I am an indoor farmer in Wyoming. Most days I talk about that experience and it sounds like a niche fact from a small business start up.

Lately it has started to feel like a front-row seat to a national mistake.

Two things are happening at once. The first is that the federal government is rewriting the rules for the Colorado River, which supplies much of the water that grows America’s winter vegetables. A proposal on the table could impose deep reductions on Arizona, California and Nevada. The states are already arguing about whether it’s legal. Arizona is preparing for a court fight.

The second, is that the US Agriculture Department has stopped accepting, processing and awarding federal loan guarantees for greenhouses, hydroponics and indoor farms, which is my category. People and companies I know have been affected. I have been affected.

Each of those decisions has a reasonable explanation behind it. The reason is that I am focused on this on this summer day, is that if you put these two facts next to each other and they turn into something else. They turn into a country tightening the constraint on its winter produce supply at the same moment it’s closing off the ways to build alternative solutions.

From November through March the produce section of an American grocery store depends on a remarkably small piece of the national map. Greens move south with the season, out of California and into the irrigated desert around Yuma and the Imperial Valley. Imports from a handful of regions in Mexico fill in whatever’s left. The same large grower-shippers tend to move crews, equipment and production south in the fall and back north in the spring. Two of the most important growing regions depend on the Colorado.

The arrangement has worked so well that most of us have never had a reason to notice it. A head of lettuce travels something like two thousand miles on average, and still a bag of it turns up in Minneapolis in February, and shelves get restocked overnight across the whole country. All of that distance, water and choreography just disappears into what reads as the ordinary abundance of a grocery store.

The longer I spend inside regional food systems, the more convinced I am that abundance and resilience are two different things that we have gotten in the habit of treating as one.

The seven basin states spent years trying to agree on what should replace the operating rules that expire at the end of 2026. They failed. On July 31, just last Friday, the Bureau of Reclamation released its own proposal.

Under that framework Arizona, California and Nevada could be required to cut their combined use by as much as 3 million acre-feet a year through 2036, with the actual reductions recalculated every two years depending on conditions across the basin. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming face no mandatory reductions for now. Arizona’s officials have called the proposed cuts draconian. Lower Basin leaders say the burden’s been divided unfairly, Upper Basin states say forcing reductions on them would violate the compact, and the disagreement at this point isn’t really about whether there’s enough water. It’s about who absorbs the fact that there isn’t.

As these accusations fly, storage in the system sits at roughly 36 percent of capacity. Federal projections have warned that Lake Powell could drop below the elevation it needs to generate hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. The law may take years to settle.

Farms don’t work on that schedule. Planting decisions, field preparation, irrigation improvements, all of it is currently tangled up in a federal proposal and a seven-state dispute and the prospect of litigation. None of that has to result in a formal prohibition for the effect to be real. Uncertainty has a yield. The supply can get smaller while everyone waits to find out.

The other half of this is much less apparent.

In April the Agriculture Department extended a pause on loan-note guarantees across certain Rural Business-Cooperative Service programs for controlled-environment agriculture, which covers vertical farms, hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics and greenhouses. The agency had looked at its portfolio and found a 40 percent delinquency rate. That number is real and my industry produced it.

A generation of indoor-farming companies raised extraordinary sums by describing farms as technology platforms, and a lot of them went chasing scale before they’d proved out basic farm economics. I’ve written about this at length and I won’t litigate the issue again here.

The result is that when they failed they didn’t fail quietly, and lenders and investors came away distrusting the whole category. That is where we stand today. I’m not too proud to admit that the Agriculture Department was right to stop and look hard at what it had been guaranteeing. An industry sitting on a 40 percent delinquency rate hasn’t earned the right to call scrutiny unfair.

But I will also say that how you design a pause matters. Pending applications were withdrawn rather than reviewed. The agency didn’t have enough bandwidth. Review after review of loans already in place created delay upon delay in execution. From a desk in Washington this work looks like paperwork being reset. From inside a farm those delays are existential. Farms aren’t software and a building that doesn’t break ground this year doesn’t produce food next winter. You don’t get the time back when an agency eventually regains confidence in its own program.

So in the same year, one arm of the federal government is preparing to ration the water underneath the country’s winter produce supply, and another has suspended a financing mechanism for farms that could grow some of that produce without drawing on the river.

The people making those decisions may never speak to one another. Why would they? Reclamation operates reservoirs, credit risk belongs to USDA, and Arizona’s lawyers are paid to represent Arizona. Everyone is answering the question that was put directly in front of them. The second question was never assigned to anybody.

Where does the food come from afterward?

The least visible thing worth building.

I’m not arguing that indoor farms should replace Yuma. They can’t, and the people who have claimed otherwise did real damage to this industry.

But let’s do this exercise together. Imagine February 2031. The river’s been rationed and thousands of acres around Yuma aren’t producing what they used to. Except that we invested in problem solving. We invested in regional and local farms over the intervening years, in other regions. Some were greenhouses, some were indoor urban farms. All grew the fragile crops that feed people where they live.

The grocery shelves look like they always have. Lettuce costs what it should. Restaurants get their orders. No governor holds a press conference. No emergency appropriation moves through Congress. Nobody anywhere writes a story about the shortage that never occured.

There’s no wreckage. No obvious constituency, because the people the investment protected will never find out they were protected. Political systems are built to answer the crisis that already occurred, and they’re much less interested in whoever quietly made sure it didn’t.

What we can do now.

The Agriculture Department’s review should end with underwriting standards rather than a permanently closed door. Use a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. The failures have actually made the distinctions easier to draw, not harder.

Somebody at Interior should be required to answer, publicly, what each Colorado River scenario means for the winter produce supply. Reclamation doesn’t need to become a food agency. But the question should exist in the record somewhere, even if the honest first answer is that we don’t know.

And the rest of us can learn to notice where the river story ends.

There will be a lot of those stories between now and the near future, and they’ll describe acre-feet and reservoir elevations and legal authorities and which state may sue which other state. All of that genuinely matters. Just watch where they end. They end at the water. When you get there, ask what comes next.

Where does the food come from after the water is gone?

Right now nobody in government owns that question, which is how each agency makes a prudent decision while the country, adding them all up, makes a reckless one.

If we get this right there’ll be almost no evidence any of it mattered. February will arrive, the grocery shelves will look the way we expect them to, and nobody will ever know how close the system came to failing.

That ordinary February is the thing worth building, and it has to be built before we need it.

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There is a bag of shredded iceberg in a walk-in somewhere right now with a date printed on the front. Best if used by August 3.

That date is the most specific thing most people will ever know about their lettuce. Not the field it grew in, not the water it drank, not the week it was cut, not the border it crossed. A date, and a brand name belonging to a company that did not grow it.

Since June, more than 1,600 people who ate at Taco Bell have gotten sick with cyclospora. Ninety-four went to the hospital. Investigators linked it to shredded iceberg from a single supplier in central Mexico by interviewing thousands of sick people and finding the one thing they had in common.

Weeks in, not one product sample has tested positive. The FDA had a single apparent hit, re-reviewed it, and concluded it was a false positive. There are no confirmed positives at all.

That is not sloppiness. Cyclospora takes about a week to make you sick and weeks more to diagnose. By the time the first person walks into a clinic, the lettuce that made them ill is compost.

Since this broke, I have watched indoor-ag companies line up to claim it as proof. Controlled environment agriculture makes food safe. Clean. Solved.

I run indoor farms, and I will not say that. Contamination can happen to anyone. It has happened at indoor farms. It could happen to us. We test for E. coli, listeria, salmonella, all of it, on the same schedule as everyone else, precisely because none of us are immune. I am not going to use a week when 1,600 people are sick to score a point.

I also want to be careful about who gets blamed. Cyclospora is not a cattle problem. The parasite only infects humans, and it spreads when human waste reaches the water that touches food, which means the failure usually happens upstream of any farmer, in sanitation infrastructure no grower owns. A farm can follow every protocol it has and still be downstream of a system that failed.

Two states

California grows roughly seventy percent of the lettuce in this country. Arizona grows most of the rest. Between them, something like ninety-five percent of America’s leafy greens.

And “two states” overstates the diversity, because these are not two independent food systems. They are one industry that moves. The same grower-shippers work both, running the Salinas Valley from spring through fall, dropping into the San Joaquin Valley for November, then wintering in the desert around Yuma and the Imperial Valley before heading north again. Monterey County alone grows more leafy greens than most countries.

So when you eat a salad in Jackson in February, you are eating from an irrigated desert valley on the Colorado River, along with nearly everyone else in America eating a salad in February. When domestic supply falls short, imports fill the gap, mostly from a small number of regions in central Mexico. Which is where the lettuce in this outbreak came from.

That is the entire map. Two states, one migrating industry, and an import backstop. No third option, which means nothing to fall back on. A hard freeze in Yuma is not a local weather event, it is a national shortage, and it is why your romaine cost eight dollars two winters ago.

The names on the bag

Now walk down the salad aisle and count the brands. A dozen at least, maybe twenty. Different logos, different prices, different promises about freshness and family and the farm.

Most of them came out of the same small number of plants.

Bagged greens move through a handful of fresh-cut processors, and those processors do not only sell under their own names. They pack private label. The store brand, the value line, the organic tier, and the national brand beside them can be the same lettuce, cut on the same line, on the same morning, in different bags. Chiquita said as much in an SEC filing years ago, naming competitors who also pack under grocers’ private labels and noting that the private label share was growing fast.

You can watch it happen in recall notices, which is the only place the arrangement becomes visible to a shopper. One Taylor Farms recall covered bagged salads sold under four brand names at once. In this outbreak, the recalled retail product was Marketside, which is Walmart’s own store brand, packed by Taylor Farms from lettuce grown in central Mexico.

Nobody is lying to you. Co-packing is legal, ordinary, and as old as the category. But it means the thing most people use to orient themselves in a grocery store is not an address. It is a marketing asset. It tells you who paid to put a name on the film, not who grew the plant, not where, not when. The variety on the shelf is the last step of the process, not a description of anything before it.

You thought you knew where your lettuce came from because you recognized the bag. You knew the bag.

Anonymity

Anonymity is an output of this system, not a side effect.

Every step that makes food cheaper strips a fact off it. Consolidate the growers and lose the field. Pool the harvest and lose the day. Shred and bag and lose the plant. Put a brand on the film and lose the packer. What reaches you is a price and a date, and neither one can answer a question.

We know this. We tried to legislate a fix.

Leafy greens sit near the top of the FDA’s Food Traceability List, with iceberg and butter lettuce named specifically. The rule attached to that list requires a company to produce traceability records within twenty-four hours of a request. It was supposed to take effect in January.

It has been pushed to July of 2028.

The reason is the whole argument in one sentence. Even the companies that were ready said their records are only as good as the data handed to them by partners who were not. A chain is exactly as traceable as its least-prepared link, and this one has thousands of links in several countries.

Now ask a small farm. Which bed, which day, which crew.

The answer comes back fast. Not because that farmer is more careful than the crews in Salinas, who work under some of the most demanding protocols in agriculture, and not because anyone has better software. It is fast because nothing sits between the question and the answer.

But speed is only half of what local buys you. The other half is how far a mistake can travel.

When a farm that feeds one valley has a bad week, the people who get sick live in that valley. Someone notices in days rather than months, because the illness and its source are still in the same place. The lot is one day’s harvest from one field, not one morning’s run shipped to nine states. The recall is a phone call.

Same failure, different arithmetic.

That is the case for local, and it is not a claim about virtue. Local farms are not cleaner. They are smaller, which means their worst day is smaller too. We spent a generation engineering the cost out of food, and what we built in its place is a system where one contaminated water source reaches 1,600 people before anyone knows to look.

Small does not mean safe. I would not trust a farm of any size that told you otherwise. Small means legible, and it means contained.

Most small farms are exempt from that traceability rule, on the basis of size. That is not a loophole. It is a tell. The rule exists to recover information that short chains never lose.

The river

Here is the part that should worry you more than any outbreak.

Yuma County grows most of the nation’s winter vegetables on Colorado River water. It uses about eight percent of the basin’s irrigation water and produces eighteen percent of its crop sales, which is a good deal for everyone until the water is short.

The water is short. The rules governing the river, written in 2007, expire at the end of this year. After five years of negotiation the basin states are deadlocked, having missed two federal deadlines in three months, while flows this year came in at fifteen percent of normal. Every action alternative in the federal draft plan cuts supply further, without compensation. And when cuts fall, they fall by priority: tribes first, then cities, with non-tribal agriculture near the bottom of the list.

So the winter half of America’s produce depends on the lowest-priority water in an over-allocated river whose operating rules run out in about five months.

This is what I mean when I say we have to diversify how we grow food, not only where. Not more farms doing the same thing, in the same climate, on the same water. Different methods, exposed to different risks.

Vertical farming is not a popular thing to advocate for right now, and I understand why. The boom made promises it could not keep. Companies raised enormous sums claiming they would replace commodity agriculture, priced themselves against a crop grown outdoors in free sunlight, and lost. That failure was earned.

So let me say what a controlled environment actually does, as narrowly as I can.

We know our water. It comes from a source we choose and test, it runs in a loop, and nothing upstream of it belongs to anyone else. Earlier I wrote that a farm can follow every protocol it has and still be downstream of a system that failed. A closed system does not remove the risk of contamination. It removes the upstream.

Nothing arrives in our rooms that we did not carry in. When something looks wrong we are not reconstructing a chain across four companies and a border, we are checking a list.

And we can tell a chef in March what we will have in June. No field can promise that, because a field is negotiating with weather. The product is not really the lettuce. It is the shortage that does not arrive.

Then there is the water itself. The most cited comparison, out of Arizona State, measured hydroponic lettuce against field lettuce in Yuma and found the indoor crop used roughly a twelfth of the water per pound. Other controlled trials land in the same neighborhood. In a basin where farms are last in line for a river that is running out of rules, that is not an environmental talking point. It is a way to keep growing food after the cuts.

The honest cost is energy. We use far more of it than a field does, because we pay for light the sun gives away outdoors, and I will not pretend otherwise. But look at what the trade actually is. Electricity can be generated many ways, in many places, and gets cleaner every year. Colorado River water can only come from the Colorado River.

A country should not have one way of doing anything essential. We do not run the grid on one fuel or the internet on one cable. We grow the nation’s winter greens on one river, in one county, in one climate, and we have called that a market.

Know your farmer, know your farm

What if we measured a food system by how fast it could tell you the truth, instead of how cheaply it could move a case of romaine.

What if the most valuable thing a farm produced was not volume but the ability to answer a question in an afternoon.

I do not know how to fix a national supply chain. But I do know this: the way you prevent the next disaster is not a perfect farm. It is more farms, more ways of farming, in more places, close enough to the people eating from them that when something looks wrong, someone can walk into the room and look.

So here is the ask, and it is smaller than it sounds.

Buy lettuce. But make sure it has an address.

Not a brand. An address. The difference matters, because for most of what is in that aisle there is no address to find. Nobody is withholding it. It was dropped somewhere between the field and the film, and the federal government has given itself until 2028 to build a system that can put it back.

