season finale as Georgia talks about her deep connection to her family's land in upstate New York, why fried onions and fresh herbs are the smells of her childhood, the experience of sharing a bathroom with frogs in the south of France, and how manual literacy connects us to our origins as humans.
Georgia Pellegrini (00:00):
My greatest memories are around food and drink with people that I care about.
Elizabeth Archer (00:20):
You are listening to Soil to Soul, farming, food, wine, and our collective future dedicated to exploring diverse voices and perspectives as they relate to farming, food, wine, and the future we're working to build. Soil to Soul is brought to you by Bonterra Organic Estates and is hosted by Jess Baum, Bonterra's senior director of regenerative impact. Our guest today is chef, writer, homesteader and educator Georgia Pellegrini. Her critically acclaimed books include Food Heroes, Girl Hunter and Modern Pioneering.
(00:53):
Georgia has written for the Wall Street Journal and hosts the television show, Modern Pioneering on PBS. She has appeared on the Today Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live and has been featured in Food and Wine Magazine and the New York Times. Georgia works to empower people to learn manual literacy, find their personal strengths, and pursue their life passions. Listen in to our season one finale as Georgia talks about her deep connection to her family's land in upstate New York, why fried onions and fresh herbs are the smells of her childhood, the experience of sharing a bathroom with frogs in the south of France and how manual literacy connects us to our origins as humans.
Jess Baum (01:41):
Hi Georgia and welcome to the podcast. We're so excited that you're here.
Georgia Pellegrini (01:46):
Hi, I am so thrilled to be here.
Jess Baum (01:48):
You and I first connected at South by Southwest last year and we had such a wonderful conversation, so I'm really looking forward to chatting more today.
Georgia Pellegrini (01:59):
Me too. I feel like we were kindred spirits, so I'm excited to continue.
Jess Baum (02:03):
Same. You grew up on your family's farm, Tulipwood in the Hudson Valley of New York. This is land that's been tended to by five generations of your family going back to your great-grandfather. Can you tell us about Tulipwood and its history and what it means to you and your family?
Georgia Pellegrini (02:24):
Yes. I have been thinking a lot about the meaning of origin and place lately and what it does to one's soul. Tulipwood is still and was always a special unique place. It's about 13 miles north of Manhattan in the Hudson Valley and my great-grandfather bought it about I guess a hundred years ago now, and it's one of those places that I just feel is forever part of my DNA. All of my memories and my sense of place and the things that I've learned about the land and living off the land is really from there.
(03:02):
My great-grandfather, my great aunt, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my father, my mother and I have all lived there and left our mark on it in our own way and I was walking around on the property the other day and the metallic labels that they all used to label their plants and their fruit trees, they still twinkle in the sun with their handwriting on them and it's this magical thing because they've all passed except for my mother and brother and it's this incredible sense of where you've come from and even where you're going and what it means to leave a mark on the land that you're in and in their case a really meaningful beautiful mark. They all knew the name of every plant on the land and I really feel like I got my love of the earth from that.
Jess Baum (03:53):
As somebody who grew up near there, northern New Jersey and feels the connection to that part of the country, what you said about knowing the name of every plant really resonates so deeply. We just were there for a few weeks and seeing the linden's blooming and feeling welcomed home by something so familiar was a really profound connective experience for me after feeling like I've left that part of myself behind, the part of myself that knows the land, that knows the plants, that knows how to use them. There's really something beautiful in that plant allyship and connection and history.
Georgia Pellegrini (04:36):
It's so true. Like you said, that when you come from a place, even the smells of a certain part of the country ignite something in you because they're so familiar and I live in Texas now and even though it's been my home for a long time, it just doesn't ignite me in the same way because it's the smells and the plants are just different. They're not what I grew up with. So like you said, it really has a deep connection to us the places that we were raised in.
Jess Baum (05:05):
Speaking of sense of smell and connection, so much of the magic of food and wine is how it helps us travel through time and space in our memory with smells and connections that bring us right back to moments in our personal and our shared histories. What smell or flavor or food brings you right back to your childhood?
