Chef Jesse Cool: Tireless Organic Pioneer

Chef Cool opened the first organic restau­rant in Menlo Park, California, long before it was, well, cool, and also long before the major­ity of peo­ple had even heard the word organic. Today, a tire­less sixty-something, she owns and oper­ates three top-rated restau­rants and a cater­ing busi­ness that source only organic and sus­tain­able ingre­di­ents. Jesse is also the author of seven cook­books, a guest lec­turer and teacher of teach­ers at Stanford University, has made numer­ous tele­vi­sion appear­ances includ­ing on The Today Show and Food Network, and is spear­head­ing a major move­ment to bring healthy organic food to hospitals.

Restaurateur

The val­ues that Jesse has pro­mul­gated for nearly four decades trace back to child­hood. “I have an old-world back­ground,” Jesse told Organic Connections, “where my father and grand­fa­ther grew veg­eta­bles in manure, with no pes­ti­cides.” As a young­ster, grow­ing up in a rural town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Jesse helped her par­ents and grand­par­ents tend their small back­yard gar­dens. They taught her about liv­ing heirlooms—seeds brought from the old coun­try to plant in American soil. Additionally they raised their own chick­ens, and her uncle even owned a slaugh­ter­house where nat­u­rally grazed cat­tle were processed and beef aged properly.

With a love of food and cook­ing that car­ried through from this upbring­ing, Jesse opened a locally sourced clean-food restau­rant in the sev­en­ties, which in those times was quite chal­leng­ing. “People often think the chal­lenge was about cost,” she said. “It was more about being a young long-haired hippy chick, dressed in lace dresses, who was con­fronting peo­ple about where food came from and what kind of chem­i­cals or preser­v­a­tives or hor­mones were added. I guess I should say that I didn’t begin with ‘organic’—that was not what my cook­ing was about. It was about no ‘arti­fi­cial’ in the food. That very quickly spilled over to organic, but it was more about, ‘How do I pro­tect the peo­ple who work with me, my fam­ily and my com­mu­nity from these arti­fi­cial things that they’re putting in the food, which some­day down the road might hurt them?’

“With that, my company’s phi­los­o­phy was born, and it remains to this day: ‘The cus­tomer comes last.’ We try really hard to take care of where our food comes from, and build rela­tion­ships with those peo­ple like we did in the Old World when we lived in a vil­lage and knew one another. We knew the bread baker; we knew the butcher; we knew the farmer. If we keep that con­nec­tion and then make sure to take care of the peo­ple work­ing with us as well as we can, they will take care of the customer.”

Hard Times

Though con­di­tions got tough, Jesse stayed the course. “I nearly went bank­rupt more times than I would like to admit,” she said. “It’s often been dif­fi­cult for my fam­ily and friends to fig­ure out why in the world I stayed in it. But com­ing from a back­ground of not hav­ing a lot, I had the abil­ity to shrink down to what­ever it took to make it work; and dur­ing those lean times—as those who do sur­vive are tenacious—I found a way to do that.

“I was also helped by other peo­ple. There were peo­ple who worked with me and pur­vey­ors who trusted that I would never betray them or leave them high and dry. The worst near-bankruptcy was after 9-11 when Silicon Valley fell apart. According to what every­one in the finan­cial world said, I should have gone bank­rupt, but I refused. I couldn’t screw my farm­ers, so I didn’t and I had to dig my way out. Now I’m com­pletely debt-free.”

Today, it is a whole dif­fer­ent scene. “Everything shifted about four or five years ago,” Jesse related. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma was writ­ten and movies like Food, Inc. came out. Now there are so many films and so many amaz­ing books writ­ten by both pio­neers and the new gen­er­a­tion of inno­va­tors. The young are find­ing ways in every­thing they do to con­nect food and its pro­duc­tion, where it comes from, and cost to just about every ele­ment of life.