Buy the head instead of the bag when you can, because a head came from one plant in one place and a bag came from wherever the line was running. Ask your grocer who grew the greens they carry, and notice how long it takes anyone to find out, because the length of that pause is the real information. Buy from the regional grower even the week it costs a dollar more, since that dollar is what keeps a second option alive where you live.

And if you go looking in February and find nothing with an address at any price, do not conclude the exercise failed. That is the finding. That absence is the whole essay.

There is one more thing the bag will not tell you. Tens of thousands of people cut and pack and move with the seasons inside this system, and we called them essential when it mattered to say so, and then went on running a supply chain that cannot name a single one of them. Nobody chose that. It was designed around them and then described as efficiency. A farm with an address is a farm where the people have names. Those turn out to be the same fact.

That does not make us the answer. It makes us one more address on a very short list, and I would rather make a small claim that holds than a large one that falls apart the first time someone checks it.

Because here is what a date is. A date tells you when a thing stops being food. An address tells you where it started being food. We have built a national supply chain fluent in endings and silent on beginnings, and then we wondered why it takes two thousand interviews to find a field.

Go open your refrigerator. Find the greens. If all you are holding is a date, you are holding the whole argument in your hand.

Charred Baby Romaine

Baby romaine from our farm, or from whoever grows nearest to you. The point was never that it has to be ours. The point is that you can say whose it is.

Here is why this dish and not a salad. Heat is a test. A head cut this week chars on the face and stays crisp and cold an inch below it. A head that spent a week in a truck steams, goes gray, and slumps into the pan. You will know within ninety seconds which one you bought, which is faster than the FDA has managed in six weeks.

You also cannot do any of this with a bag.

Serves 4.

Dressing

• 4 anchovy fillets

• 1 garlic clove

• 1/3 cup mayonnaise

• 2 tablespoons lemon juice, plus a wedge for the table

• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

• 1/2 cup parmesan, finely grated

• 1 teaspoon black pepper

Everything else

• 4 heads baby romaine, halved lengthwise through the core

• 2 tablespoons olive oil, for the lettuce

• 1 cup crusty bread, torn into rough crumbs

• 3 tablespoons olive oil, for the breadcrumbs

• 1 cup microgreens

• Flaky salt

Mash the anchovies and garlic to a rough paste. Whisk in the mayonnaise, lemon juice, and Dijon, then the parmesan and pepper. It should be thick enough to sit on a leaf without running off.

Warm the olive oil in a skillet, add the torn bread, and fry until deep gold and noisy. Drain and salt while hot.

Get a grill or a cast iron pan properly hot. Not medium. Hot. Brush the cut faces of the romaine with oil and season with flaky salt.

Lay the halves cut side down and do not touch them. Ninety seconds, maybe two minutes. You want black edges on the face and a center that is still cold. If they wilt past the first inch, pull them immediately and consider what that tells you about where they came from.

Arrange cut side up. Spoon the dressing along the charred face so it slides down between the leaves. Scatter the breadcrumbs, the microgreens, and the rest of the parmesan. Squeeze lemon over everything, finish with salt and more pepper, and eat it while the outside is still warm and the inside still snaps.

There are the fathers we celebrate and the fathers we miss. The fathers who left and the fathers who stayed. The fathers we became and the fathers we wished we’d had. And beneath the cards and the cookouts, there is a harder conversation no one quite wants to start.

We talk about fatherhood and patriarchy as if they were opposites. They are not. For most of human history they were the same structure. The father at the head of the table was the load-bearing beam of it, and the beam justified its own weight in the language of care. I provide, therefore I decide. I protect, therefore I rule. The devotion and the dominance were poured together, and we have been trying to tell them apart ever since.

So I don’t think we are confusing two separate things. I think we are standing in front of one old structure, working out which parts are holding something up and which parts are just holding us down.

For the past decade we have spent enormous energy talking about patriarchy, and much of that was necessary. Systems that shut people out deserved to be challenged. But somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to talk about fathers at all.

Not male dominance. Not authority for its own sake. Fatherhood. The work of standing between uncertainty and the people you love. The quiet decision to hold the roof up while everyone else sleeps.

I watch this in my husband. He is an attorney, and his version of stewardship has mostly looked like getting people who agree on nothing into the same room. Ranchers, recreationists, environmentalists. For years he fought to protect a piece of land just up the road from where we live. It was never a sure thing. He fought for it anyway, and in the end the land held. Protected in perpetuity. A lawyer’s word for forever. Forever, for people who are not born yet.

What also came out of those years was a bridge. Young stewards built it, so the people who use the land could finally get across. He is prouder of that bridge than of anything with his name on it. His name is not on it.

And I watch it in my son, who stewards in a different language. Through technology. Endlessly mapping, working out how to protect what he maps, before anyone has thought to ask him to.

One does his work in rooms full of people who disagree. The other does it alone, with a screen and a map. But they are after the same thing. They want what they touched to outlast them.

None of it looks like power. All of it looks like responsibility.

For most of our history those two came bundled together. In these two men, I am watching them finally pull apart.

When I look around, I don’t see anyone asking for more patriarchy. I see a world starving for stewardship.

I think about this constantly as I build a company.

Over the last fifteen years I have sat across from bankers, regulators, investors, board members, and the kind of bureaucrat who can end a project with a single memo. Some helped. Some didn’t. What surprised me was how little any of it mapped onto the story I had been handed about who holds power.

Some of the people who opened doors were men. Some were women. Some of the people who closed them were men. Some were women.

Power rarely behaves as neatly as our theories about it. More often it lives inside institutions and incentives, inside the scaffolding the old structure left standing long after any of us walked into the room.

The farm we built was never held back by patriarchy. It was held back by inertia and fear, by people who could not or would not imagine something different. Those forces have no gender.

And maybe that is why I have stopped thinking so much about power, and started thinking about stewardship instead.

Our farm is not the kind the word conjures. No soil, no praying for rain. We grow indoors, year round, in water and light, and the whole point of that control is somebody else’s calm. The shelf that is never bare. The disaster that does not arrive.

Fatherhood is not so different. The best fathers I know are not trying to control the future. They are trying to absorb enough of it that the people they love do not have to. They show up, year after year, building a steadiness someone else will get to take for granted, making sacrifices that disappear quietly into the lives they protect.

I think about my son’s generation more than I let on. They are growing up inside a culture that rewards being seen over being useful. Plenty of people are teaching boys how to perform. Far fewer are teaching them how to carry weight.

A boy can travel a long way now without anyone showing him what it means to be responsible for something other than himself. That is the part that worries me.

Stewardship is not in the blood. It is taught, mostly without words, mostly by example. That is why fathers matter now in a way the long argument about patriarchy never managed to name. A father is often how a boy first learns that the point was never to win. It was to leave the crossing sturdier than he found it, and to hand it to whoever needs it after he is gone.

I don’t know how to fix the food system. I don’t know how to fix our politics, or our habit of protecting what exists instead of risking what could be.

But I know this.

What we are short on is not power. It is certainly not outrage, which we produce in endless supply. What we are short on is people willing to take responsibility for what comes after them. People willing to build what they will not be around to use, and to carry the weight now so the next person carries less of it later.

Maybe that is what we are really celebrating on Father’s Day. Not fathers because they are men. Not fathers because they are perfect. But fathers because they are willing to carry responsibility for a future that will never belong to them.

We have gotten very good at talking about power. We have nearly forgotten how to talk about stewardship.

That is why, this Father’s Day, I am thinking less about patriarchy and more about the fathers we need.

Batata Harra

The Lebanese potatoes I keep coming back to for a BBQ side. Garlic, cilantro, lemon, and enough heat to make them interesting.

Peel and dice about five medium russets into small cubes, somewhere near seven cups. In a big bowl, toss them with four tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of a whole lemon, four cloves of minced garlic, a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of pepper, and as much cayenne as you can stand. A quarter teaspoon keeps it gentle. A half teaspoon means business.

Spread them on a sheet pan in a single layer, two pans if they are crowded, because crowded potatoes steam and you want these to crisp. Roast at 400 for forty to forty-five minutes if you like them soft, closer to an hour if you want the edges dark and crunchy. Flip them twice along the way.

Out of the oven, while they are still hot, throw in half a cup of chopped cilantro and another pinch of salt. Lime works in place of the lemon if that is what is on the counter. Serve warm, though in my house they rarely make it that far.

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Fresh vegetables, up two-tenths of a percent over the year. Flat. Calm. You could read that figure and decide the produce aisle is the most stable corner of the American economy.

Then you go buy a tomato.

This spring, fresh tomatoes cost forty percent more than they had a year earlier. Fresh vegetables as a whole were up more than eleven percent in twelve months. The two-tenths of a percent was an average, a blanket thrown over a thrashing animal. Underneath it: a tomato up forty, a potato down three, lettuce that spiked and crashed and spiked again inside a single season.

This is the thing about averages. They are true and useless. They describe a year nobody actually lived.

Here is the year people lived.

A virus the field crews call INSV, carried by an insect the size of a comma, moved through the Salinas Valley, the place that grows a huge share of the lettuce this country eats. Prices shot up. Then everyone overcorrected, replanted, flooded the market, and prices crashed below their five-year average. Then growers got scared and held back. Spike, crash, spike. Meanwhile most of the lower forty-eight sat in drought. The lettuce that did make it to the shelf often arrived wilting, browning, short on the days it had left. Stressed crops and rushed trucks do not make beautiful food.

This is the part the average really hides: more than eight in ten shoppers say they are paying more for fresh produce than they were a year ago. They are not wrong. They are reading the spikes. We have built a food system that performs stability on a spreadsheet and delivers volatility in a cart.

There are reasons, and none of them are leaving. A crop that needs cool, even weather, in a climate that no longer offers it. Disease that compounds season over season. A map where a handful of valleys feed a continent, so when one valley goes down the whole country feels it. And a supply chain so long that the food spends its freshness in transit. Four structural cracks, widening, in the floor we stand on every time we feed our families.

So this is the thing worth building. Not the cheap head of lettuce on the calm Tuesday. The box of greens that costs the same in February that it cost in July. That is there when Salinas floods. That did not spend five days in a truck. The thing worth building is stability. Price that holds, supply that holds, a shelf that does not empty when the sky misbehaves.

Think about what that means you are actually paying for. Not the lettuce. Field lettuce is cheaper on a calm day, and always will be. You are paying for the forty-percent spike that never reaches your kitchen. The empty shelf you never have to stand in front of. The recipe you don’t have to change because the greens showed up, again, like they always do.

You are not buying produce. You are buying the disaster that doesn’t arrive.

It’s the logic of every sane thing a community has ever built for itself. You don’t buy a seawall for the calm days. You don’t measure a fire department by the fires it didn’t have to fight. The whole worth of it is the catastrophe that quietly fails to happen, and you only notice the day it would have.

That is not a software bet. That is an infrastructure bet. You do not ask a bridge to turn a profit in its first quarter. You build it because a community needs to get across the water for the next fifty years, and you measure it on that horizon. Food is the same. We just forgot, somewhere between the venture term sheet and the grocery flyer, that it was ever infrastructure at all.

So you would think this is the moment indoor farming wins. Grow it close, grow it clean, grow it no matter what the sky is doing.

You would think.

Instead, the headlines this year were funerals. More than twelve vertical and indoor farming companies went bankrupt in a single year, taking more than a billion dollars of investment down with them. Names that had raised seven, nine hundred million dollars. Gone, or nearly.

This spring the U.S. Department of Agriculture made it official. It paused federal loan guarantees for controlled environment agriculture across the board, the whole category, after the loans already on the books defaulted at a rate north of forty percent. The government filed indoor farming next to failing manure-gas plants and closed the window. It did this slowly and bluntly, to every farm in the category at once, the ones built to flip and the ones built to last, without pausing to tell them apart. And a financing window, once closed on a farm counting on it, has a way of producing the very default it was meant to prevent.

I’ll keep my old point short, because I’ve made it before: too many of my vertical farming colleagues treated food like software: raise enormous sums, build a spectacular facility, figure out the farming later. But the deeper mistake was simpler than the technology. They made one bet, and it was the wrong one: that they could beat a field-grown head of lettuce on price, out of the gate, against an industry running on land that was paid off decades ago.

It was never going to work. Growing greens under lights can cost many times the energy of growing them under the sun. If your entire pitch is cheaper lettuce, the sun wins. You cannot out-compete free on the one day the weather happens to cooperate.

So they competed on the average. And they died on the average.

Let me say clearly what that failure was not. It was not an indictment of growing food in a controlled space. The greenhouse growers who have done this well for generations, many of them horizontal, sun-fed, rooted in their regions, were right all along, and some of the loudest indoor failures would have done well to listen to them sooner.

Here is what I actually believe.

None of us, not the field, not the greenhouse, not the vertical farm, is the whole answer. We are each a piece of one. The field feeds us when the weather holds. The greenhouse extends the season and steadies the supply. And a farm that can stand inside a city, growing through any month, is the piece that’s missing where the need is sharpest: in the places that import every leaf they eat. We are supplemental. We are meant to be. A solution that helps rural communities hold their ground, and one that lets a city begin to feed itself. Different tools for the same job, which is keeping people fed no matter what the sky does.

And once you stop trying to beat the sun at its own game, the economics change. You do not grow commodity iceberg to lose on price by a penny. You grow the things indoor farming is actually good at: tender greens, microgreens and herbs that bruise and wilt in a long truck, varieties the field struggles to hold in quality, crops people will pay a fair price for because they are better and because they are reliably there.

That is the margin. Not cheaper than the field. More stable. More local. More consistent when the outdoor system is on a rollercoaster.

You let the sun do what the sun does beautifully. And you grow the things the commodity system struggles to keep fresh, steady, and on the shelf.

That is the reframe the last few years cost us so much to learn. Not which method wins. But: this is a need. And a society that recognizes its needs honestly, and innovates around them on purpose, is a society that gets to keep eating in February.

I should tell you where I am standing when I say this. We are one of those farms. Vertical Harvest is in the category the government just closed the window on, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because the whole point of this newsletter is that I don’t perform stability I haven’t earned. We are restructuring, in the open, because the work is worth it and the need we were built to meet has only gotten sharper.

Here is what the moratorium taught me, and it is the thing I most want the greenhouse growers and the field and every other piece of this to hear. The government cannot be the patient capital this kind of infrastructure runs on. It moves too slowly to tell a careful operator from a reckless one, and when it finally moves, it moves on all of us at once. You do not build a bridge on a partner who might pull the financing halfway across the water because someone else’s bridge fell down.

So we need capital that can see the difference the policy could not. That is what I am writing to find: investors, partners, communities who understand this is a fifteen-year proposition and not a fifteen-month one, and who want to help build the thing rather than flip it.

And infrastructure has one quality the spreadsheet never captures. It can hold people.

Yesterday was a parade. Memorial Day weekend, the whole town of Jackson out on the curb. And we were on a float in the middle of it, not because Vertical Harvest bought a spot, but because Tim McLaurin invited us. Tim is one of our farmers. He is also, by his own accurate account, Jackson’s biggest rockstar, a personality that moves mountains and knows it. Tim has Down syndrome. This was his moment, his parade, and he asked us to come stand in it with him. So my co-founder Caroline, and my daughter, and I went, as his guests.