Georgia Pellegrini (05:30):
There are so many, but I will say that my grandmother was a big believer in fresh herbs and the idea that you could have a long busy day and whip something out and if you added fresh herbs it would just transform a dish. There was always mint growing around her house and when I smell the mint in the garden still I feel like I'm with her in the kitchen. She also used to say that if you come home and you have guests coming over and you're rushing around because she was a busy photographer, she was a working woman, she used to say, fry some onions and it'll make your house smell like you've been cooking all day. And so the smell of fried onions or mirepoix, which is onions and celery and carrots in a pan along with fresh herbs and mint, I feel like I'm with her every time I smell them.
Jess Baum (06:23):
It really is incredible how powerful our senses are in connecting us and bringing us back. Makes it feel like time isn't linear, like we can go back in time, that food and wine and place and smell are time traveling devices in a way.
Georgia Pellegrini (06:41):
I think so. I think there's also, I used to say that I could tell you exactly what I ate in a moment years ago because I think that there's something enlivening about food and drink and we can all disagree on a lot of things in this world, but at the end of the day, breaking bread with people is a really meaningful experience and everyone loves to eat and so it's always a great unifier I say. My greatest memories are around food and drink with people that I care about.
Jess Baum (07:10):
I want to talk a little bit about your path to working with food and becoming a chef. You briefly worked in the finance world before realizing it wasn't for you and you went to the French Culinary Institute to become a chef. After graduating you worked at Michelin starred restaurants in New York and in the south of France. You've talked about how during your time working at the iconic Blue Hill at Stone Barns, you were asked to slaughter and butcher a few turkeys for the restaurant, which connected you to this purpose of paying the full price of the meal. Can you share a bit about what you mean by that and where this awakening led you?
Georgia Pellegrini (07:51):
When you're doing something that's not making you tick and not fulfilling you, it forces you to think about what you're doing when you're happiest. And for me it was really getting back to my roots, getting back to the things I did growing up. Foraging and fishing and catching my trout and eating it for breakfast, but I had never killed an animal before in that way. And one of the unique things about the restaurants that I worked at, like you said, is that it was truly farm to table, whether it was harvesting the vegetables or the animals. It was really about participating in the whole cycle of life. And so when I was faced with that moment of having to kill a turkey, it was a very almost spiritual experience for me. It flipped a switch in me in the sense that I feel like it tapped into this natural human instinct and really made me open my eyes to what it is to be an omnivore and what it is to really pay the full karmic price of the meal. It's very easy to have an anonymous relationship with our food.
(08:53):
It's very easy to go to a grocery store and buy a boneless, skinless piece of meat that's wrapped in styrofoam with no sign that it was ever a living thing. But there's something incredibly deeply satisfying about participating in the full cycle of life with our food as best we can. And so for me it was really a watershed moment as a chef and as an omnivore to realize that I wanted to participate more in bringing my food to my plate and that it didn't have to be some sort of brutal crude experience. It could be a really beautiful experience that it's natural part of who we are as humans. And so that day I killed my first turkey and I took it very seriously. I didn't waste any of it and I took it all the way to the plate, to the diner who enjoyed it. It was just a very moving experience and I think that there's a disconnect now especially in this day and age. From that moment forward I decided that I wanted to reconnect and really be much closer to my ingredients.
Jess Baum (10:00):
Can you share a bit with our listeners about your experience in the south of France? I remember you telling me some incredible stories around connecting more deeply to your food and foraging and your experiences there.
Georgia Pellegrini (10:14):
Yeah. I really started to dive deeper into this philosophy around food and exploration and really curiosity. One day a friend of mine who was a chef wrote to me, he was bicycling his way through France and stopping off to what they call stage at restaurants, which is just volunteer your time for a short time. And he wrote to me and he said, "I'm currently cooking at this restaurant in the south of France and I think this is a place for you." And so I wrote to them and I told them where I was working and I said I was interested in coming to work there, and they responded and they said, "We will receive you in September. Can you come in August?" And it was that simple, and I naively took my knife bag and packed it and got on a plane and I showed up on a train in the middle of nowhere, got picked up by someone who worked at the restaurant and got to a rundown house in the middle of the French countryside.
