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.