Episodes

  • Episode #121: Lucio and Pablo Usobiaga

    Episode #121: Lucio and Pablo Usobiaga
    Dec 18 2025
    I want to you to try to imagine an ancient lakebed where the decomposing aquatic life at its bottom was piled up within the lake and mixed with branches and other organic material to form islands. Now imagine farming on those islands. Imagine these farms being incredibly productive. So productive that the crops grown on them could feed hundreds of thousands of people. Not only do they feed at an incredible scale without depleting the nutrients in the soil, but they encourage additional life. With intervention, by humans becoming part of the ecosystem rather than dominating it, they actually encourage biodiversity. It sounds like the future, right? Right? Would it blow your mind to know that these farm islands were actually created 2,000 years ago in what is present day Mexico City? It’s shocking, right? Would it blow your mind even more if you know they still exist to this very day?

    These farms are called chinampas and the knowledge that was developed here and expanded on throughout the past 2,000 years continues in a place called Xochimilco, within the limits of Mexico City. Today’s guests are the brothers Lucio and Pablo Usobiaga, who founded Arca Tierra, a farm network that includes chinampas farmers, as well as their own farm, and farms from other traditional agricultural systems in and around Mexico City. They also opened the zero-waste restaurant Baldío in 2024, alongside the British chef Douglas McMaster of Silo.

    What these guys are doing and how they are doing it should not be underestimated. They are trying to change the conversation around words like peasant and campesino and turn them into the role models we should all look up to. They are creating a vibrant, alternative network of farmers and collaborators that places value on ancestral agricultural systems and those that are protecting them.

    What’s important to take away from this and I want you all to think about it into the new year, is how hopeful they are. They are blunt about the challenges ahead and all the awful things that will happen, but they believe in what they are doing. They believe in these farmers and ancient agricultural systems. They understand what it’s going to take to bring them back. I hope that by listening to people like Lucio and Pablo, you do as well. We really can do this, all of us, together.

    --
    Host: Nicholas Gill
    Co-host: Juliana Duque
    Produced by Nicholas Gill & Juliana Duque
    Recording & Editing by New Worlder
    Email: thenewworlder@gmail.com
    Read more at New Worlder: https://www.newworlder.com
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Episode 120: Gregg Moore

    Episode 120: Gregg Moore
    Dec 4 2025
    Gregg Moore is a ceramic artist who is best known for his work with Dan Barber at the restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns. The Glenside, Pennsylvania based artist is a professor of ceramic art at Arcadia University and also co-owns the ceramic studio Heirloom alongside his wife Jackie, which sells plateware influenced by agriculture and farmers’ markets.

    Why don’t we think of the plate with as much depth as we think of the food that sits on top of them? Not just how it holds the food on top or within it, but the materials they are made from and what they represent? This discussion really made me think a lot about the vessels we use to communicate food. It’s not every restaurant that can have a ceramicist like Gregg and give them the space to be creative, but for many that strive for something different it could be a missed opportunity.

    One of the signature elements he works with is bone, using mostly the femurs of cattle that live at Stone Barns. Using a late 1700s recipe by Josiah Spode, he breaks down the bones into a powder, which gets remade into plates and cups. What’s fascinating is they have done tests about the quality of the bones and it is directly related to how the cows live. A healthier, grass fed cow not injected with hormones has purer bones that result in better plateware. It really makes you think about what we are putting in our bodies.

    --
    Host: Nicholas Gill
    Co-host: Juliana Duque
    Produced by Nicholas Gill & Juliana Duque
    Recording & Editing by New Worlder
    Email: thenewworlder@gmail.com
    Read more at New Worlder: https://www.newworlder.com
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Episode 119: Shava Cueva

    Episode 119: Shava Cueva
    Nov 13 2025
    Shava Cueva is the Baja California, Mexico born photographer who created the book and platform Bebidas de Oaxaca. The self-published book, now in its second edition, and available in English and Spanish, documents an incredible 87 traditional drinks from the eight regions of the state of Oaxaca. They are drinks made from “fruits, seeds, rinds, leafs, sap, flowers, crusts, [and] stems,” and prepared “raw, roasted, cooked, fermented, distilled, boiled, ground, mixed by mortar and pestle, foamed, cold or hot.” The book is filled with beautiful imagery that show the time and care Shava takes when visiting these often remote, rural communities and it shows the richness of these drinks, which are often left out of conversations of Oaxacan food and are gradually disappearing.

    What’s especially fascinating is that Shava has no culinary background. In the interview we discuss how the Baja born photographer, who now lives in Australia, first became intrigued by Oaxaca’s traditional beverages. He had a vague idea of a project during the pandemic, but once he arrived to the state and started shooting, he realized how substantial the project could become. There was so many drinks that weren’t archived anywhere and he continues to document them. His website and YouTube channel continue where the books leave off, and the material just keeps coming. It’s an endless source of inspiration for him. I hope more people follow his lead.