(11:08):
I had three frogs living in my bathroom. I had nothing. I slept under a tablecloth that I borrowed from the restaurant, but there was something incredibly beautiful about the way that they approached ingredients. I would spend my time between lunch and dinner service in the garden with the gardener and his three-legged cat and he would teach me about unusual herbs and all of their healing attributes and the difference in the climate and how it affects food, and they have a lot of dry heat and lack of rain in the south of France, and so the flavors are more potent and everything is olive oil based. It's just a different approach to ingredients depending on the natural cycle of the weather in that environment. It was a very intense experience, but it was also a really beautiful experience in that I really got to learn about food and ingredients in another culture that really, really celebrates the beauty of the connection between nature and the way that we consume as humans.
Jess Baum (12:12):
You've said that manual literacy, this beautiful term that I believe you've coined is a path to a more empowered, joyful life. Can you define manual literacy for us and share a bit about how you connect with it on a daily basis?
Georgia Pellegrini (12:30):
It's actually a term that my dad coined once upon a time. He and I were very symbiotic in the way that we viewed the world, and he was very encouraging about my untraditional path for my career and also understood this deep yearning that I had to get my hands in the dirt and use my hands and how almost therapeutic it is as a human being in this day and age. To me manual literacy is the deep satisfaction of using our hands in so many different ways. It can be as simple as learning to grow 25 pounds of potatoes in a garbage bag on your fire escape in New York City. It can be making your own butter in a mason jar. It can be growing herbs on your windowsill. Not everyone has a lot of land to practice these things, and to me it's not about that.
(13:24):
It's about finding ways to get back to the land, large or small, because there's this deep natural instinct that we all have as humans that I think we lost touch with in the past few generations. I've seen it happen where people that I teach on my adventure getaways and in my workshops. This look in one's eyes that happens where a light switch flips on when we use our hands, when we make that homemade fresh mozzarella or get our hands in the dirt or learn how to dice an onion properly. There's this deeply satisfying human instinct that kicks in and it's very empowering for people and once they experience it, they don't go back. They're hooked and they start to pursue it more and more in their own lives. It really creates a lot of balance and it's something that I look for for my daughter every day, just to get her out in the garden to throw some dirt in the air or hold a worm. I think it's really, really important for us to get balance in that way.
Jess Baum (14:20):
I wish I had had that term in my back pocket manual literacy when I was a child because I was one of those kids that used to say that I felt like I was born into the wrong time, and I read Laura Ingalls Wilder and I read all of the Anne of Green Gables books on repeat and wanted so desperately to connect with something real and tangible and felt such a lack of it in my life in the 80s and 90s. I remember finding onion grass, that's what we called it anyway, on the playground at school and just being so enamored of this idea that there was something that I could pick from the ground and eat and it had flavor and it was safe.
(15:06):
That really influenced and inspired me to learn to forage as I grew up and even though I don't drink alcohol, I think that wine is such an interesting encapsulation of that. It's this process that has not changed for generations that connects us so deeply to time and place. My grandparents were big wine people and actually created their own wine in honor of my grandmother, and we still have bottles of their 2003 Chardonnay grown in Mendocino, and it's just amazing that it's this bottle with a portrait of my grandmother that was painted in the 1960s that came from vines in Mendocino in the early 2000s, and unbeknownst to me at that time, I now work for a Mendocino winery.
Georgia Pellegrini (16:02):
Wine is really the ultimate manual literacy I think. It encapsulates the true use of your hands, the working of the soil, the nurturing of the vines, the making of the wine itself, the slowness and the patience that's required, and then just the origin of a time and place. Like you said, it encapsulates a moment in time. It's one of the original acts of manual literacy throughout human history.