You do not put Tim on a float. Tim puts you on the float.

I want to sit with that for a second, because it is the whole thing. In a food system that treats food like software, there is no line item for Tim. He is friction.

In a food system built like infrastructure, Tim is the point. Not as a beneficiary, not as someone we generously made room for. As the rockstar who invited the rest of us into the parade.

Here is the part the spreadsheet should love all along, if it had been looking: this is not charity dressed up as a business. It is a better business. The software farms needed rooms full of highly credentialed engineers to coax lettuce out of a machine, and they paid for it, every payroll cycle, until they couldn’t.

We build the other way. A balance of automation and people, the machines doing what machines are good at so the people can do what people are good at, which turns out to be most of growing food. That balance is cheaper to run than an all-engineer operation, and it employs the very people the optimized model wrote off as a cost. Real jobs and real greens, in the same building, paid for by the same model.

The inclusion is not the price we pay for the mission. The inclusion is part of why the math works.

Because here is what a city actually needs, the thing no average will ever capture: not just greens that stay on the shelf, but a place those greens come from that has room for people inside it. Room for the people a more “efficient” model would have left behind. A farm you can belong to, not just buy from.

That is the model.

The greens matter. They are what make the system viable. But the deeper value is that the system holds people too.

That is what Vertical Harvest was built to do from the beginning, long before the headlines and bankruptcies and moratoriums. Grow food and futures at the same time. That is the mission. It always has been.

Memorial Day is the day we honor the people who held the line so the rest of us could keep our lives. It is, underneath, a question a community asks itself once a year: who is this for, and who do we owe. I think a food system is that question asked three times a day. Who is it for. Who gets to belong to it. Who do we owe.

I don’t have the whole answer. We are still building ours. Still fighting for it, most days. But yesterday Tim was up there leading his own parade, the town was on the curb, and he had waved the rest of us up beside him. For the length of one street the answer was standing right there in front of everybody, waving back.

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And because something still has to land on the table tonight, here is the most honest thing I know how to cook.

Wilted Greens with Garlic, Lemon, and Yogurt

Serves 2 to 4.

You will need:

• 2 large bunches greens. Swiss chard, spinach, mustard greens, kale, whatever looks alive.

• 3 to 4 tablespoons good olive oil

• 3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

• Kosher salt

• Juice of half a lemon

• Thick yogurt

• A handful of toasted almonds or pine nuts

• Good bread

Warm the olive oil in a wide pan over medium heat. Add the garlic and let it soften slowly until just turning gold at the edges. Not brown. Gold.

Pile in the greens. They will look impossible at first and then collapse almost instantly. Add a good pinch of salt and toss until glossy and tender, about five minutes.

Take them off the heat and squeeze over the lemon.

Spoon thick yogurt into a shallow bowl. Pile the greens over the top. Scatter almonds. Tear bread alongside it and eat everything warm.

There’s no technique to hide behind here. No long braise to rescue a tired bunch. The whole dish is just greens good enough to stand on their own, picked close, still alive, not half a week into a truck. That’s the argument, and it’s also dinner.

You shouldn’t have to think about whether they’ll be there. You should just get to cook.

The quote arrives in my inbox. It gets brought up in meetings, in casual conversations. Friends text it to me late at night.

“It is not the critic who counts… the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming…”

I know why people send it.

I am building something real, with my bare hands, with my co-founder, with a team I love. The dust is on us.

The vertical farms are real too. Both of them. Both feed communities by growing greens in February. Both employ people the labor market was not designed to employ. Both exist because people from across the aisle came together to build them.

Anyone who walks into one of these farms feels it immediately. People feel the possibility. And possibility changes people too.

I love Roosevelt’s speech. It refuses the easy refuge of cynicism. It gives dignity to trying. To striving. To failing publicly while attempting something difficult. But lately I have been thinking the speech does not quite name something.

What if the real work of the arena is not domination, but relationship?

This week I listened to Pema Chödrön speaking with Ezra Klein. She used a phrase from one of her teachers that I have not been able to let go of.

Collaborating with reality.

Working with what is actually there instead of exhausting yourself arguing with it. That phrase unlocked something for me.

There has been a growing call lately for builders. For people working in atoms, not just bits. For people building real things in the physical world: infrastructure, food systems, manufacturing, housing, energy.

Atoms matter. They feed people. They give people work to do at six in the morning. They cannot simply be deleted, optimized into abstraction, or pivoted into something else next quarter.

But what people do not say loudly enough about building in atoms is that it is hard, it takes longer than expected, and atoms do not bend. Not the laws of physics. Not the climate. Not the economics. Not the people.

That is what I have slowly come to understand about Vertical Harvest.

The work was never about domination over difficult conditions. It was never about forcing Wyoming to grow food. Or forcing a labor market to become inclusive. Or forcing finance into a shape it did not recognize.

It was always collaboration.

We engineer the ecosystem plants need to thrive. We design jobs around the people who hold them. We build with the financing tools that exist, imperfect as they are. We adapt to weather, labor, markets, politics, biology, human emotion.

We collaborate with reality.

The old system, by contrast, still sees mostly in binaries. Profitable or not profitable. Charity or enterprise. Operational rigor or compassion.

The company we built was never going to fit neatly into those categories. It is operationally rigorous and mission-driven. It is economically ambitious and deeply human. The social outcome is not separate from the business outcome. They are the same outcome.

That is the whole point.

As the model has been tested publicly, one criticism keeps resurfacing: they only got funding because it was a social mission.

I want to be clear. We received a USDA-backed loan because the business model fit the metric. Because there was market demand. Because we had ten years of operational data. Because the underwriting was rigorous.

The mission was not charity layered onto a weak business. The mission strengthened the business.

The arena is public. If it is not public, it is not the arena. If I stay quiet about what I am learning, the work stays private. The model stays opaque. The people who might understand it never find it. That is part of what building something new actually is. Years of conversations. Hundreds of pitches. Walking people through farms in the middle of winter trying to help them see something that does not fully exist yet. Most people cannot. A few can immediately. Those people change everything.

So I am trying to live honestly inside the process. Not after it. During it.

The polished version of innovation is always cleaner than the reality. The reality is confusion. Translation problems. Systems struggling to recognize something they do not yet have language for.

I brought in people who had spent careers inside legacy systems. In some places it translated seamlessly. In others, it did not. Not because they lacked skill, but because the model itself did not fit existing categories.

That is part of what makes innovation hard. There is no real playbook for what has not yet existed.

We built through federal innovation frameworks because the model met the criteria and the opportunity aligned. Maybe my mistake was believing systems built on binaries would immediately know what to do with a model built on integration.

I still do not fully know the answer to that. But I know this.

If I had not believed it was possible, none of this would exist. Not the farms. Not the jobs. Not the food. Not the people standing beside me now.

This week Pema also gave me another phrase I cannot stop thinking about.

Lean into the sharp points.

When something hurts, when something feels uncertain, when something exposes your limits, do not flee from it. Stay with it. Learn from it. I am trying.

It is not glamorous. It is learning to sit with uncertainty publicly. It is leading through a chapter I did not script. It is watching a model I deeply believe in be tested in real time while people debate its legitimacy from a distance.

But I am beginning to understand that this too is part of the work.

The arena is not simply where you get bloodied. It is where you continue collaborating with reality while the world watches. It is where you work with the actual conditions in front of you instead of the fantasy version you wish existed. And reality is not clean.

Reality is people. Reality is payroll. Reality is lenders. Reality is lettuce. Reality is disability. Reality is markets. Reality is ego. Reality is hope. Reality is limitation. Reality is care.

You do not dominate those things. You work with them.

Insisting a company must be either impact or investment. That a worker either fits the slot or does not. That food must be either commodity or charity.

We never had the luxury of that kind of rigidity. We had to build with what was actually true.

Here is also what I am learning. Leaning into the sharp points is not only about staying in the pain. It is about learning from it. Trusting that the struggle itself may be making space for a new way forward.

That trust is what keeps me in it.

I have watched people walk through our buildings and immediately understand what is possible. I keep building for them.

So when people send me Roosevelt, I take it in. The striving. The public risk of caring deeply about something uncertain.

But I want to add this. The arena is where you lean into the sharp points. With your bare hands. With the math. With the body you are in. With the people beside you.

I am collaborating with reality. Leaning into the sharp points. Living with my mistakes. The work continues. The dust is on me.

I would not be anywhere else.

The conversation between Pema Chödrön and Ezra Klein was incredible to listen to. I highly recommend it.

And if this topic intrigues you, here are a few places to keep going with Pema’s work.

Comfortable With Uncertainty. A book about what to do when you do not know what comes next.

When Things Fall Apart. Exactly what the title says.

Welcoming the Unwelcome. How to lean into the sharp points.

Another Kind of Freedom. Her newest, and the source of the two phrases above.

I have spent the last few weeks hooked on Love on the Spectrum.

A lot of people I know, told me they avoided the show because they assumed it would be exploitative. Honestly, they have it backwards. The thing that makes the show so powerful is its restraint. Especially for reality television. It treats people like people.

And, I love the mothers. Connor’s mother especially.

She sits across from her grown son and helps him make sense of heartbreak, confusion, hope. When his date pulled her hand away on a walk and he was sure he had done something wrong, his mother told him it was probably just hot outside. She told him to talk to her about it. She once said that if someone had told her when Connor was three years old that one day he would be sitting across from her talking about a girl, she would have called them a liar. And there he is. Talking about a girl.

That is what got me thinking about mothers in the first place. What interests me most about mothers is their ability to see what is actually in front of them and love it without trying to make it fit.

I think that is what people are responding to in the show too.

People on the spectrum often struggle to mask who they are. Their feelings sit much closer to the surface. Joy. Disappointment. Awkwardness. Hope. Nothing is particularly hidden.

And people who have spent their lives outside what society calls normal understand struggle differently. Which means they understand joy differently too. Even trying becomes courageous.

There is a moment with Connor where he meets a woman named Georgie on a date. Bird watcher. Lovely. Midway through the date he excuses himself to use the bathroom, and the camera catches him walking away talking quietly to himself.

She is something else… where have you been all my life?

He didn’t mean to say it out loud. He couldn’t help it. That is what the show keeps revealing. Joy that has nowhere to hide.

Eventually Connor and Georgie broke up. Connor wanted something Georgie wasn’t ready for. They stayed friends. The breakup mostly happened off camera. His mother later said it felt too personal to turn into content. I loved that.

Because the show understands something important. Love is not always the ending. Sometimes love is the trying.

When my kids were young, our family mantra was simple: weird is good.

By middle school I had to explain what I meant. Everyone wants to be the same at that age. Resist it, I told them. Hold onto the thing that makes you different. One day people will seek you out for it.

My kids thank me for that now.

My mother taught me the same thing. Not through slogans. Through example.

She started a business because my brother had disabilities. She wasn’t going to wait for the world to figure out what he needed. She built it herself. At a time when women were not really expected to build companies, in an industry she knew nothing about. She couldn’t accept being anything less.

Maybe that courage came at a cost. My parents divorced because of it. But I am grateful she lived as herself.

And honestly, I know this kind of love exists because I experience it every day at Vertical Harvest.

I think about Johnny. Johnny works for me. He tells me exactly what he thinks. The few times payroll has been late during this brutal stretch, he has called it out directly in our group chat. Unacceptable. And he is right. It is.

We laugh at each other. We laugh at ourselves. Nobody is above reproach. Working with Johnny is one of the great privileges of my life. It is love. It is a spectrum.

Then there is Logan. Twenty-six years old. Las Vegas. Lives with his mom and twin sister. Before the show he had never dated a real woman. Instead, he had an imaginary girlfriend named Tifah. A full relationship. A whole inner world.

Then he met Hailey. A real woman who loved trains as much as he did. So he broke up with Tifah. On television.

He wore this incredible bright blue suit on one of their dates. Completely earnest. Completely himself. At one point he said falling in love felt like chomping on candy. It did not work out. Hailey wanted to be friends. I tried my best to impress that girl, Logan said afterward. Well, here I am now. I still need to look for love.

That broke me a bit. Because having an imaginary girlfriend is exactly the kind of thing the world teaches people to hide. Logan didn’t hide her. He named her. He was brave enough to leave her for something real. And brave enough to keep looking when the real didn’t love him back. And somehow that honesty felt more emotionally sophisticated than most people I know.

If you have been reading these essays, you know this has been an exceptionally difficult stretch for me and for Vertical Harvest. I stopped writing for a while. Some right-wing media picked up our story and flattened it into something ideological. A story about waste. About politics. But the story I know is about people.

I regretted putting myself out there. I wondered if I had exposed my staff, many of whom have disabilities, to too much scrutiny. Too much cruelty. The world feels mean right now. Flattened. Performative. Everyone screaming at each other across algorithms.

And then I spent a day watching Love on the Spectrum and remembered something important. The people whose insides sit closest to the surface are not the problem. They are often the medicine.

Our North Star at Vertical Harvest has always been this: no great mind thinks alike. What comes from that is not just innovation. It is magic. And people need magic right now. Normal is killing us.

The pressure to flatten everyone into the same shape is everywhere. Easier to categorize. Easier to market. Easier to dismiss. But the people I work with every day remind me there is another way to live.

One where we actually see each other. One where people are allowed to be complicated. One where dignity is not tied to polish. One where nobody has to disappear to belong.

This is my life’s work.

The markets are brutal right now. I have questioned myself more times than I can count these past few months. I have risked a great deal. But I would still do it again.

Because this is real. Nothing is hidden here. We see each other.

We should not have to fight this hard to build something real. But we do. I believe the model we built matters. Not just because of the food. Because of the people. Because weird is good.

That is what mothers know.

That no one should have to disappear to be loved.

The world is starving for that kind of seeing.

And maybe that is why I keep returning to foods that should not work, but somehow do.

Baked eggs with labneh and za’atar. Greens under, eggs cracked over, a spoonful of labneh whisked with minced garlic, baked in a water bath, dusted with za’atar and chili paste at the end. Eggs on yogurt sounds strange the first time you hear it. Then you eat it and realize people have been making versions of this dish for generations because it is deeply comforting. Rich and bright and alive all at once.

Weird is good.

Baked Eggs with Labneh and Za’atar

Serves 2.

You will need

• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

• A small handful of Red Veined Sorrel or any hearty green, about 8 leaves

• 4 eggs, any size

• ¼ cup labneh, or Greek yogurt

• 2 cloves garlic minced

• Kosher salt

• Za’atar

• Chili crunch

• Pita or good toast for the table

Make it

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Set a kettle of water to boil.

Brush two small ramekins with olive oil. Lay your greens in the bottom of each. Crack two eggs over the top.

Whisk the labneh with the micned garlic and a pinch of salt. Spoon a dollop over the egg whites in each ramekin, leaving the yolks uncovered so you can still see them. Add a few grains of salt to each yolk.

Set the ramekins in a baking dish with sides. Pour the boiling water into the dish (not into the ramekins) until it reaches halfway up the sides. Slide the whole thing into the oven.

