Sophia Roe wants food to feel good

“Another thing I’m obsessed with right now,” she tells me, her head still in the fridge, “is cabbage.” It’s both affordable to buy and easy to grow: Roe is adamant about providing pathways for healthy eating that don’t have to break the bank, making sure to highlight crops that can be grown easily on a windowsill in a coffee can. “You can braise it, stuff it, fry it, pickle it – you can feed a lot of people with cabbage. Anything you can feed a lot of people with is something I’m really into.

Part of a system

Roe has a knack for using the personal as a pathway into broader conversations: everything that has happened to her (or you, or me) is part of a larger framework, a system we’re all complicit in, the circle of capitalistic life. Instead of feeling judged about your choices, her enthusiasm makes it feel like you’re being recruited onto a team – not necessarily do-gooders, but people who, at the very least, want to do better. Her curiosity and charm are that infectious. At one point, I asked her if she’s always been so interested in food, she repeated the word ‘always’ five times. “I don’t know if these things make me a better chef, but they do make me a better person, and I care more about being a better person than being a better chef,” she says. “I never want to reach the pinnacle of chefdom. I always want to keep learning and keep going.”

It’s a mindset that means she has a packed schedule. Tomorrow, she tells me, she’s off to Los Angeles for the Daytime Emmys, where her work on Counter Space, the show airing on Tastemade that explores food systems on a macro scale, earned her a second nomination in the culinary host category. Next stop is Chicago, where she’s the red-carpet correspondent for the prestigious James Beard Restaurant and Chef Awards, two years after winning one of her own. None of this was part of the plan when Roe started in the culinary industry, which Roe was drawn to out of necessity, not passion. “I had just dropped out of college and I just needed a job,” she says, of her first restaurant gig. Working in a restaurant didn’t just give her something to do – it gave her somewhere to belong.

Roe grew up in Florida, born to a mother who struggled with mental health and substance abuse and an absent father. She was often in and out of the foster care system. Her first ever job was at the local Subway, a gig she still describes with pride. It wasn’t just about earning a paycheck: “Man, I stole so much food,” she laughs. “I was 14 years old – I couldn’t have said I was experiencing food insecurity. I had no language for that. I just knew that the school lunch I had wasn’t hitting, just like it’s not hitting for most kids.” Restaurant work gave her agency: she could have a sense of purpose, she could choose what to eat, she could provide for herself. “It was the first time I understood that that’s what you do with money.”

Pivoting to plant-based

In 2010, she started working in a raw food restaurant in Florida. It was a small enough operation that, even though she was hired as a hostess, she would be called into the kitchen if someone else didn’t show up for their shift. This is where she was introduced to the vegan diet that she would eventually – after stints in even more restaurants and a few years private cheffing – come to be known for. Veganism, at that time, was freighted with elitism: Gwyneth Paltrow and celebrity chef Matthew Kenney were faces of the movement. It was expensive and rarefied, but most importantly: “girl, these rich white folks were paying,” Roe says, of her decision to pivot to a more plant-based approach to cooking.

Now, a decade later, Roe has no regrets about giving up the diet – it’s not like she was born a vegan, she quips. Increasingly, it was hard to maintain the diet while she was traveling. “It felt so funny to go to someone else’s country and be like, ‘Can you cater to me? Can you make me frijoles with no pork or meat?’ It felt American, self-important, yucky. I also did a fair bit of solo traveling, so it was even more awkward.”

Traveling widely also opened her eyes to our invisibilized food systems. A cultivation nerd, she’d be looking for certain crops that were native to the land she was in, and come up with nothing. Eventually, she realized that those crops were largely being grown to be sent elsewhere. There are people in Peru, she tells me, who are not allowed to eat the quinoa that naturally grows there, because it’s harvested and sent to the US or Canada. Thus came a radical reshifting: if she wanted to eat and work responsibly, the issue was less with meat than the systems through which we receive our sustenance. “My focus is eating as locally and as regionally as possible, which looks like whatever you can possibly do.”

Roe is sure to bring nuance to these conversations – we can’t expect, say, low-income single parents or broke college kids to equally shoulder the burden of eating more sustainably as we should someone like her: unmarried, abundantly resourced. “The reason I like to push plants so much is because they are renewable,” she says. “For the most part, they are more affordable than things like milk, cheese, meat, even when we’re talking about highly processed or highly manufactured stuff. I don’t think we need to be yelling at single moms, trying to make ends meet, feeding their kids hot dogs – you gotta do what you got to do out here. But that’s why I am so tough on people who know better. If you know better, do better. I am tough on a very specific consumer.” (She’s especially tough on how we share our wealth: “Don’t even get me started on the food the people drop off at the community fridge. If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t put it in the fridge. If it’s expired, don’t put it in the fridge.”)

Let’s be human first

Roe still leads a plant-based life, with more focus on where the food comes from than what it is. “I know everybody wants to have this very intense vegan conversation, but I think we need to have human conversations first, so that we can be empathetic and understanding, and have the nuance that veganism doesn’t work for everybody.” The availability of manufactured vegan food has created an easier on-ramp to the lifestyle, but it’s not quite in keeping with the Vegan Dream of Yore: amending one’s lifestyle to help the greater good. “If you’re a vegan because you want to save the planet, or because you love animals – don’t think that just not eating animals is enough,” she says. Focus on land conservation and animal protections – rights for animals is not the same as being a vegan.

Someone once told her that there are three types of cooks: people who cook for themselves, people who cook for the food, and people who cook for both. “We want to do right by the food, and we actually want to do right by the people that we feed, and I think that looks like dignifying the animal that I’m eating, dignifying the cheese that I’m eating, and the only way to do that is to understand what I’m eating and where it came from.” Cue more proselytizing, but I’m nodding along, wanting to hear more. It doesn’t need to be obsessive, she contends: it can be as simple as watching a YouTube video or listening to a podcast, anything to shorten the distance between ourselves and the journey our food takes to get on our plate. Consciousness is the best ingredient to have in your kitchen. “We want our food narratives and our food stories and our food genesis to be so good, because food feels good, it feels really good to eat food, but I think it’s really important to understand a lot of reasons why we eat what we eat, and the reasons we eat, and how many of them are not really not coming from a kind place,” she says. “There needs to be some discomfort with your comfort food.”