The Intersection of Food, Sustainability, Justice, and Health: Interview with Jenny Breen

Nourish and Shine

Jenny Breen has been a professional chef and advocate for sustainable food systems and food justice, and has worked directly with farmers and producers in Minnesota since the mid-1980’s. She was co-owner of Good Life Cafe and Catering, a sustainable food business from 1996 to 2013. She is a 2009 Archibald Bush Foundation Leadership Fellow and completed her Master of Public Health degree in Nutrition at the University of Minnesota in 2011 while working to build strong networks within health and food systems for greater access to food, support for sustainable farming, and understanding of cooking as a health strategy. Her first cookbook, Cooking up the Good Life, emphasizes local, seasonal whole foods cooking for families and was released in April of 2011 from the University of Minnesota Press.

Chef Breen currently teaches three courses at the University of Minnesota, including an online undergraduate course called "Food Choices: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves" and a graduate level cooking course for health professional students called “Food Matters: Cook Like Your Life Depends on It,” both through the Bakken Center For Spirituality and Healing. She also teaches an undergraduate nutrition cooking class, “A Food Systems Approach to Cooking” in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS). She contracts as a Public Health culinary nutrition educator with local health departments, clinical organizations, school districts and nonprofit food and farming organizations.

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