Bake about 14 to 15 minutes for dippable yolks. They look underdone right before they are done. Trust it.

Dust the tops with za’atar and drip chili crunch on top. Serve immediately, with pita to scoop.

From the outside, it looks like an industry that rose quickly… and collapsed just as fast. From the inside, it feels very different. It feels unfinished.

We are still in it. Still building. Still trying to prove, day after day, that a different way is possible.

A decade ago, vertical farming was supposed to change everything. Billions of dollars flowed in. Promises stacked as high as the trays themselves. And now… much of it is gone. That part is simply true.

Companies raised extraordinary amounts of capital and still couldn’t make it work. The narrative moved faster than the reality. Scale came before understanding. Because this was never software. It was always something else entirely. Food is not a trend. It is infrastructure. And infrastructure does not care about hype.

It asks you to learn before you scale. To pay attention before you declare victory. To stay close to the thing you are building, long enough to understand what it actually requires.

I watched that first wave from the inside. I felt the pull of it too… the pressure to move faster, grow bigger, prove something before it was fully understood. It’s hard not to get swept up when the world tells you that scale is the only signal that matters.

But something in me resisted. Not because I had it figured out. I didn’t. We made mistakes… plenty of them. But we made them close. Close enough to see what was working.

Close enough to understand that healthy plants and healthy margins come from the same place. Attention. Discipline.

A willingness to build for reality… not for narrative. And over time, a different question began to take hold. Not just what went wrong.

But what if this industry was built differently from the start?

What if we had valued learning over speed. What if we had cared more about nourishment than narrative. And then the question I can't let go of…

What if we valued what goes into our bodies as much as what goes into our machines?

Because when you really look at the world we’ve built, the imbalance is hard to ignore. We have built extraordinary systems for what powers our technology. We protect it, optimize it, finance it. We obsess over speed, reliability, precision. We have entire economies dedicated to what flows through our devices.

But what flows through us… we have treated as secondary. We chose speed, scale, convenience, and called it progress. But look at what we left behind.

Food has been reduced to something cheap, something convenient, something abstracted from its source. And yet it is the most fundamental input we have.

Food is not peripheral to human potential. It is the foundation of it.

It shapes how we think. How we heal. How we show up for one another. Human potential is not unlocked by software alone. It is fed. What if we built with that in mind? Not as an afterthought. Not as a trend. But as a starting point.

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I find myself imagining what that world would actually feel like. Not idealized. Just… different.

A world where the food in a hospital is considered part of the treatment. Where the greens on a patient’s plate didn’t travel 2,000 miles to get there. Where they are still alive when they arrive.

A world where children grow up knowing that food has a source, a season, a story. Where proximity matters. Where freshness matters. Where someone, somewhere, grew this for you.

And underneath all of that, something even more fundamental. A recognition that food has always been one of the ways we take care of each other.

A meal is never just a meal. It is a signal. I thought about what you need.

For most of human history, that was obvious. Somewhere along the way, we optimized it out. We made systems faster, more efficient, more scalable. And in doing so, we stripped away the proximity that made them human. Efficiency without connection is how systems break.

What if that tradeoff was never inevitable? What if we could build systems that were not only efficient… but human. Close enough to see who they serve. Strong enough to last.

⸻

This is, in many ways, what we have been trying to do at Vertical Harvest. Not just grow food. But test a different set of assumptions.

That people who are often excluded belong at the center. That food can be grown closer to the communities that need it. That business and humanity are not opposing forces. That profitability and purpose can, in fact, reinforce each other… if you are willing to build differently.

I won’t pretend it’s easy. It isn’t. We are still fighting…for the right customers, the right capital, the right conditions. Some days that fight feels closer than others.

But we are not guessing. We know what this looks like when it works. We’ve lived it.

And beneath the wreckage of the last decade, something real remains. The ability to grow food with less water. Without pesticides. Closer to where people live. Not everywhere. Not for everything. But where it works, it endures.

⸻

This was never about replacing traditional agriculture. It was about building something alongside it. Something more resilient. More regional. More connected.

The New York Times piece tells one version of this story. A necessary one. But it is not the only version. There is another story still unfolding. Quieter. Harder. Less visible. The story of what remains when the hype fades. And the story of what we choose to build next. Because this is not just about vertical farming.

It is about what we value.

We can keep building systems that are faster, bigger, and more disconnected. Or we can build systems that actually sustain us. We can keep treating food as a commodity. Or we can recognize it for what it is. Essential. Foundational. Non-negotiable.

We will never out-innovate what we are unwilling to nourish.

What if we built close enough to see the people our systems are meant to serve? That is the question I am living inside.

And despite how hard it is… it is still the question I want to build my life around.

No recipe today. Just go find something real, grown close, and eat it slowly. You'll understand everything I just wrote.

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"This piece was written in response to [Vertical Farms Tried to Compete With Open Field Farming. It Isn’t Going Well.](NYT link), published in the New York Times."

“Of course you feel heavy,” she said. “You’re transformational.”

She told me that people who live at the edge of transformation feel the tension of it in their bodies. The instability. The responsibility of helping something new come into being before the old thing has fully died.

Then she said: “You’re a bridge. You move between light and dark.”

I’ve been sitting with that. Because I haven’t been writing. Not because there’s been nothing to say. Quite the opposite. I’ve been in the trenches. Pivoting. Grinding. Holding together spreadsheets and relationships and decisions that don’t make themselves easily.

There’s a version of this that sounds heroic. The plane-building-while-flying metaphor. I’ve used it. But honestly? Some days it feels less like flying and more like gripping the nose of the thing as it races forward, hoping your hands hold.

And I know I’m not alone in that. Right now, with everything that is visibly breaking down and not yet rebuilt, so many of us are holding things together with both hands and very little sleep.

What I’ve been trying to do, in the middle of all of it, is tell the truth about what it feels like. Not the polished version. The real one. Because that’s how transformation actually happens.

We need each other’s honest accounts right now.

My mother built an electronic health record system decades before digital health became an industry. She didn’t set out to disrupt healthcare. She set out to solve a problem for her child. My brother has disabilities. She watched fragmented medical systems fail him again and again. She could have accepted that as the reality. Instead she built something that didn’t exist, because she believed something better was possible and she was willing to be the one to make it.

My cousin Rana lives in Beirut. She has lived through eleven wars. She is living through another one right now. In our last conversation, with everything unfolding around her, she said: “I’m still optimistic. A body in motion stays in motion. I have to stay in motion for my family.”

Rana built a company that crafts sonic environments, spaces shaped by sound, designed to move people emotionally. She is, in the middle of repeated violence, choosing to devote her life to resonance and beauty.

I think about that word. Choosing. In the middle of everything, she is still choosing.

My sister navigated more complexity in her young life than most people will ever face. And what she’s building for herself now, the steadiness of it, the reliability of it, didn’t come from ease. It came from every hard thing she moved through and decided, again and again, not to let define her. That is its own kind of optimism. The kind that doesn’t announce itself. The kind that just keeps building.

Three women. Three different shapes of the same choice.

Recently I went with my co-founder Caroline to the opening of a book, Women Shaping the West, photographs by Lindsay Linton Buk. Caroline and I have been building Vertical Harvest together for more than ten years. Through every hard turn, she has been one of the people who keeps me oriented toward the light when the work gets heavy and the path ahead disappears.

\The room that night was full of women whose lives are woven into this landscape. Lynette Sinclair, an Eastern Shoshone linguist, has spent her life carrying her language into the future, preserving it so it doesn’t die with her generation. Jessie Allen Gottwald runs a ranch at nine thousand feet. She began guiding people through the Wind River peaks when she was thirteen years old.

Standing there, I thought about the women who have shaped my own life. Women from high school I still speak with decades later. Women who have grown alongside me. And perhaps the greatest gift: the deep friendships I’ve formed later in life, with women quietly and boldly changing their worlds, and sometimes the world.

The sisterhood matters more than we often say out loud. We need to savor it. Hold onto it. But also see it clearly for what it is, not just support, not just comfort in hard times. Something more dangerous than that.

A force. An alternative to every system that was built without us.

Listening to the women in that room, something clarified. A pattern I keep seeing in the women I’ve known my whole life. Three ways of moving through the world.

Builders create structures that endure. Farms. Schools. Companies. Institutions. Systems that make life possible long after they themselves have stepped away. They do not wait for the right moment. They build because the thing needs to exist and they are the ones standing there.

Bridges move between worlds that rarely speak to one another. They translate values, hold tensions, create pathways where none existed before. They live in the uncomfortable middle, not because it’s easy, but because someone has to. The bridge is always load-bearing. The bridge never gets to rest.

Seers sense patterns and futures still forming. They give language to what others are only beginning to feel. They name the thing before the rest of us know it has a name. And they carry that knowledge alone, sometimes for years, before the world catches up.

Most women embody one of these strongly. But some move between all three, seeing the future, translating between worlds, building the structures that make that future real. Those are often the women quietly reshaping the systems around us. And the last to recognize it in themselves.

Women have been doing this work for centuries. Holding families through hardship. Holding communities through transition. Holding culture through upheaval. Holding entirely new futures until the rest of the world was ready to see them.

This work is not peripheral. It is not supportive. It is not secondary.

It is structural. It always has been. And it has been made invisible just as deliberately as it has been made essential.

And this moment, right now, with everything breaking and reforming at once, needs all of it. Needs all of us.

Building. Bridging. Seeing. Choosing.

I’ve been sitting with which one I am. I think my honest answer is that I’m a bridge. I have been my whole life, though I didn’t always have the word for it. What that means in practice is this: I spend a lot of time in spaces that haven’t figured themselves out yet. Between what’s failing and what isn’t ready. Between the people who hold power and the communities that need it. Between the world as it is and the world I believe is possible.

Some days I’m not sure I’ll make it across. That the distance is too far, the tension too great. I don’t know if I will actually bridge. I just know I haven’t stopped trying.

And I have to make the same choice my mother made, that Rana makes, that my sister makes. Over and over. The choice to believe something better is possible and to keep being the one who acts like it is.

That is the optimism that doesn’t make headlines. It just keeps showing up, keeps building, keeps holding the space between what was and what could be.

What I know about this moment is that we will not build our way through it alone. The chaos and uncertainty is real. The exhaustion of holding things together while the ground is shifting, that is real.

But so is this: in every room I walk into, there are women making that choice. Quietly. Persistently. With or without recognition. Before and after the world decides to notice.

We need to find each other. Name ourselves to each other. Because the future doesn’t get built by people working in isolation. It gets built by people who know they are not alone in the work.

I want to know your story.

Not the polished version. The real one. The one you’d tell at midnight to someone who gets it. The one that starts with what it actually costs.

Are you a builder? A bridge? A seer? Or all three, which is its own kind of weight, moving between them depending on what the moment needs, giving each one everything you have?

Tell me. In the comments, in a message.

And if this piece found something real in you, pass it to her. The one you’ve been thinking about while you read this. The one who is also gripping the nose of the plane. She needs to know she’s not the only one.

We find each other by telling the truth out loud.

That’s how we build this. Together.

Lebanese Fattoush with Roasted Feta and Orange Honey Glaze

While writing this piece I found myself thinking about the quiet resilience that runs through so many women’s lives. Fattoush is a Lebanese salad that transforms what might otherwise be discarded, yesterday’s bread, fresh herbs, simple vegetables, into something bright and alive.

It’s food built on renewal.

Tonight I’m adding roasted feta and a warm orange honey glaze. Something sweet, something sharp, something sustaining. A dish that holds both darkness and light.

Ingredients

For the salad:

• 2 cups chopped romaine

• 1 cup chopped cucumber

• 1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved

• ½ cup radishes, thinly sliced

• ¼ cup chopped parsley

• 2 tablespoons torn mint

• 1 scallion, thinly sliced

• For the toasted bread

• 1 pita, torn into bite-sized pieces

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• Salt

For the roasted feta

• 1 block feta

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• Fresh cracked pepper

For the orange honey glaze

• 2 tablespoons honey

• 2 tablespoons fresh orange juice

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• 1 teaspoon lemon juice

• Pinch of salt

• Optional

• ½ teaspoon sumac

Instructions

Preheat oven to 400°F.

Place feta in a small baking dish. Drizzle with olive oil and cracked pepper. Roast about 20 minutes until warm and lightly golden.

Toss pita pieces onto a sheet pan with olive oil and salt. Bake 8–10 minutes until crisp.

Whisk together honey, orange juice, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. Heat gently ins a shallow sauce pan and then let sit.

In a large bowl combine romaine, cucumber, tomatoes, radishes, parsley, mint, and scallion.

Toss with half the glaze.

Add toasted pita and mix gently.

Place roasted feta on top and drizzle remaining glaze. Sprinkle with sumac if using.

Serve immediately. Bright. Crunchy. Salty. Sweet. A reminder that renewal often begins with what we already have.

I used to believe no one could argue with food and jobs. I still believe that is mostly true…which is exactly why it matters that we keep telling this story clearly, calmly, and without apology.

Right now, this country is pouring extraordinary capital into AI…even as many remain unconvinced. We are betting billions on something we are still trying to understand. And here is what we do know: AI is energy-hungry. It is leaving the SaaS abstraction and demanding physical infrastructure: data centers, power, water, land. Atoms, not just code.

That shift demands a different kind of thinking. When you build with atoms, returns are not instant and planning cannot be short-term. The infrastructure we build today shapes what is possible for decades. We have to plan into that future, not just the next funding round.

At the same time, we remain deeply biased toward shareholder value. That instinct is not wrong…it is one of our strengths. The problem is that we have started confusing financial abstraction with durability. We invest in what scales fast, not always in what holds.

Other countries are building differently. China (gasp), for example, is investing heavily in infrastructure that is both profitable and existential: food systems, energy systems, manufacturing systems. Things made of atoms. Things that are hard to replicate. Things that keep showing up when conditions get hard.

Food is infrastructure.

As many of you know, I run Vertical Harvest, a controlled environment agriculture company. We grow fresh, nutritionally packed leafy greens and microgreens year-round in vertical farms…climate-controlled facilities that use a fraction of the water and land of conventional agriculture, with no pesticides and predictable output regardless of weather. We operate in Wyoming and Maine, and we intend to build more.

This is not experimental agriculture. This is production agriculture with modern tools.

We grow food where people live, close to where it will be consumed, with the kind of consistency that institutions, schools, and supply chains actually need.

What we have built cannot be quickly replicated. The systems, the teams, the operational knowledge, the community relationships…these take years to develop and refine. That defensibility creates real value for our stakeholders. It also creates value for the communities we serve.

Last week, our team packaged greens for more than 25 Maine schools, starting with the Westbrook High School salad bar. That matters.

It matters because growing food in the heart of a community changes what is possible.

Schools can rely on fresh, local supply at scale. Hospitals and healthcare facilities can source consistently. Demand across the state can be met without shipping food thousands of miles. The people we serve are not abstract customers, but neighbors.

If we are serious about nutrition, for kids, for patients, for families, this is where it starts: with local production, with consistency, with dignity in what we serve.

And with stability.