Jess Baum (16:27):
I do want to touch on how in many ways developing these skills is a privilege. Not everyone has access to land and many people lack the time and resources to learn to hunt, forage and cook from scratch. So many people live in survival mode. Is it possible to make manual literacy more accessible for all people?
Georgia Pellegrini (16:51):
Yeah, it's a great point and it's something that I have really made my mission and my work. My third book is called Modern Pioneering, and my PBS show is also called Modern Pioneering, and it really is about educating people in ways that they can access manual literacy and access, quote unquote, the land even from a studio apartment in the heart of a busy urban environment. You don't need a vast Montana field where you can hunt pheasant in order to access manual literacy. And I think it's really about showing people the ways that they can have those tools in their own life. And I love teaching parents and kids about how to make butter in a mason jar in their kitchen. The crux of it is that it shouldn't be something that's a place of privilege. It should be something that we're all entitled to as humans because it's really all of our origin story.
(17:46):
And so how do we get back to that? How do we have it be an outlet that gives us the balance and the presence and this momentary respite from our technology driven lives? One of the things I love about PBS and that platform specifically is just simply that it's free and that you can access it even just with an antenna in the most rural areas. And so it's an educational platform that I have been using to teach people these skills no matter their circumstances because I think it's a right that we all have as humans no matter where we are in life, and it shouldn't be something considered elitist or privileged. It should be something that we all feel entitled to. And so that's been my mission is to make people recognize that, that it's theirs for the taking. We just need the information to empower ourselves.
Jess Baum (18:37):
I have some very distinct memories of when I was an environmental educator, teaching middle schoolers hands-on science and nature in the woods of New England, teaching children how to make butter in a mason jar. We over complicate things and understanding that all it takes to make butter is some full fat milk and shake it a bunch. It's quite incredible. Bonterra Organic Estates is Regenerative Organic Certified, which means that our vineyards and our wines meet the highest standards in the world for soil health, animal welfare and farm worker fairness. Do you see parallels between manual literacy and regenerative organic agriculture?
Georgia Pellegrini (19:25):
Yes. I think it's the original manual literacy. I think when we practice regenerative organic farming, it's a way of doing things that are the most natural cycle of life. We all have this craving to learn those things, but we're not educated in them anymore. There's an emphasis on educating us over singular career paths, technology driven career paths, but I do think we all have this yearning. And so when we are learning about regenerative organic farming and educating people on what it really means, which is simply a natural cycle of life, a natural rotation of animals through the land, people start to recognize how it's all connected. This sort of field to stream to table eating that I promote is very similar to what Bonterra is doing. It's just connecting animals to soil to a product that people are consuming, and it's this beautiful, perfect cycle. That's the way nature intended. It all goes back to origin, and I think if we all go back to origin and the way things are intended, it works out. When we interfere is when it stops working out.
Jess Baum (20:38):
It's interesting that in the last five years the term, quote unquote, regenerative agriculture has become such a buzzword and it's been spoken about as if it's a modern invention rather than a return to inherently sensible ways of tending to the land that our ancestors and that especially indigenous peoples have been honoring and farming and tending to the land in this way for millennia. So it's a return rather than a reinvention.
Georgia Pellegrini (21:13):
That's exactly right. It's honoring our history, the history of humanity really.
Jess Baum (21:28):
You are a Wellesley graduate who's worked in finance, a French culinary institute graduate who's worked in Michelin star restaurants in New York City and France, and a renowned author and TV host. How have your values about how and where you spend your time and energy changed over the years?
Georgia Pellegrini (21:52):
Well, I have recognized more and more, especially as I have gotten older and become a mother, that the only thing that matters at the end of the day is authenticity and authenticity in the sense of who you really are in your own skin and how you choose to live your life in a way that feels fulfilling. There's so much noise in this world and it seems to just become noisier and noisier. When I was younger, I feel like I was moving fast and was doing the things that I felt passionate about, but things were just fast and noisy. And I feel as time has gone on that I've become a lot more grounded in my own skin and I feel my feet planted very firmly on the ground.