“I’ve had restau­rants for 37 years, and 4 years ago was the first time I had to pay taxes—because prior to that all I did was lose money. The first year I had to pay taxes I got really angry; then some­one looked at me and said, ‘It’s okay, Jesse. That means things are shift­ing.’ And I’ve had my busiest 4 years ever. Some of this has to do with man­age­ment and learn­ing how to be more of a busi­ness per­son, although a lot of it has to do with not being trendy but being part of the trend. I also hired an amaz­ing chef, Carlos Cañada, who embraced the ethics of it all and fell in love with our long-established friend­ships with farm­ers, ranch­ers and fish­er­men. I trust him, and we work together with care and respect for every ele­ment that goes on every dish for our customers.

“The young peo­ple who eat in the restau­rants get it. They under­stand that the food is a lit­tle more expen­sive but there’s a rea­son for it. I’m not just charg­ing because we’re food­ies who are try­ing to impress them; they under­stand it’s because we know where the salt, the cof­fee, the but­ter, the oil, the meat—everything—comes from and they’re will­ing to pay for that.”

Of course, the pop­u­lar­ity of Jesse’s restau­rants is due in no small part to the way those curated ingre­di­ents are uti­lized. She is a chef, after all, and spe­cial­izes in mak­ing her dishes fla­vor­ful and fun, in addi­tion to being sus­tain­able. Her cui­sine includes superb sal­ads, ele­gant entrées, sand­wiches, sig­na­ture com­fort foods and lus­cious desserts.

Healthy Hospital Food

A few years back, the pop­u­lar­ity of Jesse’s restau­rants brought her into a whole new arena. “For years, the doc­tors from Stanford Hospital have eaten at my restau­rant in Menlo Park called Flea Street, and they would often say, ‘What are you doing that’s new, Jesse?’ A cou­ple of years ago the head of car­di­ol­ogy, a doc­tor named Bobby Robins, asked the same ques­tion. I replied, ‘Do you really want to know?’ and he said, ‘I do.’ So I asked, ‘When are you going to give me your food?’ And he asked back, ‘Well, what do you have in mind?’ I told him, ‘Please do sim­ple food for peo­ple who are sick and scared: a sim­ple purée of organic veg­etable soup if they’re on a diet where they can’t eat solid foods. Or what about old-fashioned chicken soup, but made from real organic chicken so it actu­ally nour­ishes peo­ple? Or how about a baked apple for dessert?”

That con­ver­sa­tion led to an intro­duc­tion to the CEO of Stanford Hospital, which led to the attempted launch of a pro­gram Jesse devel­oped for them called Farm Fresh. But the pro­gram stalled. “It didn’t quite make it because it was a lit­tle bit ahead of its time,” Jesse said. “It’s a very chal­leng­ing sys­tem that’s not wrong; they’ve always wanted to take care of peo­ple. They just have been doing it a lit­tle dif­fer­ently. It’s more institutional—they feed hun­dreds and hun­dreds of peo­ple a day. For one thing, they have to learn how to cook food again. When I first started Farm Fresh and put chicken noo­dle soup on the menu, they had the equip­ment but nobody knew how to make chicken stock.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

Jesse has now dug in for the long haul of bring­ing healthy and whole­some change to hos­pi­tal food—and has truly seen what it will involve. “I think it’s going to take some out­side sup­port,” she said. “It’s going to take a revis­it­ing of what dieti­tians and nutri­tion­ists see as nec­es­sary when some­one is heal­ing in a hos­pi­tal. I also think it’s going to take some out­side fund­ing and sup­port to help adjust the whole cost issue, since it might be a lit­tle more expen­sive to offer really healthy food. And they might have to adjust their expen­di­tures in order to make that part of a healthy sys­tem because they real­ize food is a path to well-being. I think that is prob­a­bly the biggest asso­ci­a­tion the med­ical world is start­ing to see—the asso­ci­a­tion between tak­ing care of one­self and the high cost of med­ical services.”

Jesse is hard at work on the cam­paign to get this accom­plished and is deal­ing with numer­ous enti­ties to bring it about. “The good news is Stanford Hospital is really start­ing to take a look at what it actu­ally means to use truly local fresh food, and how to obtain it in vol­ume, and how food is con­nected to heal­ing and well-being,” Jesse reported.