Price stability does not start at the shelf. It starts long before food ever reaches a plate. It starts with where and how we grow it.

When food travels thousands of miles, prices are tethered to fuel costs, weather disruptions, labor shortages, supply chain bottlenecks, and global market swings. That instability shows up immediately in school nutrition budgets, healthcare food programs, and household grocery bills.

Local food production changes that equation.

When we grow food where it is consumed, supply chains shorten. Transportation exposure drops. Pricing becomes more predictable and more resilient. Producers and buyers can plan. Institutions can budget. Communities can rely.

This is why controlled environment agriculture matters as infrastructure, not as novelty. Innovation is essential, but it has to rest on strong fundamentals, not experiments divorced from market reality.

CEA is not about reinventing agriculture. It is about applying proven technology to solve a basic problem: how do we produce fresh, nutritious food reliably, year-round, close to population centers, with stable pricing and reduced environmental impact?

The answer is not sexy. It is engineering. It is operations. It is teams who understand both agriculture and industrial production. It is capital deployed into systems that generate revenue from day one, not five years from now.

This is what investing in infrastructure looks like.

Food production is infrastructure. Nutrition is infrastructure.

These systems support public health, workforce productivity, educational outcomes, and regional economic stability. They are not a social add-on. They are a foundation.

Our team at Vertical Harvest shows up every day to make this real…growing food, building careers, and proving that local production can operate at scale while delivering the stability the market is asking for.

Starting with our communities. Starting with price stability. Starting with the understanding that reliable access to fresh, nutritious food is foundational infrastructure.

And here is what makes this moment different: everyone is now worried about the same thing. Stability.

Agreement is possible.

This is not theoretical. I have told this story before, but it is worth telling again.

At the very beginning, I went head-to-head with a Tea Party leader who wanted to kill Vertical Harvest outright. Instead of fighting him in public, I took him to lunch. Every week. For more weeks than I care to count. Eventually, we agreed on something simple and powerful…it was a good idea.

A very conservative state used public funds to build community infrastructure. Not because it was fashionable, but because it worked. Ten years later, that decision is still feeding people, still creating jobs, still proving its worth.

That is where we are again.

This is a good idea. It brings people together. It makes money. It lasts. It delivers stability when everything else is volatile.

We need to invest in things we can build. Things we can touch. Things that feed people. Things that employ them. Things that show up.

Infrastructure that does not disappear when the hype cycle moves on.

Food does not disappear. Communities do not disappear. When we invest in infrastructure that feeds people and employs them, the value does not disappear either.

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We need people who understand that atoms create defensible value. We need policymakers who see food production as infrastructure. We need communities that know they can build this themselves.

If you know someone in any of those categories, send this to them. And if you’re building something similar, or trying to fund it, scale it, or replicate it, reply.

Let’s figure this out together.

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I don’t dismiss that language anymore. There is so much we don’t understand, and I’m increasingly aware of how limited our perception really is. My brain, like most of ours, can’t actually see what’s happening beneath the surface of things.

Many of us have been searching for patterns as a way of dealing with this moment. Trying to name what’s breaking. Trying to understand why so many systems feel brittle at once.

And yet, there is something real underneath what people are reaching for.

What I see, again and again, is not the universe responding to attitude, but systems responding to coherence.

Every system has thresholds. Bodies do. Organizations do. Cities do. Food systems do. When inputs arrive too fast, too hard, or too disconnected from meaning, systems don’t become more efficient. They collapse into survival.

That collapse is often moralized after the fact. We call people irrational, polarized, greedy, broken. But much of what we’re witnessing is regulatory failure: nervous systems overwhelmed, institutions pushed past their capacity, feedback loops no longer holding.

This is the part that often gets mislabeled as “frequency.”

What people are sensing is state.

When a nervous system is regulated, perception widens. Options appear. Timing improves. When a nervous system is overloaded, everything narrows. Thinking becomes binary. Decisions become defensive. Survival replaces imagination.

That’s true for individuals. It’s also true for groups. Rooms have nervous systems. So do organizations. So do cities.

What we call “systems” are, at their core, networks of people regulating one another moment by moment. Which is why coherence doesn’t originate inside a single person.

It happens between us.

We are humans first, long before we are roles or positions. Our nervous systems evolved in relationship. We borrow steadiness from people we trust and offer it back without thinking about it. Coherence is not a personal achievement. It’s a relational state. It’s what happens when people feel seen, heard, and unthreatened enough to think together. Human connection isn’t a soft overlay on systems; it’s the infrastructure that keeps them from collapsing.

You know this feeling.

It’s what happens when you’re with people you trust. Sitting around a table. Cooking together. Talking without performing or proving anything. No one is managing the room. No one is scanning for threat. There’s a glow in those moments—not because nothing can go wrong, but because your body stops bracing. Your shoulders drop. Your breath deepens. Time stretches just enough to let you feel where you are.

For a while, the world feels workable.

Nothing feels brittle. Nothing feels urgent in the wrong way. You’re available. You can listen. You can laugh. You can think a few steps ahead without fear snapping everything shut.

That sense of safety isn’t sentimental. It’s physiological, and it’s created in relationship. It allows curiosity to return. It gives imagination room to re-enter. It makes risk feel possible instead of dangerous.

That is coherence, experienced from the inside.

When enough people feel it at once, systems behave differently. Conversations soften. Time opens up. Decisions stop being purely defensive. Possibility returns, not because the facts changed, but because the system stopped protecting itself from reality.

This is why leadership is less about vision than we like to admit, and more about regulation.

I’ve learned this by watching myself lead. Leaders are regulators, whether we intend to be or not. Not because we control others, but because our state sets the conditions in the room. We pace inputs. We shape attention. We either amplify fear or create room for clarity.

When I carry the weight of a moment in my body, everyone feels it. My urgency tightens the room. Conversations shorten. Options disappear.

When I steady myself first, the opposite happens. The system reopens. Momentum returns, not because the facts have changed, but because people can think again. Under real pressure, I can feel the fork in the road: whether I transmit strain or help the room find its footing. That choice matters.

Fear spreads. Calm spreads. Clarity spreads. So does numbness.

When people say “the universe responds,” what they’re often noticing is this: when we change our internal state, we change the system we’re inside. Different signals go out. Different responses come back. Different options become available.

That’s not magic. That’s biology, attention, and social physics.

This is where food enters the conversation, not as metaphor, but as structure.

Food is one of the few systems that touches everything at once: biology, culture, labor, economics, infrastructure, care. Food regulates nervous systems. It creates rhythm. It slows time. It stabilizes households. It reduces background stress.

When food systems are local, dignified, and reliable, they free cognitive bandwidth. People can think beyond survival. When food systems are extractive, fragile, or distant, they add constant, low-grade stress to everyday life.

Food doesn’t just sustain life.

It coordinates systems.

This is why food belongs in conversations about leadership, coherence, and the future of our cities. It’s one of the most powerful regulatory tools we have, and we’ve treated it as either commodity or sentiment for too long.

If we want different outcomes, we have to stop asking people to be better inside broken systems. We have to design systems that can hold human nervous systems without breaking them. Systems that feed rather than extract. Systems that stabilize rather than overwhelm.

That is the work. Not manifesting. Not bypassing. Not hardening. But building the conditions for coherence, again and again, at every scale we can touch.

And sometimes, that work begins exactly where it always has: around a table, with people we trust, sharing food that gives our bodies enough safety to believe, if only for an evening, that the world can still hold.

And this is where the work gets practical.

Coherence doesn’t live in ideas alone. It has to land somewhere. Often, it lands at the table.

This is what we make when we need the world to feel workable again. It simmers slowly. The house fills with lemon, olive oil, and herbs. It gives our bodies enough safety to settle so we can talk, laugh, and think a little more clearly.

Nothing fancy. Nothing performative. Just food that regulates.

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Mediterranean Lemony Chicken and Rice Soup with Herbs

Bright, savory, and generous with lemon. This soup should taste like it’s been sitting in the sun.

Ingredients:

• 1 whole chicken, or 2–3 pounds bone-in chicken thighs

• 3 tablespoons good olive oil

• 1 large yellow onion, finely chopped

• 3 carrots, sliced

• 3 celery stalks, sliced

• 5 cloves garlic, smashed

• 1 cup short-grain rice (arborio or medium-grain works beautifully)

• 2 teaspoons kosher salt, plus more to taste

• Freshly ground black pepper

• 1 bay leaf

• 1 small bunch fresh dill, finely chopped

• 1 large bunch fresh parsley, finely chopped

• Optional: a small handful of fresh oregano or thyme

• Zest of 2 lemons

• Juice of 3–4 lemons (don’t be shy)

Method:

Warm the olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onion, carrots, and celery with a pinch of salt. Cook slowly until soft and fragrant, letting everything sweat without browning. Add the garlic and cook for another minute.

Add the chicken, rice, bay leaf, and a few herb stems if you have them. Season with salt and pepper. Pour in enough water to cover everything by about two inches.

Bring to a gentle boil, then reduce to a steady simmer. Let it cook uncovered for 45–60 minutes, until the chicken is tender and the rice has softened and lightly thickened the broth.

Remove the chicken, shred the meat, and return it to the pot. Stir in the lemon zest, then start with the juice of three lemons. Taste. Add more lemon and salt until the broth is unmistakably bright and alive.

Turn off the heat and stir in the chopped herbs at the very end. The soup should smell green and fresh.

Finish with a generous drizzle of olive oil.

Serve hot. With bread. With people you trust. With time.

This is food that steadies and wakes you up at the same time. Bright without urgency. Grounded without heaviness.

Which is often where coherence begins.

I considered not posting this morning, out of respect. A pause. A moment of silence. Of course, whether I post or not is not the point.

What matters is the choice we make, again and again. To choose light over darkness. To refuse numbness. To stay awake to one another. To keep choosing differently until the pattern our country is locked into finally begins to change. So today, like every day, the choice is still ours.

Every year, the teams I build and lead at Vertical Harvest and at my architecture firm, GYDE Architects, choose a single word to carry us through the year.

My co-founder at Vertical Harvest, Caroline, taught me this practice years ago, and it has been formative. Not aspirational. Formative.

The word is a filter. A framework. We return to it monthly. We ask whether our decisions align with it. It shapes what we’re learning, where we’re stretching, and what we’re trying to protect. Over time, I’ve come to see it as a way of staying oriented when the year inevitably goes awry.

So I wanted to share the practice, and the word I’ve chosen this year.

When I first shared my initial choice with my team, they teased me. Gently. Lovingly. They said I always choose words that sound like shampoo commercials. That was my first sign it wasn’t right.

I had started with Essence. It made sense intellectually. Strip things back. Simplify. Get to the core. But when I lived with it, it felt heavy. Too compressed. Too inward. Like holding my breath. Like holding everything.

When I asked myself why it didn’t fit, my mind went somewhere familiar: Charles Bukowski’s poem The Laughing Heart. I’ve always loved Tom Waits’s voice, and really everything about him. He’s that rare combination of pleased, surprised, and serious.

Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. There are ways out. There is light somewhere.

That line has followed me for years. I know I bring the light. I always have.

In the darkest moments, when things feel most constrained, I find it. Or maybe I insist on it. I used to think that was just an ability I had. A temperament. Something innate. This year I realized something else. It’s my sword.

It may not be much light, but it beats the darkness.

There was a reason Essence called to me. I do want to simplify. I am simplifying. I want to be who I actually am, not who pressure tries to turn me into.

One morning this week before an important presentation, I could feel my energy slipping. I felt the pull toward carrying the heaviness instead of moving it.And then it landed quietly and clearly: I already know who I am. And I choose light.

That choice showed up immediately. I changed how I showed up. I shifted how I presented my case. I brought my light to the table deliberately, even though it would have been easier to match the gravity I was carrying.

And something changed.

I felt it first in my weary supporters. Their posture shifted. Their attention sharpened. There was proof behind the shift. A plan. A clear path forward. A desired outcome people could actually get behind.

This wasn’t optimism untethered from reality. It was a stark choice made visible: we could choose the light and move the work forward, or let the weight of the moment pull it into the dark. The room breathed again. What had felt closed began to move.

This is possible.

Be on the watch, the gods will offer you chances, know them, take them.

Last year, I wrote about whimsy. About the instruction that kept surfacing in my life: protect your whimsy. I wasn’t talking about frivolity. I was talking about attentiveness. About refusing to harden. About staying enchanted in a world that rewards grimness and calls it seriousness.

Whimsy, I’ve learned, isn’t fragile. It’s resistant.

It keeps the nervous system out of survival mode, where thinking narrows and bad decisions get made. It allows beauty, humor, curiosity, and intimacy to stay in the room when the stakes are real. That realization is what finally moved me from Essence to the word that actually fits.

The word I choose is Revel. Not because this year will be easy. It won’t be. Not because I’m interested in celebration for its own sake. I’m not.

Revel is about choosing aliveness in the middle of difficulty. It’s a refusal to let pressure flatten curiosity, joy, humor, or beauty out of the work. Hard years have a way of narrowing everything: thinking, relationships, imagination. You start to confuse seriousness with credibility. Endurance with leadership.

Revel is my pushback.

This week I’m heading to DC to try to bring sanity to a decision the USDA has imposed on our business. Will it work? I don’t know. The stakes are real. The consequences matter.

But I do know this: I won’t meet this moment by going dim. When I dwell in the heavy, everything stays heavy.

So I choose motion. I choose light. I choose to lead from aliveness, not just endurance.

In a hard year, Revel asks this of me: I don’t adopt severity as proof of seriousness. I don’t dim what gives me energy to calm the room. I make space for beauty, laughter, food, intimacy, and curiosity alongside real consequence. I choose vitality alongside vigilance.

Revel is not reckless. It’s self-protective. It keeps clarity intact. It protects judgment. It keeps the edge sharp without letting it turn brittle.

You are marvelous, Bukowski writes. The gods wait to delight in you.

This year, I’m letting them.

And because revel also lives at home, not just at work, this is what the kids and I cooked together one night, letting the rest of the world fall out of reach.

Greek Meatballs with Feta and Tomato Sauce

Ingredients:

For the meatballs:

• 1 lb ground beef or lamb

• 1 small onion, diced

• 2 cloves garlic, minced

• 2 large eggs

• 11/2 cup panko breadcrumbs

• 1 cup milk

• 1 bunch fresh parsley, finely chopped

• 1 teaspoon dried mint

• Salt and pepper

• 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

For the sauce

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• 4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

• 1 can whole tomatoes, crsh with your hands and reserve the juice

• Salt and pepper

• Red pepper flakes to taste

• Feta cheese chunks

To serve

• Cooked orzo

• Extra feta or herbs if you like

• Method

Preheat oven to 400 Degrees. Whisk the eggs and milk together in a bowl. Combine all meatball ingredients in a large metal bowl and mix gently. Roll into golf-ball-sized meatballs.

In a large saute pan add olive oil and garlic over a low heat and brown slowly, add hand crushed tomatoes and sauce from can and red pepper flakes, season, and simmer.

After slightly thickened, add meatballs to the sauce. Cover and cook in the oven for about 45 minutes. Remove cover and add feta chunks and put back in the oven for 15 minutes.