(22:46):
And my values now are really how can I pursue joy and contentment on a moment to moment basis because time seems to be moving faster and faster. As I get older and as I see my daughter every day waking up looking more grown up, I want to live a life that feels content and authentic to who I am and the way I want to live in the world and try to ignore the noise as much as I can. Trying to find ways to be present is always the challenge. I think it's easy to live in the past and the future and on the virtual information highway, and so I'm just constantly in pursuit of living in the present moment, and I'm definitely not successful at it all the time, but that's where my values are currently.
Jess Baum (23:35):
Before we move on to our quick question segment, I have a very important question to ask you. Is rose still your go-to wine?
Georgia Pellegrini (23:46):
I would say that rose has a special place in my heart. When I was cooking in the south of France, I didn't have a car, I didn't have a cell phone. I had this very old clunky laptop, and my only connection to civilization was to take a bus to the nearest town, and I would have a few hours off between lunch and dinner service and I would sit in a cafe and I would order a glass of rose and check my email on this old clunky computer. So I would say yeah, rose is probably still one of my favorites. It just evokes a lot of memories for me that are happy memories, and I also love my wine very cold, so it fits the bill.
Jess Baum (24:32):
I am going to move us into our quick questions segment, so I'm just going to throw some questions at you. What did you want to be when you grew up?
Georgia Pellegrini (24:43):
I think it changed often, but I think my first memory would be I remember wanting to be an artist.
Jess Baum (24:51):
What's your ego confession?
Georgia Pellegrini (24:54):
I love paper towels. I just love them. They solve a problem for me immediately, and I'm not good at using reusable towels the way my husband is.
Jess Baum (25:05):
What's the most impactful thing that you've read in the last year?
Georgia Pellegrini (25:10):
I've been thinking about what I've been reading, and I realized being a busy mom, I listen to a lot of things right now, listen to a lot of books and even podcasts, so I'm going to change it slightly and say there's a podcast I'm listening to right now called Wiser Than Me, and it's about, it's Julia Louis-Dreyfus interviewing women that are older. They call it the winter of their lives, and I have found a tremendous amount of wisdom from women that are older than me that have lived full lives. I found it to be very, very valuable and encouraging.
Jess Baum (25:44):
What place brings you joy?
Georgia Pellegrini (25:48):
Anywhere that my daughter is. She lights me up on a moment to moment basis.
Jess Baum (25:54):
What's your life motto?
Georgia Pellegrini (25:56):
My dad gave me this motto as a mantra growing up that he would always repeat to me, and it was, "Mastery doesn't create passion, passion creates mastery." And it was a way that he inspired me to keep pursuing my passion without pursuing perfection and to always extract joy from them.
Jess Baum (26:15):
That's beautiful. Thank you so much, Georgia, for joining us today and for sharing your experiences and your perspective and your passion.
Georgia Pellegrini (26:24):
Oh, it's my pleasure. I always love talking to you.
Elizabeth Archer (26:48):
Thank you for listening to the Soil to Soul podcast, hosted by Jess Baum and produced by me, Elizabeth Archer, right here in Mendocino County, on behalf of Bonterra Organic Estates, the largest Regenerative Organic winery in the United States. If you love wine, look for Bonterra's first ever Regenerative Organic Certified Estate Collection Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay in a store near you. To learn more, visit bonterra.com. Original music composed by Mendocino County musician, Julian Sterling. Thanks again to today's guest, chef, writer, homesteader and educator Georgia Pellegrini. If you enjoyed season one of Soil to Soul, be sure to subscribe so you're the first to know when season two drops, and if you could take a moment to rate, review and share, we'd really appreciate it. We hope you join us again next season as we dive into more compelling conversations about farming, food, wine, and the collective future we're working to build.