“There are other sig­nif­i­cant issues to address,” she con­tin­ued. “For exam­ple, the large food ser­vice man­age­ment com­pa­nies, from which the hos­pi­tals get their food, them­selves pur­chase from large pur­vey­ors that have to carry a cer­tain insur­ance min­i­mum. But I’ve been talk­ing to the large food ser­vice companies—Sodexo, Aramark, Bon Appétit, Morrison Group and oth­ers. I’ve been a keynote speaker with their teams. It’s very com­plex, but they actu­ally do want it to hap­pen, and they’re try­ing to fig­ure out how to do it.

“Even ‘insti­tu­tional cook­ing’ is now doing what most trends or cycles do: go back to a dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at it. Using frozen processed foods was the best they could do when peo­ple started eat­ing that way or the econ­omy changed. Now they’re reex­am­in­ing it and fig­ur­ing out how to feed peo­ple just very sim­ple basic nutri­tional food again.”

Teaching the Teachers

Teaching is also a major aspect of Jesse’s mis­sion. Through the Stanford Teacher Education Program, Jesse has been edu­cat­ing Stanford stu­dents who them­selves will go out and teach. The pro­gram is instruc­tive on incor­po­rat­ing other subjects—math and sci­ence, for instance—into gar­den­ing and cook­ing, and demon­strat­ing the ease and joy with which both gar­den­ing and cook­ing can be done.

“We teach stu­dents who are going into class­rooms all over the coun­try,” Jesse explained. “We just had our grad­u­a­tion, and some were going to St. Louis, some were going to Connecticut, some were stay­ing in California. We teach four classes a year from the gar­den into the kitchen, includ­ing lessons about obe­sity and diabetes.

“By the third class, I’ve taught them how to cook with seven basic ingre­di­ents: olive oil, vine­gar (lemon), salt, pep­per, sugar, herbs and spices. They learn that fat, sugar and salt can be a good part of mak­ing food deli­cious, and when used con­sciously, are not a bad part of life. Through these basic cook­ing ele­ments, they learn to teach their kids to not be afraid of eat­ing and how, with wise per­sonal choices, they can con­trol obe­sity and other results of unhealthy eating.”

Through her cook­book Simply Organic (Chronicle Books, 2008), Jesse is also edu­cat­ing the pub­lic at large. This unique work seeks to assist any­one, in con­vert­ing their home kitchen, to be com­pletely organic. “One of the new trends is that the young are start­ing to cook at home,” Jesse said. “I believe that the soul­ful sat­is­fac­tion we get from cook­ing at home should be made eas­ier. I set out to write a cook­book that is not over people’s heads or just a bunch of pretty pic­tures, but some­thing that peo­ple can actu­ally take home and, with­out using many ingre­di­ents, make some­thing for them­selves that is deli­cious. I actu­ally think that’s what every cook­book should be about.”

Past Meeting the Future

Jesse con­tin­ues to uti­lize the wealth of knowl­edge she has assim­i­lated to bring us into an organic future. “I’ve had the great for­tune of still being alive while this move­ment is really tak­ing root,” Jesse con­cluded. “We’re see­ing the result of those seeds that were planted many years ago about the con­nec­tion of food to just about every­thing. I’m enjoy­ing con­sult­ing, being a part of think tanks that are look­ing at how to take that fur­ther into the busi­ness world, and am also on some great advi­sory boards. I love hang­ing out with the young inno­va­tors who think out­side the box and have found true pas­sion and soul­ful­ness in an entre­pre­neur­ial way with food. I’m now bridg­ing his­tory and the future, how­ever that might land on my own plate.”

For more infor­ma­tion on Chef Jesse Cool, visit her web­site at www.cooleatz.com. Jesse Cool’s book Simply Organic is avail­able from the Organic Connections book­store. Food pic­tures from Simply Organic © Jesse Ziff Cool. Used with per­mis­sion of Chronicle Books LLC, San Francisco. Visit ChronicleBooks.com.