Co-founder of The Kitchen and Square Roots, an urban farming and entrepreneurship platform down the road from New Lab in Brooklyn.
1. We love that you’re in Brooklyn. What brought you and your business here? In many ways NYC is a template for what the future world will look like. By 2050, there will be 9 billion people on the planet, and 70% will live in cities. These people will all want local, real food. So my co-founder Tobias Peggs and I thought: if we can figure out a solution in NYC, then it will be a solution for that rest of the world as it increasingly begins to look like NYC
2. What’s next for Square Roots? We want to prove the Square Roots model with our first campus in Brooklyn. We want to replicate the campus and program model in every American city as fast as we can.
3. What about food is the most broken? Can it be fixed? Many people — especially in our biggest cities — are at the mercy of industrial food. The industrial food system ships in high-calorie, low-nutrient, processed food from thousands of miles away. It leaves us disconnected from our food and the people who grow it. The results are awful — from obesity and diabetes to a total loss of community in our food system. The American food system can be fixed but we need an army of real food entrepreneurs helping to move us away from industrial food.
4. If you could erase any technology from history, what would it be? Corn-based ethanol. It has co-opted millions of acres of land that could be used for real food without any environmental benefit.
5. If you were a vegetable, what would you be? 🍅😜