Garnish with parsley. Serve over orzo. Rich. Comforting. Aliveness, on a plate.

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I have seen what it looks like when people refuse fear.

We have all seen it.

We see it when people show up in their communities to say no to what they know is wrong. When they stand in streets, in town halls, in workplaces, in courtrooms, and insist that the world as it is does not get to stay that way simply because it is powerful or entrenched or convenient.

What has been happening to our own citizens on the streets has brought tears to so many of our eyes. Tears of horror. Of disbelief. Of grief. Moments that force a reckoning with how fragile the social fabric really is, and how quickly fear can be weaponized.

Sometimes that courage has cost lives. Literally. And yet those acts do not vanish. They start movements. They spark fires. They build resistance and resiliency in the rest of us. They show a way forward. They bring light, abundance, and momentum where there was once only silence or compliance.

Fear does not just scare us. It immobilizes us.

Paralysis is the real corrosion. A kind of rust. You sit. You worry. You replay. You wait for certainty that never comes. And while you are frozen, nothing can be built. Nothing can be repaired. Nothing can be imagined.

The moment you set fear aside, even imperfectly, something else rushes in. Creative thought. Problem solving. A willingness to test, to adapt, to move. Motion itself becomes an antidote.

I have been living this truth in my own small, brutal microcosm.

The USDA is part of a longer arc. One element in a deliberate plan to stabilize and sustain a capital-intensive business that is already operating in the real world. Not a rescue. Not a shortcut. A rational component of building durability into work meant to last.

And then the ground shifts.

The agency suddenly institutes a temporary, portfolio-wide pause on certain loan guarantees while it reassesses overall portfolio performance and underwriting guidance. The shift is abrupt. It lands without warning. For businesses like ours, built in rural communities with the same agency’s support and participation, it creates immediate dislocation.

This is not a judgment on our business. It is not a response to a failure in fundamentals. But it is intrusive all the same. A policy reversal from within the very system that helped make the work possible. Our process is affected by timing, not by viability. Still, the whiplash is real.

It is also a reckoning for the vertical farming industry as it stands today. Not as an idea, but as a tool still under development. Nascent, yes. Uneven, yes. But no different from how so many of the societal systems we now depend on were formed…through trial, error, iteration, and learning in public. Infrastructure does not emerge fully formed. It is built, stress-tested, and refined over time.

That is the terrain innovation has always required. And this is where the story stops being about us.

We say we want solutions to climate pressure, food insecurity, housing shortages, and fragile rural economies. We celebrate ingenuity in theory. But the systems that support innovation are often asked to balance urgency with stewardship, and sometimes that tension shows up as reassessment rather than momentum. For innovators across food, energy, housing, health, and climate, this landscape is familiar.

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This is the moment where many people stop. They tell themselves it is too hard. That waiting is safer than pushing. Fear convinces them that stillness is prudence.

It is not.

Paralysis is the greater risk. Fear freezes people and systems long after it is clear they no longer fit the world they are meant to serve. And nothing adaptive, nothing resilient, nothing humane is ever built from a seated position.

And yet, I have been at my desk all weekend.

Not because I feel fearless. Quite the opposite. Fear shows up regularly. It taps me on the shoulder. It asks familiar questions. What if this doesn’t work. What if the ground shifts again.

When that happens, I set it aside.

Not permanently. Not with bravado. Just long enough to do the work in front of me. The calls. The writing. The decisions that keep things moving. I don’t wait for fear to disappear. I work alongside it, and I choose motion anyway.

Tonight, I was reminded of that in a simple way. A friend and investor reflected back the strength in my voice and offered a phrase that has been passed down for a reason: feel the fear, and do it anyway.

Not deny it. Not conquer it. Feel it. Name it. And move.

There is no recipe this week. No soft landing at the end. Just the practice itself.

Let’s feel the fear. And do what we can anyway.

Make friends with chaos. Hold a calm mind. Be comfortable with the unknown.

They resonated because this has been a m-f*cker of a week. You’ve heard that from me before, but it somehow always finds a new edge. The kind of week where you keep functioning while the ground keeps shifting. Where uncertainty isn’t a concept…it’s the condition.

This is not new terrain for me. It is the terrain.

For all the good we try to do, things go wrong. People get tired. Patience thins. Effort does not guarantee relief. Sometimes it isn’t enough. And sometimes the systems that were meant to carry you reveal their cracks…exposing you, amplifying vulnerability, making the weight heavier rather than lighter.

That doesn’t mean the work is failing. It means the work is real.

Working at the edge has a consequence: visibility. Everything gets louder there…progress, strain, disagreement, impatience. Mess is not evidence of collapse. It is evidence of proximity. Failure hides. This work doesn’t.

“Make friends with chaos” isn’t a metaphor. It’s a discipline. It means letting things move without losing your center. Staying flexible without becoming unmoored. Rejecting the fantasy that stability is something you earn and then keep. It also means forgiving human frailty. Championing second chances. Defying unkindness, even when it would be easier not to.

Sing into pain. Dance daily. Swoon under clouds.

I thought about that driving with my daughter, both of us screaming “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales,” voices cracking, laughing, letting sound carry what the week couldn’t. In that moment, she understood the only way to help me wasn’t to fix anything, or solve anything, or even talk it through…but to help me let it go. She turned it up, and we did.

Listen to the quiet. Seek growth. Trust in change.

After I wrote the first draft of this piece yesterday, I found myself celebrating with my dear friend Giovannina Anthony. Against long odds, she and a deeply committed, patient, strategic group of people helped make a conservative state a sanctuary state for abortion access.

The work isn’t finished. The state is already moving to redraw lines, to narrow protections, to preserve everything except the one thing that was just safeguarded. But for today, what she and her colleagues accomplished stands as a beacon. Proof that patience is not passive. That persistence is not naïve. That the art of the possible still exists.

We stayed late. Mark and I were among the last ones there (no surprise). And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, you just need one good round with friends…the kind that reminds you why you keep showing up.

Giovannina stayed the course when backing down would have been easier. When fear would have been reasonable. When the personal cost was real…to her career, her family, her safety. Quiet courage rarely gets recognition in the moment. But I have to believe that patience and persistence do not go unnoticed in the universe.

Honor the bright-hearted. Be trustworthy. Believe in goodness.

These are instructions for weathering a storm. And it is stormy right now…for all of us.

I shared these notes with my team at Vertical Harvest. Not to motivate them. To name what they already live. They work inside uncertainty every day. They challenge assumptions because there is no script. They refuse binaries because real problems don’t live there. They rely on trust and close creative bonds because systems fail without them.

That isn’t culture. It’s capability.

As children, we understand uncertainty instinctively. We don’t expect guarantees. Somewhere along the way, adulthood teaches us that control is possible. It isn’t. Responsibility isn’t about certainty. It’s about how you show up when certainty disappears.

Drop your shoulders. Bend your knees. Head for the light.

I am radical. Not because it’s brave. Because it’s necessary. And no, it isn’t safe. Radical paths don’t show you the ending before you begin. They don’t reward you with reassurance. They ask whether you’re willing to keep moving without it.

People ask when it will be enough. Why I keep going. They tell me it’s okay to stop. That they’ll still love me if I don’t make it.

What they miss is this: the work is the practice.

Vertical Harvest has been my training ground for this way of living. Not because it’s extreme, but because it’s honest. It taught me how to live on the brink without losing myself. How to value language and silence. How to trust others. How to look up and move forward even when my knees shake.

That education is not abstract, it is embodied. I wouldn’t trade it.

Earlier in this short year, I wrote about wanting more joy in the present. That wasn’t retreat. It was correction. I didn’t forget how to be responsible. I remembered how to be alive inside responsibility. Not naive. Awake. Not fearless. Willing. Not in control. In motion.

Be electric.

That is radical living.

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This week’s recipe: Stanley Tucci’s Zucchini Spaghetti (alla Nerano)

This dish looks simple. It isn’t. It asks for time, patience, and trust that waiting is part of the work.

Ingredients:

• 4–5 medium zucchini

• Sunflower oil, for frying

• Kosher salt

• Spaghetti

• Unsalted butter

• Fresh basil leaves

• Parmigiano-Reggiano, finely grated

• Pecorino Romano, finely grated

• Freshly ground black pepper

Instructions:

Slice the zucchini into thin rounds.

Heat a generous amount of olive oil in a wide pan. Fry the zucchini in batches, seasoning lightly with salt, until they are golden and tender. They should collapse slightly, not crisp.

Transfer the zucchini to a plate lined with paper towels. Let them cool.

If you can, let them rest for several hours or overnight. This isn’t optional if you want the full effect…the zucchini soften, deepen, and begin to melt into themselves.

When you’re ready to cook, bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil and cook the spaghetti until just al dente. Reserve a generous cup of the pasta water.

In a separate pan over low heat, add a small knob of butter and a portion of the zucchini. Mash gently with a spoon to create the beginnings of a sauce.

Add the drained spaghetti directly to the pan, along with a splash of pasta water. Toss gently, letting the starch and fat emulsify.

Remove from heat. Add more zucchini, torn basil, Parmigiano, Pecorino, and black pepper. Toss again, adding pasta water a little at a time, until the sauce becomes glossy and coats the pasta.

Taste. Adjust salt only if needed. Serve immediately.

This is not a dish you rush. You fry. You wait. You trust the rest. You let simple things become something richer than they were. Which feels like the right instruction for this week.

I also know my daughter will roll her eyes as she reads this, and she’s not wrong. The whole thing is a mess. A little mystical. A little Instagram-coded. The kind of thing serious people are supposed to outgrow.

And still. The messages kept finding me all year.

Not from the heavens. From my phone. From some account called Message From the Universe. Words highlighted in yellow. Serif fonts pretending to be scripture. The kind of thing you scroll past quickly so no one mistakes you for someone who believes in signs.

Except they found me when I needed them.

I saved them. Catalogued them, actually. Screenshots stacked like pressed flowers. December 6. December 7. December 8. Don’t give up. You’re not behind. You’re becoming. Act like it’s already yours. My daughter had to catalogue them too… because, unbelievably, we shared a camera roll until the end of this year. Which means she was exposed to every single one of these earnest little messages, whether she wanted to be or not.

Why did I keep them?

Because this year my mind did all the work. My mind carried me through crisis and complexity and endless problem-solving. It built scaffolding. It negotiated. It planned. It endured.

But my spirit? My body?

They lagged behind, waving from the distance like, Hey… remember us? Maybe those messages were less about belief and more about balance. Maybe they were a way back in.

I’m done with resolutions.

I don’t want declarations or dramatic reinventions. I don’t want to burn it all down every January just to feel like I’ve done something. I want to think about life as a continuum. A long, ongoing practice of tuning. Not fixing. Not optimizing. Tuning. Turning the dial slightly. Listening. Adjusting. Again and again.

This year matters to me, not because the calendar says so, but because of where it sits in a longer arc. In numerology, 2025 was a nine year. An ending. A clearing. A culmination. And whether you believe in numerology or not, anyone who lived through the last year knows this much: something closed.

For me, it was a nine-year cycle that began in 2016, when Vertical Harvest opened its doors. I thought that was the manifestation. The building. The company. The proof.

But sitting in the Atlanta airport this year, exhausted and early and oddly quiet, I did an exercise about what I actually want to manifest in my life. Not build. Not accomplish. Not prove.

Be.

What landed surprised me in its simplicity. I want to be joyful. I want to be wild.

Not reckless. Not chaotic. Wild in the way living things are wild. Responsive. Alive. Uncontained by spreadsheets and seriousness. What a relief, to realize that the work I’ve been doing all these years was never the end goal. It was a chapter. A necessary one. A demanding one. But not the destination.

Vertical Harvest wasn’t the manifestation. It was the training.

And then at the end of the year, this post came to me. Orange text. Blunt and unapologetic:

“One of the healthiest things a woman can do for her mental health is protect her whimsy. Not her productivity. Not her image. Her whimsy.”

Yes. That’s it.

Because the world is very good at hardening women. At telling us to be realistic. Grounded. Unbothered. Efficient. Palatable. Risk, when it’s tolerated at all, is expected to arrive already justified, already smoothed, already made safe.

And there is nothing weak about staying enchanted.

It takes strength to believe in good things after you’ve seen how cruel life can be. It takes courage to keep wonder intact when cynicism would be easier. Protecting whimsy isn’t denial. It’s resistance…a quiet one, practiced daily, in a culture that rewards certainty and endurance far more than imagination.

So maybe this is what I’m carrying into this new year. Not resolutions. Not goals. Not a five-step plan.

A commitment to tuning. To paying attention to what my body has been saying all along. To letting my spirit move at its own pace instead of dragging it behind my mind. To taking joy when it shows up, without interrogating it. To staying a little wild, even in a world that confuses exhaustion with virtue.

I don’t need the universe to be talking to me. I just need to be listening to myself again. If the messages helped me remember that, then I’m grateful. Even if they came wrapped in yellow highlights and Instagram fonts.

This isn’t a beginning or an ending. It’s a reset within a continuum. A quiet recalibration.

I’m not reinventing myself this year.

I’m returning.

A Whimsical Dutch Baby (serves whoever shows up)

Preheat the oven to 425°F. Put a cast iron skillet inside while it heats. This matters.

In a blender (or a bowl, imperfectly):

• 3 eggs

• ¾ cup milk (any kind… this is not a test)

• ¾ cup flour

• A pinch of salt and one of nutmeg

• A little vanilla if you feel like it

Blend or whisk until smooth-ish. Don’t overthink it.

Pull the hot skillet out of the oven. Add a generous knob of butter. Let it melt and sizzle like it’s happy to be here. Pour the batter in. Put it back in the oven.

Do not open the door. This is a trust exercise.

Bake 18–22 minutes, until it has puffed dramatically, collapsed slightly at the edges, and looks like it’s mid-conversation with itself.

Now the whimsical part:

Top it with whatever feels right today, not what the recipe says.

• Lemon juice and powdered sugar

• Berries and yogurt

• Sautéed mushrooms and herbs

• Leftover greens and a fried egg

• Honey and flaky salt

Eat it straight from the pan if you want. Cut it unevenly. Let it deflate. That’s the point. Mine wasn’t this perfect today, but you know what? There’s always next time for fine tuning.

Happy New Year friends, and what a year it’s been. Thank you for supporting the work I started this year, it has helped me. I hope it has helped you in some small way too.

This year opened under the sign of the Snake…and moved toward the Horse.

The Snake asks for shedding. Not drama. Not destruction. Just the quiet, often painful letting go of what no longer fits. Old skins. Old stories. Old ways of proving worth. This year required that kind of shedding…assumptions about growth, about pace, about what success was supposed to look like.

The Horse, by contrast, is about stamina. Forward motion. Staying upright over distance. Not sprinting. Not performing. Just continuing.

2025 demanded both.

As the year closes, it does so at the winter solstice…the darkest point on the calendar. Not an ending, but a pause. The moment when the light stops retreating, even if you can’t yet see it returning.

This December forced a reckoning.