    --
    Host: Nicholas Gill
    Co-host: Juliana Duque
    Produced by Nicholas Gill & Juliana Duque
    Recording & Editing by New Worlder
    Email: thenewworlder@gmail.com
    Read more at New Worlder: https://www.newworlder.com
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Episode 118: Peter Tempelhoff

    Episode 118: Peter Tempelhoff
    Oct 30 2025
    Peter Tempelhoff is a chef and restauranteur in Cape Town, South Africa. While Pete lived and worked in Europe and the US, and worked with Marco Pierre White and several other well-known chefs, hell fell in love with Japanese cooking many years ago and it changed how he saw South African ingredients, which is an ongoing evolution. His fine dining restaurant Fyn combines Japanese techniques with South African ingredients, though he also the more casual restaurants Sushiya and Ramenhead, and a vineyard restaurant in Constantia named Beyond. Another restaurant at the historic Boschendal Estate, called Arum, will open in November.

    Last year on a bit of a whim, while I was waiting on paperwork for my next book, I went to South Africa. Pete told me about a paleobotanist named Jan De Vynck that he was working with that was researching the cognitive development of homo sapiens in South Africa more than 100,000 years ago. The story was of particular interest to me, and Pete for that matter, because the story had everything to do with what homo sapiens ate. The species was near extinction, but the particular biodiversity of the Western Cape allowed the survive and then thrive to become the dominant species on the planet. I found it to be incredibly hopeful and a powerful reason why we need to protect biodiversity and I wrote a 10,000 word three part story on the New Worlder newsletter about it.

    This was my only time in South Africa. My only time south of Morocco on the African continent, and it was nothing like I expected. Aside of the straight up physical beauty of the Cape Town area, the extreme level of biodiversity and how it resulted in all sorts of ingredients new to modern kitchens was quite the surprise. Many of them don’t look, smell or taste like anything I’ve ever tried before. Pete’s restaurants are a good place to find them and he’s been building different gardens to support his needs and encouraging other farmers to grow them to take the pressure off of wild resources. I see South Africa as a place we’ll talk much more about in terms of gastronomy and restaurants in the years to come and it’s because of what’s native.

    --
    Host: Nicholas Gill
    Co-host: Juliana Duque
    Produced by Nicholas Gill & Juliana Duque
    Recording & Editing by New Worlder
    Email: thenewworlder@gmail.com
    Read more at New Worlder: https://www.newworlder.com
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Episode #117: Nancy Matsumoto

    Episode #117: Nancy Matsumoto
    Aug 28 2025
    Nancy Matsumoto is the author of Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System, which will be released in October but is available for pre-order now. The book is a collection of stories about women that are creating alternative food networks. They are building out local and regional supply chains in the face of overwhelming odds and the destructiveness of industrial agriculture. While the book traces how broken our global food system is, it’s quite hopeful. All of the women featured are doing something about it. They are making changes. They are building something.

    We talk a lot about supply chains, how long they are and the work that it takes to shorten them. We talk about how an obscure Eurasian grass called kernza is having a positive impact on landscapes in the north central US while being used to create beer. How cacao producers in Belize and Guatemala are getting organized to better their situation. If you want to be inspired in making the changes you want to see in the world, read this book.

    We also talk with Nancy about the art of writing. We actually have the same agent and have faced a lot of the same challenges in the media industry, which has become nearly impossible to navigate. Putting non-fiction narrative books like this together require tremendous amounts of time and patience, yet we do it because these are important stories to tell. Nancy has also written the books Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake and By the Shore of Lake Michigan, a translation of WWII-era Japanese concentration camp poetry. Again, the latest book is Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System. Order a copy or follow Nancy on her just launched Substack, Reaping, which follows some of the stories from the book.
    --
    Host: Nicholas Gill
    Co-host: Juliana Duque
    Produced by Nicholas Gill & Juliana Duque
    Recording & Editing by New Worlder https://www.newworlder.com
    Read more at New Worlder: https://www.newworlder.com
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Episode #116: Elspeth Hay

    Episode #116: Elspeth Hay
    Aug 14 2025
    Elspeth Hay is the author of the new book Feed Us With Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food. The book helps us understand how many in Western society lost their relationship to nut producing trees. It explains how integral trees such as oaks, chestnuts, black walnuts and hazelnuts are to forest ecosystems and how their nuts were once a staple in North American diets.

    Hay, lives on Cape Cod and has been reporting on food and the environment for the past 15 years with The Local Food Report, a segment that has aired on a regional New England NPR station. Despite growing up on a farm in Maine, it was a revelation when she found out that acorns were edible and it sent her down a rabbit hole of curiosities that reshaped her understanding of food production, not to mention how she understood the world. In our conversation, we talk about the things in the way of returning tree nuts into our food supply, from land rights to a focus on yields that do not account for external costs.

