As you may've guessed based on his caption, the story is focused on his push for plant-based eating. As the magazine points out, he’s on the board of the Food Education Fund, and he recently spearheaded the Future of Food Entrepreneurship Program, which pairs underrepresented public high school culinary arts seniors with emerging and established food tech companies.
“I think I might get more excited about these things than music or filmmaking," he said in the interview.
On how he became interested in as a way of changing the world:
"It began as something personal. There was a moment in the life of the Roots when we decided to move to the UK. We had to move to an environment that cared about musicians and live music. Once we came back to the States and were making our fourth album, our label was looking at the record contract and asked, “Why do we have a full-time chef, and why is this giant food budget here?” We explained that collaboration was such an important part of our creative process, that the only way to trick other musicians and songwriters to do work on our album was to have good food, because every true artist is starving. So we had hired one of the best chefs in Philadelphia to create food in my living room every Friday night. Of course, everyone comes for the food, but they leave writing songs. That was always in my back pocket, like, “Okay, if you have the best food, then people will come, always.” Years later, once I was in New York, I noticed that chefs were the new rock stars. Being onThe Tonight Show, it blew my mind, like, “Wait, Daniel Humm is coming to do what?” I began to notice similarities between musicians and chefs, so I started throwing these events called Food Salons, in which I would have a mix of maybe 70 people at my apartment. I would have three chefs come and collaborate on a story. One day Danny Meyer was one of the people; we were having a Shake Shack versus Impossible Burger blind tasting, and I kept choosing Impossible Burger. That was my eureka moment: I jumped in with Impossible. Then I started dreaming out loud. “Can someone make a cereal so I can eat cereal again?” Then it became a game. Magic Spoon, JUST Egg, RightRice, Apeel, Ocean Hugger, Perfect Day.
On launching the Future of Food entrepreneurship program:
I discovered the Food and Finance High School in 2016 or 2017. When I DJ in New York, I do a lot of fundraising, especially for kids in the arts. But when I heard about the Food and Finance High School, I was like, “Wait a minute, there’s a Fame school for culinary?” These kids are out to save the world. They’re going way beyond just how to make croissants, they’re doing hydroponics, and when they brought me to the rooftop, they were explaining to me how they’re raising fish and also doing their own irrigation system. Just a bunch of great cheat codes that could help people who live in the inner city. I’m from Philadelphia. Yes, I know cheesesteaks and all those things very well, but to get to the Pathmark where my mom would get her fresh produce, we had to go miles from where we lived. So when I went there and saw that these kids were learning much more than just how to make pastries or macaroni necklaces, I started thinking maybe I can figure out a way to get them to work in kitchens, because there are hardly any people of color and hardly any women running these kitchens. But there was also the idea to create a program in which, instead of these students being a prep cook and maybe one day becoming head chef, they get in the mind space of creating the next great product. Me and my partner at Quest Loves Food, Alexis Rosenzweig, and Nan Shipley, one of our [Food Education Fund] board members, wanted to start a four-week summer program in which the students could visit spots in the Bay Area where the tech world is. We started a program that sent them out there to learn how these companies work, and we partnered with UC Berkeley so they could have a home base to contribute to the food tech space.
Read Questlove's full interview at Town & Country.
