Chef Lidia Bastianich pays tribute to changemakers in a new season of Lidia Celebrates America
Lidia Bastianich loves food. But in truth, the Istrian-born chef’s interest in food is so strong because of her love of people.
With more than 60 years under her belt in the service industry and a still-growing cooking education brand that includes a series of popular cookbooks and TV specials, Bastianich is hitting the road one more time to experience some of the best food in America. This time, however, Bastianich has sustainability on the brain as she interviews chefs and entrepreneurs from across the country to find out what drives them to create and share the magic of good food.
A part of the three-time Emmy-winning series Lidia Celebrates America, chef Lidia Bastianich pays homage to her chosen home country in the docuseries’ newest instalment, subtitled Changemakers. Releasing on PBS just in time for the American Thanksgiving holiday, the hour-long special is the public television icon’s way of saying “thank you” to the America she knows and loves.
Having opened her first restaurant — Buonavia in Queens, New York. — with her then-husband Felice in 1971, there is no denying that Bastianich’s knowledge in the kitchen is extensive. But unlike many other celebrity chefs whose public personas come off as aloof, pretentious or downright nasty, Bastianich’s love for people is evident.
As she explained, she’s thankful to live in the United States and how, at every step in her journey, she continues to meet wonderful people doing what they can to make a difference.
“My message is to thank America, because I am grateful,” says Bastianich.
“America is always great,” she later continues, adding, “There are such great people out there . . . respecting each other, helping each other. [With Changemakers] I want to bring [viewers] that beauty that exists in reality in America.”
In the hour-long Changemakers special, Bastianich visits towns and cities in Minnesota, California and Virginia to learn more about what drives other food enthusiasts who are at the forefront of beneficial change.
“Lidia [Bastianich] travels . . . to visit those who work hard to change the availability of healthy food in their communities and to alter the way we perceive food in America,” reads the PBS news release.
She begins in Minneapolis, meeting with James Beard Award-winning chef and restaurateur Sean Sherman to discuss foods, herbs, flavours and culinary traditions that are important to Indigenous cuisine.
Stopping first at the Indigenous Food Lab located in the Global Midtown Market, Bastianich enjoys a lunch of chili topped with bison birria and a side salad dressed in a juneberry vinaigrette. Later, she visits Sherman at his upscale restaurant, Owamni (a Dakota word for “turbulent water”), to indulge in mushroom tacos, hominy and bison stew, a tepary bean dip and more.
Next on Bastianich’s Minneapolis checklist is the Great Minnsect Show at the University of Minnesota, where she meets cricket-focused power couple Claire and Chad Simons, owners and operators of 3 Cricketeers, a company dedicated to producing, packaging, marketing and selling crickets. Packed with protein in every crunch, crickets are a sustainable source of nutrients and make the perfect addition to salads and pesto.
“The whole idea of [eating] crickets and insects [is ancient],” Bastianich explains. “I’ve travelled to Mexico City, and at the big market I ate ant eggs, I ate chocolate-covered ants . . . In Thailand, they have bugs that [are a] delicacy.”
With insects consumed by more than two billion people globally, Bastianich reflected aloud that perhaps “cultures way before us” — before “the colonial way of eating” — were more in tune with nature and more adept at balancing meals based on local diets. This is something Appalachian-based chef Kari Rushing also spoke to in Changemakers.
The owner and head chef of Vault & Cellar in Middletown, Virginia, Rushing takes a few minutes in the special to prepare what she calls “rabbit food” for Bastianich. Dedicated to reframing the historical opinion of Appalachian cooking, Rushing makes delicious meals from ingredients that are readily available, living off the land and being “resourceful.”
In California, Bastianich visits Patricia Miller of Center Plate LLC in Stockton and the kind-hearted volunteers of Inglewood’s Social Justice Learning Institute.
The co-founder of the Black Urban Farmers Association of Stockton, Miller has taken on the task of farming to feed locals in need, many of whom work for organizations that export food away across America. Meanwhile, “SJLI brings produce to their distribution centre, giving away up to 15,000 pounds of produce to community food banks, churches, non-profits and individuals” (per PBS).
For Bastianich, the message is clear: we must pay close attention and be grateful to the world around us.
“There’s so many things that we neglect,” she says. “So [in Changemakers] I go for things that matter to me, the things that I see in America and I want to highlight.”
Lidia Celebrates America airs Tuesday, November 26 on KCTS and WTVS