I can see what we built, and how we built it. I can see where integrity held, and where it faltered. I can see what we proved…and what we didn’t.

But the hardest question wasn’t operational or strategic. It was quieter and more personal: why I stayed.

That turning point, when nothing looks like it’s working and yet the light has already begun to return, reframed the question for me.

When I finally said this out loud, my board chair, one of many mentors who has walked this road with me, said something simple: Of course you stayed. It has never been about you. It’s about your brother.

He was right.

This work has never been about personal endurance or professional identity. It has always been about building a world where the people we love are not afterthoughts. Where systems make room. Where dignity is designed in, not argued for.

The solstice reminds me that staying isn’t bravado. It’s devotion. It’s choosing to stand in the dark long enough for something better to emerge.

Not because the path is clear, but because the purpose is.

This year, as much of the vertical farming industry collapsed under its own weight, I watched competitors disappear almost overnight. Companies that once dominated headlines shut their doors, some quietly, some very publicly. And in the aftermath, I watched a different kind of return…fewer promises, less noise, and more people willing to do the hard, unglamorous work with humility, clarity, and grit. The hype burned off. What remains is purpose.

I was one of the first to step into this industry. A woman. An architect. Carrying a why that didn’t fit the prevailing narrative. And now, I am one of the last still standing. Not because we were louder. Not because we raised more. But because we chose people…again and again…even when it was harder.

There is a Viktor Frankl quote that has been rattling in my brain this year: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

That space is where this year happened. When capital tightened. When systems failed. When fear whispered that walking away might be easier. So many times it would have been easier to give up.

So many.

To not expose myself to the agonizing doubt. The fear. The overwhelm. In that space, I chose to stay. To respond with responsibility, not reaction. With care, not collapse. With meaning, not momentum for its own sake.

A good friend reminded me this year of Simone de Beauvoir. She believed that meaning is not inherited…it is constructed through action, through choosing responsibility even when the outcome is uncertain.

That ethic has shaped every hard decision I made this year. Leadership, to me, isn’t about having answers. It’s about refusing to abandon others when certainty disappears. A good life is one that strengthens the people around you…that makes it possible for others to keep going.

And in staying, we did build.

At our farm at home in Wyoming, the one we have run since 2016, we deepened what it means to be rooted…strengthening the model that first proved this work was possible. We refined. We stabilized. We remembered who we are.

In Maine, we crossed a different threshold altogether. A farm brought fully into being. Systems coming online. Teams stepping into place. People who had waited years for this work finally walking through the doors. A promise moving from drawing board to lived reality.

These were not flashy milestones. They were earned ones.

Vertical Harvest has always been about lifting ourselves and each other up. Not as a slogan, but as a daily practice. It is slower. It is messier. It demands more of you than you think you have. And it is the only reason we are still here.

This was also the year I began to write…not as marketing, not as explanation, but as truth. Somewhere along this journey, I found my voice. Or maybe I stopped muting it. Writing became a way to return to those December questions…to sit with them instead of outrunning them.

I do this work because food is never just food. It is dignity. It is access. It is who gets to participate and who gets left behind. It is systems made visible. It is a mirror.

I do this work because a meaningful life is not built on ease…it is built on choosing to remain human inside systems that reward the opposite.

Who knows what next year will bring. But this year, I can answer December’s questions honestly. We did not get everything right. We did not prove everything we hoped to.

And still, we stayed.

As this year closes, I am not interested in triumph narratives. I am interested in endurance with integrity. In quiet courage. In staying soft without breaking. In building something that can hold people, even when the ground shifts beneath it.

We are still here. And that is not an accident.

I keep coming back to this meal at the end of long seasons. A whole chicken and rice, cooked together in one pot. It’s simple, steady food, the kind that nourishes without demanding too much in return. Nothing performative.

One-Pot Roasted Chicken and Rice

A meal for endurance, not applause

Ingredients

• 1 whole chicken, about 4 pounds

• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

• Small pinch saffron threads

• 1½ Teaspoon turmeric

• 3-4 tablespoons olive oil

• 1 onion, finely chopped

• 2 garlic cloves, chopped

• 1½ cup long-grain rice (basmati or jasmine works well)

• 2½ cups chicken stock

• 1 lemon sliced & one juiced

• Green herbs & microgreens

Method

1. Heat your oven to 375°F.

2. Pat the chicken dry with paper towel and season generously inside and out with salt and pepper.

3. In a large Dutch oven or heavy ovenproof pot, heat 3 tablespoons olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until golden, 7-9 minutes. Reduce heat to medium-low, sprinkle the onion with a little salt, add the garlic and cook until softened, 1 to 2 minutes. Add ½ teaspoon of turmeric and stir until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Turn the heat off and transfer the onion mixture to a small bowl. Don’t wash the pot.

4. Sprinkle the remaining 1 teaspoon of turmeric all over the chicken. In the same pot, heat the remaining 1 tablespoon of oil over medium-high, and carefully place the chicken breast side down in the pot. Cook the chicken on the stovetop until the breast side is golden, about 5 minutes. If the heat is too strong, reduce to medium. You’re not completely browning the skin, just getting some color on it. Very carefully, with the help of tongs and a wooden spoon, or using your hands, turn the chicken over and cook the back side until golden, another 5 minutes.

5. Spread the onions evenly around the chicken, keeping them off the skin. Add 2½ cups of chicken stock to the edge of the pot, making sure it doesn’t wash over the bird. Bring the liquid to a brief boil, then cover the pot and transfer it to the oven to cook for about 50 minutes.

6. Take the pot out of the oven and spoon the rice into the broth around the perimeter, distributing it as evenly as possible. If any rice lands on the chicken or gets caught in the wings, gently push it down into the liquid so it can cook fully. Sprinkle the chicken with lemon juice, lemon slices and saffron, if using. Cover the pot and return it to the oven for about 30 minutes, until both the chicken and rice are tender. Let the dish rest, covered, for 5 minutes before serving, and finish with fresh herbs if you like.

7. It’s best to carve the chicken right in the pot and serve along with the rice. But you can also gently lift the chicken out and place it on a board and carve.

This is food that nourishes without exhausting. Food that gives more than it asks.

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On Thursday night, I stepped outside into the cold. The kind of Wyoming cold that clears the lungs and sharpens the senses. Wet snowflakes drifted down, catching the thin winter light. Above me, the Cold Moon, the last full moon of the year, held its ground. A moon for endings. A moon for beginnings. A moon for release.

Standing beneath it, I remembered something simple but powerful: an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force. Physics… but also leadership. Also life. I can’t control the context, and this year’s context has bordered on impossible, but I can choose the force. I can choose what propels me forward and what no longer gets to shape my trajectory.

And as I looked ahead from that cold, still moment, the question became unavoidable: what deserves the heat of my attention in the year to come…and what no longer does?

What I Release

I release the feeling that I am behind.

I’m done letting myself be defined by a statistic… that barely 2 percent of venture capital flows to women. That number reflects a market inefficiency, not a deficiency in me. Physics teaches us that systems resist change until enough force shifts the equilibrium, and intention is a force. I’m not here to contort myself to a broken system. I’m here to apply pressure with precision. I’m here to change the equilibrium.

What we’re building isn’t niche or “female led”. It’s aligned with where the world is going: human-centered, generative, designed to meet a real need and produce real returns. That’s not accident or luck. That’s intention. And I feel that truth in my bones. The right partners won’t categorize me… they’ll recognize the inevitability of the work.

I will build with that inevitability in mind. I will lead from conviction, not comparison. I will let the force of what I’m creating redraw the boundaries of what’s possible.

I release the belief that joy must sit outside the grind.

Rigor isn’t the enemy of creativity… it’s the runway. The grind, the daily commitment, the repetition, the unglamorous work, is the recipe that brings joy to the table. Heat, pressure, friction… that’s where transformation happens.

What I want most is to be joyful and free, not in spite of the work, but through it. Joy is born in the moment discipline turns into flow, when something with weight and meaning emerges because you willed it into being. That is freedom: the freedom of creation, of agency, of building something that carries your imprint and your intention.

I will honor that discipline. I will choose the kind of rigor that unlocks joy, the kind of structure that makes freedom possible, and to let the work itself become the place where I feel most alive.

I release self-doubt.

This year forged me into a CEO. Entrepreneurship runs in my family’s blood. It shaped the people who raised me and the stories I grew up inside. I used to say I never set out to be a CEO. And yet here I am… not by aspiration, but by evolution.

This year tested every assumption and every seam of my resilience. Instead of fracturing me, the pressure reshaped me. It clarified my instincts, sharpened my conviction, strengthened my capacity to lead. I’m not the person who began this year. I’m stronger, steadier, more precise.

What I lived through didn’t break me; it built me. It pushed me into the CEO I was meant to become, not by title, but by temperament, courage, and clarity. My voice carries weight because it’s been earned through fire, repetition, and consequence. And I’m done minimizing it.

I will walk into rooms with that energy…not loud, not defensive, but grounded, immovable, and aligned with the truth of who I am and what I’m building.

I release the idea that I’m acted upon.

Waiting can be maddening…the stalled deals, the unanswered emails, the systems that move at a pace that defies urgency. But I refuse to mistake delay for defeat. I am not a victim of circumstance. There is always a solution, always another way through.

I will not wait for conditions to shift or for someone else to clear the runway. I design the runway. I build the structure. I chart the direction. My agency doesn’t come from permission… it comes from intention, clarity, and the discipline to create the openings I need.

I release those who make me small.

The cold clarified this one. There is no room in this next cycle for people who siphon energy, diminish capacity, or treat vision as frivolous. I’m done contorting myself around the limits of others. I will no longer give them oxygen.

I will choose only the relationships that expand possibility…to walk with those who honor the work, see its scale, and meet imagination with imagination.

I release fear — especially fear.

Fear narrows the field. Fear distorts the signal. Fear keeps the deeper truth out of reach. I’m done with that.

What I invite now is transparency, honesty, and clarity… even when they’re sharp. Especially when they’re sharp. Those are the conditions where real alignment happens. Clarity cuts away the noise. Honesty reveals what’s workable and what isn’t. Transparency forces coherence between intention and action.

I don’t need comfort… I need truth. Truth is a tool. Truth is direction. I trust that. I trust myself inside that.

I will lead with that clarity… to let truth be the force that moves me, steadies me, and shapes everything I build next.

I release the myth of failure.

We talk about failure as if it’s a result… a verdict. But the truth is far more elemental: outcomes are unpredictable; the process is where the real transformation happens. This year proved that again and again.

The process, its messiness, pressure, recalibration, has already reshaped me, my team, and the work we do. We are not who we were at the start of the year. Our thinking stronger. Our strategy more grounded in reality and more ambitious in possibility.

Every setback forced adaptation. Every constraint sparked creativity. Every hard decision tightened alignment. None of that belongs in the category of failure. It belongs in the category of becoming. It is evolution in real time, forged by staying with the work when the outcome wasn’t promised.

The myth of failure says the value lies only in the end result. But what built me, what built us, was the endurance and the refusal to stop.

I will move forward honoring the process with the same discipline, clarity, and courage that brought me here, and to trust that whatever grows from that will be exactly what’s meant to take shape.

I release judgment.

I invite evolution and connection. The forces that keep me awake to possibility. Evolution asks me to stay porous to new information, new collaborators, new ways of thinking. It requires that I shed what’s static and choose what’s alive. Connection reminds me that innovation is never solitary. It’s built in relationship, in the friction and alignment between people willing to show up with honesty and imagination.

These forces widen my field of vision. They keep me alert to what wants to emerge next. Evolution sharpens me. Connection steadies me. Together, they ensure I never mistake the current landscape for the limit of what’s possible.

I will remain open, to new ideas, new partners, new ways of building, and to let that openness pull me toward the future I’m meant to create.

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Stepping Into the Next Cycle

By the time I turned back toward home, the cold felt less like resistance and more like clarity. I could feel a nine-year cycle closing behind me and another opening…raw, wild, full of possibility. Still uncertain, still demanding… but for the first time in a long time, I felt fully in control of myself.

And as we look ahead, a quieter, more consequential question emerges: what will we choose to fill the next chapter with? What will we build with intention rather than momentum?

So much of leadership, and life, is intentional construction. We design the structures that hold us. We choose the materials, the boundaries, the openings. Nothing reflects that more simply, or more beautifully, than an intentionally built dish. A whole roasted fish looks daunting, unwieldy, exposed, elemental, but when prepared with care, when it’s scored and seasoned and filled with brightness and heat, it becomes something deeply pleasing. Something that nourishes not just the body but the moment itself.

My intention moving forward is to build in that spirit…to choose what is alive, what is aligned, and what is worthy of the heat it will take to make it real.

So here it is…

Whole Roasted Winter Fish with Warm Spice Rub and Herb-Citrus Stuffing

A dish for closing a cycle and stepping into the next one.

Ingredients:

• 1 whole fish (branzino, snapper, trout, or whatever looks brightest and freshest)

• 4–5 cloves garlic, minced

• 1 tablespoon ground cumin

• 1 tablespoon ground coriander

• ½ teaspoon cayenne (more if you want heat to speak)

• Kosher salt and cracked black pepper

• Olive oil

• 1 large onion, minced

• Additional 2 cloves garlic, minced (for sautéing the onions)

• 2 bunches fresh cilantro, minced

• Juice of 1 lemon

• 1–2 lemons, thinly sliced

• Fresh parsley for finishing

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 425°F. High heat matters. It seals intention into the skin and carries it through to the center.

2. Prep the fish. Rinse and pat dry. Place it on a sheet of tin foil large enough to wrap it fully. Score the skin in three diagonal cuts on each side.

   These cuts matter… they invite the spices in. They let the heat do transformative work.

3. Make the rub. In a small bowl, combine:

   • minced garlic

   • 1 tablespoon cumin

   • 1 tablespoon coriander

   • Pinch cayenne

   • Salt and pepper

   • Generous olive oil to make it a thick paste

   Rub this mixture all over the fish, inside and out, working it into the scores.

   The aroma should feel grounding… almost smoky even before it hits the heat.

4. Build the stuffing. In a skillet, sauté the s onions in olive oil until soft, translucent, and slightly golden.Add the minced garlic and cook until fragrant but not browned. Remove from heat and fold in the minced cilantro and lemon juice.

   This mixture should taste bright, herbal, alive.

5. Assemble. Stuff the cavity of the fish with the onion mixture.

   Slide lemon slices inside alongside the stuffing — they release their oils slowly, the way clarity unfolds.Lay extra lemon slices on top or beneath the fish if you want even more perfume.

   

6. Roast. Wrap the fish with the tin foil and place it on a parchment-lined sheet.

   Roast for 18–25 minutes depending on size, until the flesh flakes cleanly with a fork and the skin has taken on color.

7. Finish. Drizzle with more olive oil.Shower with freshly chopped parsley.

   Taste for salt. Give it what it needs.

8. Serve intentionally.

   Bring it to the table whole. Let the aroma tell its story…pice, heat, citrus, herb… cleansing and restorative. This is a dish for stepping over a threshold. For releasing what you’re done carrying and nourishing what comes next.