    Coincidentally, I’ve been on a nut tree rabbit hole myself for the past few years. It started with the chestnut trees I have on my land, which drop so many nuts each year I don’t always know what to do with them. Chestnuts have become a part of my seasonal diet, and I’ve now planted a few hazelnut trees as well. Meanwhile, I’ve been researching Brazil nuts for the book I’m working on in the Amazon, and in some communities I have visited, they remain a staple food. So the possibilities of how we can shift what we eat towards more sustainable solutions are a reality. Elspeth writes and talks about polyculture and how the yields of nut trees paired with other complementary crops are not far off from the amount of food produced in industrial agriculture, with few of the negative external factors.

    --
    Host: Nicholas Gill
    Co-host: Juliana Duque
    Produced by Nicholas Gill & Juliana Duque
    Recording & Editing by New Worlder https://www.newworlder.com
    Read more at New Worlder: https://www.newworlder.com
    Show more Show less
    55 mins
  • Episode #115: Olivia Chase & Steve Sprinkel

    Episode #115: Olivia Chase & Steve Sprinkel
    Jul 31 2025
    Olivia Chase and Steve Sprinkel are the owners of The Farmer and the Cook in Ojai, California. What is The Farmer and the Cook? It’s a restaurant, café, bakery, farm market and community hub in the middle of Ojai, plus a 10 acre farm a few blocks away.

    The Farmer and the Cook opened in 2001, though Olivia and Steve have been at the center of the American organic food movement for decades, helping it grow from a radical counter-cultural idea in one small area of Southern California to a transformational influence on the American food system. Organic food, vegetarian and vegan food, farmers markets, farm to table – these are ideas that entered the American mainstream because of what started to happen in this area. Today, they are often buzz words, corrupted by industrial food. Then there are people like Olivia and Steve that have not wavered from their original goals. They have stayed true to their ethos, growing, distributing and serving nutritious food that is good for your body and doesn’t destroy the environment. They try to make it nutritious food affordable and accessible to anyone in their community, not just the wealthy Angelenos that make their way to the town on the weekends.

    In our discussion, where Juli was there on location, we talk about how the price of land has made it difficult for new farmers, but how organizations they are a part of, like the Ecological Farming Association and ALBA, are helping to train farmworkers, many of them Latin American, to improve yields and access land of their own. We talk about hopeful gains in seed saving, which is helping make agricultural diversity more resilient. They are also helping preserve seeds from Gaza so that they don’t disappear during the war and they can eventually be reestablished by Palestinian farmers.

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the time it takes food movements to have real impacts. We are sometimes taken by surprise at how quickly food systems can be disrupted. I’ve seen it happen rapidly in the two decades I have been researching food in Latin America. Sometimes we want things to happen in the other direction overnight, but it takes time. Seemingly small actions, like saving seeds and getting nice vegetables into the hands of consumers can have a strong impact as time goes on. It might take decades before you can see the change, maybe it’s after your bones are down in the ground, but someone must have the courage to start somewhere.
    --
    Host: Nicholas Gill
    Co-host: Juliana Duque
    Produced by Nicholas Gill & Juliana Duque
    Recording & Editing by New Worlder https://www.newworlder.com
    Read more at New Worlder.
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 11 mins
  • Episode #114: Nicolás Tapia

    Episode #114: Nicolás Tapia
    Jul 17 2025
    Nicolás Tapia is the chef and owner of the restaurant Yum Cha in Santiago, Chile. Nicolás talks about how he became interested in tea during a trip to China and during a family style meal where everyone was drinking tea he was reminded of the Chilean concept of once, the evening tea and meal. That’s when the idea was planted in his head to create a restaurant where food and tea could be paired together, combining his cooking experience, Chilean ingredients and the influences from China and elsewhere in Asia where he continues to explore regularly.

    I mention this in the conversation, but when I first heard about Yum Cha I questioned whether it was going to work. A tasting menu with Asian techniques, Chilean ingredients and a tea pairing? It’s a risk. Even though there is a ton of tea consumed in Chile, more than anywhere else in Latin America per capita and even more than in China and Japan. Then I went and I was like, alright, he knows what he’s doing. It comes through in the interview. I think it’s a good example of someone following their curiosities to another part of the world with an open mind and doing something interesting with it what they learned, and continuing to learn, engage and create something new. I highly recommend a meal there if you are in Santiago. Or stop by the tea house he is about to open.

    Nicolás did the interview from a hotel room in La Paz, Bolivia, where he was doing an event later that week with the restaurant Phayawi, which I haven’t been to but I’ve heard great things. I’ll be in Bolivia in a few months and hopefully I’ll have time for it.

    Read more at New Worlder.
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 5 mins