A Short Ritual Note

As you cook, consider what you’re releasing, and what you’re making room for. As the fish roasts, whole, honest, unhidden, let it remind you that heat transforms, that discipline creates beauty, that care is its own kind of power.

And when you eat, let it nourish the part of you that’s ready to move forward. Share what you’re releasing. Share what you’re inviting in. Do it with others. Do it with intention. And whatever you build next, don’t let the fire go out.

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But what’s carried me, what’s kept me anchored through all the volatility, are the moments that remind me what it actually means to be rich. This isn’t a recap of my year. It’s more of a journal of the past few weeks, and in them, a reminder, maybe for anyone navigating more than they expected, of the kind of wealth that actually gets us through.

Rich is the moment when new team members gift you a lovingly crafted sand-dollar ornament. Something small, but so surprisingly on point it catches your breath. A reminder that the ocean is endless possibility, and that somehow you always have a dollar even when you think you don’t. That kind of instinct from people who are just getting to know you, to signal that you are not alone in this work

Rich is watching your daughter turn twenty-one and truly take in that the whole family showed up for her. Seeing her stand in her own gravity: powerful, beautiful, hopeful, furious in all the right ways… rooted in a city you once claimed as your own, now becoming hers in a way that’s entirely different, entirely her. She’s becoming fully herself while still unmistakably connected to you, building a world that looks exactly like what you once hoped for… only better. And the moment is so powerful you can feel the pride rise in you…sharp, steady, overwhelming in the best way. Standing beside her, recognizing what’s the same and what’s completely her own, a feeling familiar to anyone who’s watched someone they love become who they were always meant to be.

Rich is friends generous enough to hand over their loft for a birthday Lions-watching brunch. The kind of space that makes everyone feel instantly feel at home and luxurious at the same time. The hysterical moment when they walked in unexpectedly and you feel like a teenager caught throwing a party. And then you all drink wine the rest of the afternoon, settling into the kind of laughter and ease that only long, hard-earned friendships can hold.

Rich is the best friend you move through an entire weekend with, and honestly, almost your whole life. The quiet moments and the much louder ones. Doing what you’ve always done best together… closing down Balthazar, this time with a new generation in tow. Yelling at strangers, creating a microclimate of energy only the two of you can generate, spinning moments of pure, ridiculous hilarity out of thin air. And still finding your way back to each other with that unmistakable look that says, we’ve been through it all, and we’ll keep going through it all together. That kind of connection becomes its own infrastructure.

Rich is having a husband who wants you to be present, yet understands when you can’t be…who knows you have to keep pushing, so he heads out and has a full-on NYC adventure with his own incredible energy. A partner who doesn’t take from you, but expands around you. And then, when you reunite, he’s swelling with pride about what you’ve accomplished, seeing you clearly, rooting for you without hesitation. The kind of partnership that is spacious and joyful and built on real belief.

Rich is nights of music in Brooklyn that remind you connection ages but doesn’t dull …old friends, new music, generational mashups. One night where you were far too short to see anything at all, yet it didn’t matter because you could feel every pulse move through the room, the crowd carrying you as much as the sound did. And then another night, LCD Soundsystem, where you could see it all.

Rich is watching James Murphy sing, furiously dancing with the person who’s been a friend, mother, anchor across decades. Looking back and seeing those you love dearly dancing to the songs that built eras of your life. That feeling of belonging to something larger than your obligations.

Rich is gallery hopping, arguing far too loudly and far too long about the meaning, or the refusal of meaning, in Jeff Koons at the Gagosian. The kind of debate that’s half-serious, half-ridiculous, fully alive. And then a stranger stepping in, asking to take a picture of your group because he’d been watching the whole performance play out… amused, maybe impressed, definitely entertained by your collective insistence on wrestling the art to the ground. Moments like that, where curiosity spills into joy and strangers get pulled into the orbit, feel like their own kind of wealth.

Rich is seeing your son with his beautiful and incredible partner. To witness the steadiness, the care, the quiet ease between them, the way mutual respect is the foundation for everything they’re building together. It’s one of those rare moments of clarity when you can actually see the long-game work of raising humans take root. And it’s a different kind of wealth altogether to welcome people you already love into your family…to watch it expand in such an easy, natural, wonderful way, widening the circle in ways you didn’t even know you were hoping for.

Rich is the Vertical Harvest team meeting before the holiday break, where people spoke candidly about their worries, their hopes, their goals…a room full of honesty, fatigue, humor, and commitment. A moment that made clear how far we’ve come together, how far we still have to go, and that we are, unmistakably, in it together. That kind of shared resolve is a form of abundance few organizations ever get to experience.

Rich is being home for Thanksgiving and creating a table longer than any you’ve ever set. Listening to the young adults who grew up around you speak out loud about what they intend, what they’re releasing, what they’re grateful for…and realizing they’re ready for the world in ways you hoped but never fully saw until that moment.

And rich is knowing that when everything else is uncertain, you hold on to what isn’t …the moments, the images, the flashes of connection and clarity that actually get us through. When I think about the work I’ve been pushing up a mountain bigger than any I’ve climbed before, I remind myself that the point was never to get rich. The point is to use whatever richness I already have to move things toward love, kindness, and beauty… through food, through design, through entrepreneurship, through community, through whatever I’m able to build.

Usually I end with recipes. But for this post, I think the alchemy of the past few weeks is a recipe of its own kind. A mix of images, memories, pulses of feeling and energy, all of it reminding me how rich I really am. Blend your own ingredients, the moments that rise up without asking, the ones that stay with you long after the noise fades. Those are the moments that will carry us through.

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And hunger isn’t somewhere else. It’s here. Even in Teton County, one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country. Jackson’s median household income tops six figures, and yet neighbors still rely on pantries and aid to bridge the month. Wealth and want, side by side.

In Maine, nearly 14% of households face food insecurity…the highest rate in New England. In Wyoming, more than 90,000 residents, including 27,000 children, depend on food assistance. These aren’t statistics; they’re dinner tables.

SNAP is supposed to be the backstop. This month, even that backstop has been unstable… whiplash guidance, partial funding, legal volleys. The bigger story: a brittle system cracking under stress.

When systems fail, what’s left are people. And often, they’re the ones teaching us what real resilience looks like.

This past week was monumental for us — the expansion of our Vertical Harvest team in Maine. We welcomed two new employees whose grit and grace I can only describe as fighter energy. They’ve lived through more than their share of hard things before walking through our doors, and in their first week they taught me something I wanted to share with you.

They told me about the Cycle of the Sleeping Phoenix.

In Human Design, it marks the end of an old world. A 400-year cycle defined by collective planning, and the start of a new one defined by individual ignition. The Phoenix doesn’t burn for the sake of destruction. She burns because she must evolve.

That idea felt like recognition…like being caught in the act of becoming. Maybe it’s the giant phoenix ring I wear on my right hand… under the wrong light, it reads less CEO and more questionable life choice. But really, it’s my reminder that rebirth is never elegant.

We’re living in a burn phase…where the institutions built for stability no longer fit the volatility of the world we’ve become. And yet, the Sleeping Phoenix isn’t about collapse. It’s about awakening. It’s about small sparks of sovereignty lighting up everywhere, people refusing to wait for systems to fix themselves.

Jill Lepore’s recent opinion piece in The New York Times has been rattling around in my brain. In it, she reminded us that change demands both determination and imagination. Determination: the grit to keep going when the system feels immovable. Imagination: the audacity to picture something different in its place.

She wrote that most forms of tyranny do end…not because people wait for it, but because they work for it. Generations fought for the right to vote, to be free, to be seen. They didn’t just hope; they acted, again and again, often without knowing if it would matter. Lepore’s point landed with me because it’s what this work feels like — staying determined long enough for imagination to have a chance.

I saw that spark of imagination in New York City this week, too…in Assembly member Zohran Mamdani’s call to rewrite the economic rules entirely. No matter what you think of his chances, he’s changed the playing field. I still can’t get that chant out of my head — “My name is Mamdani… M-A-M-D-A-N-I.” It wasn’t even supposed to be a chant — but I guess that’s how memes work. And yet it’s more than a meme now; it’s captured people’s imagination. That’s how imagination works: it rattles loose what we thought was fixed.

A few weeks back, as many of did, I went to a No Kings rally. At first, it felt strange…uncomfortable even. I felt a little silly yelling into the air. But then, as the crowd grew, the voices started to rise together - the largest one our little town square had ever seen. Something started bubbling up. There it was…hope.

And even when hope doesn’t get you much, it creates an energy that wasn’t there before.

That’s what systemic change really is…a thousand small acts that start to move something larger.

I know the overwhelm that comes with it. Every weekday, before the sun comes up, I’m thinking about how to expand a model for change that’s complex, fragile, and vital. I lose sleep over how to build a system that can scale and still stay human.

But what I’ve learned is this: systems don’t change all at once. They shift because of small acts that accumulate until the world tilts.

The Phoenix doesn’t rise in one blaze…she stirs, she smolders, she gathers heat. Every tray we plant, every farmer we hire, every partnership we build is a spark.

So this week, instead of a recipe, I’m asking you to start your own small act: organize or join a food drive.

Here’s a simple guide…what to collect, how to give, and where it will matter most. Because the Phoenix can’t rise on hunger.

And because systemic change, the kind that lasts, begins at the smallest scale possible: one meal, one job, one person, one chant at a time.

Let’s feed the Phoenix.

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How to Feed the Phoenix: A Simple Guide to Hosting a Food Drive

Systemic change starts small — with one shelf, one box, one bag. Here’s how to turn intention into impact.

1. Start Where You Are

Choose a location that feels accessible…your office, neighborhood, school, gym, or faith community. Small and steady beats large and complicated. A collection bin with a clear purpose does more than a committee that never starts.

2. Connect With Your Local Food Bank

Before you collect a single item, reach out. Ask what’s most needed right now…pantries’ priorities shift month to month. In Maine, you can contact Good Shepherd Food Bank. In Wyoming, One 22 Resource Center or Hole Food Rescue.

3. Focus on What’s Needed Most

Shelf-stable proteins and basics usually top the list:

• Canned tuna, chicken, or salmon

• Peanut butter and nut butters

• Canned beans, soups, and stews

• Whole-grain pasta, rice, and oatmeal

• Baby formula, diapers, and hygiene items

Avoid glass containers, perishable foods, and expired items.

4. Make It Personal

Label your collection with heart, not guilt. “Feed the Phoenix” works better than “End Hunger Now.” Remind people this is about neighbors, not numbers. A short story… who this helps, what it means…moves people more than stats alone.

5. Spread the Word

Share it through email, local newsletters, and social media. A quick post or flyer with a deadline, drop-off spot, and contact name keeps it clear. Invite kids, coworkers, and friends to join.

6. Deliver With Care

When you drop items off, ask what they need next. Relationships build resilience — it’s not just about one donation, it’s about connection.

7. Keep the Spark Alive

Turn your drive into a rhythm. Quarterly or seasonal drives keep awareness alive and help food banks plan for demand spikes.

Author’s Note: If you organize or join a food drive this week — even something small — I’d love to hear about it. Tell me where you’re feeding the Phoenix. These stories matter. They remind us that systemic change doesn’t live in headlines or handbooks; it lives in kitchens, parking lots, and town squares — in the places where we still choose to show up for one another.

She’s deliberate, but never polite. Every move…from the exact geometry of her guitar riffs to the chrome-slick perfection of her stage persona, feels like an act of control that somehow births chaos. She’ll smirk while shredding. She’ll arch an eyebrow at the idea that art should be palatable.

I once saw her crowd-surfing while playing guitar, and her stiletto, yes stiletto, scraped my forehead. Now that is perfection. A literal brush with her blend of elegance and ferocity, intellect and abandon. It was like being baptized by feedback and glitter.

It’s that tension, between mastery and mess, between calculation and raw heat, that I find intoxicating. Annie Clark is a reminder that precision doesn’t have to preclude wildness. You can be deliberate and free. You can know exactly what you’re doing and still let it all unravel beautifully in front of an audience.

When she couldn’t find a guitar that fit her body, she designed her own… the St. Vincent Ernie Ball Music Man, sleek, angular, built for balance and beauty. It’s an object that holds both form and rebellion. She made something that didn’t exist, because it had to.

I think about that a lot in my own work. Architecture. Farming. Leadership. It’s all choreography…equal parts rigor and risk. I’ve spent years learning how to build systems that serve people…but it’s the moments where I let go a little, where I allow instinct to slip through the structure, that things come alive.

That’s what St. Vincent does. She designs her own instruments, directs her own films, produces her own albums, shapes her own mythology. But she also makes space for surprise, for the crackle that comes when perfection fractures.

And then there’s New York.

That song always makes me feel nostalgic for my own New York days…the striving, the late-night ideas, the feeling that everything was possible and just slightly out of reach. It’s a love letter disguised as an elegy, a reminder that the places and people who shape us never really leave. They haunt, they hum, they echo. Annie Clark makes nostalgia feel muscular…she lets tenderness have teeth.

Maybe that’s what cool really is: not apathy, but agency. The ability to choose, to self-create, to resist being defined.

So here’s to the women who are both architects and arsonists. To the ones who know the rules so well they can play with them. To anyone trying to make something true in a world that keeps asking you to make it smaller, simpler, safer.

Below the paywall — “The St. Vincent Starter Pack”: A deeper dive into fearless femininity, feedback, and creative autonomy.

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🎃 Happy Halloween 🎃

It’s by far my favorite holiday. Halloween has always reminded me that sometimes we just need to be someone else….or even a scarier version of ourselves.

When I was a DJ, Halloween was the playlist I looked forward to building all year…the perfect mix of eerie and ecstatic, strange and sublime.

One of my favorite muses back then (and still today) was Aquarium Drunkard. So in the spirit of the season, I’m sharing one of his mixes if you dare to go past the paywall for your spooky enjoyment.

Now, for a little treat of my own…I’m launching something new within Beauty, Terror, Food, a paid companion called Sustenance.

There’s the beauty. There’s the terror. And somewhere in between… there’s what sustains us.

My writing here has always been about what it’s meant to me to build systems that serve people…and to try, in my own way, to design a world that holds more care, connection, and belonging. And what it takes to be on a journey such as this, it has been very inward, very self-reflecting.

Sustenance will live underneath that work…a place for what feeds it. The art, the music, and the ideas that nourish the creative spirit and sustain joy. Here’s what you’ll find:

• playlists from my DJ days (yes, they’re back)

• artists who stretch what’s possible and who make the world shimmer

• interviews and conversations with people who remind me what it means to make and to care

• books, essays, and images that keep me inspired

My Sunday essays will always remain free and open to all…reflections on food, inclusion, and what it takes to build a more connected world. But if you’d like to join me for what lives underneath that work…the sound, the pulse, the small things that keep us believing, Sustenance is for you.

And when you purchase a paid subscription, it doesn’t just support the writing…it helps fuel the spooky green work we’re doing at Vertical Harvest, where beauty and impact grow side by side.

Here’s to music that moves you, to art that wakes you up, and to the strange, shimmering beauty that sustains us all.

🖤 Become a paid subscriber to access Sustenance 🖤

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