Meet the Next Generation Chef Leaders
Chatting with Culinary Institute of America students Jessie Arnett, Tristan Haverfield, and Nathan Tucker
Hello Readers!
Recently a chance Metro North Railroad encounter connected me to a group of super-committed, up-and-coming chef leaders studying at the Culinary Institute of Education (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York. We had so much fun chatting that I decided to write about them. Early into the second semester of their first year, I sat down virtually with Jessie Arnett, Tristan Haverfield, and Nathan Tucker to find out how the next generation of chefs is being trained, and how they’re thinking about food system and sustainability issues.
All three students have landed plum externships, which begin in late April: Jessie will be working at the Michelin-starred Gramercy Tavern in New York, led by chef Michael Anthony; Tristan at the two Michelin-star Minibar by José Andres in Washington, D.C.; and Nathan the three Michelin-starred Single Thread Farm Restaurant Healdsburg, California, led by chef Kyle Connaughton and his wife and head farmer Katina Connaughton.
A quick look into their school’s offerings in sustainability and food systems shows that the Applied Food Studies bachelor’s degree offers a course called the Ecology of Food that offers students time in the school’s teaching garden. In 2010 the school launched its Green Campus Initiative which revolves around the Menus of Change programs. The Introduction to Food Systems course that Jessie, Tristan, and Nathan took is a required class for their 18-month associate’s degree program in culinary arts, but the CIA also offers an online master’s degree in sustainable food systems.
Before getting into Jessie, Tristan, and Nathan’s undergraduate food system education at the CIA, I’ll give you a little background on them.
Each felt the lure of the kitchen early in life. Jessie was 10 or 11 and living with her family in Columbia, Missouri when she began cooking for her four siblings. She was in charge of what their mother dubbed “fend-for-yourself” nights, where she had to figure out dinner with just what was in the fridge and the pantry. The challenge fostered creativity, which continued when she was older and able to make the five-minute walk to the grocery store to buy ingredients for her dishes. This early practice, Jessie says, also drew her close to her siblings, creating an emotional bond she’s grateful for today. Before culinary school she worked for two years at a catering company, then as a grill cook at the Missouri Country Club. As she gained more experience, she began to think about how she might combine her talent for art with her growing culinary skills.
On the first day he could legally start working, at 14, Tristan landed a job as a dishwasher at a local restaurant in his hometown of Missoula, Montana. Six months later, at his second restaurant job he fell in love with the adrenaline rush of cooking on the line, “that stress of being in the weeds, that feeling of if you mess up you’ll destroy the whole rhythm of the restaurant for everyone. I realized I wanted to chase that feeling,” he says. "A chef mentor pushed him to think creatively about making dishes, which in turn put him on the path to the CIA and competitive cooking.
Nathan began cooking when he was about 12, and his interest deepened during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it was a way to pass the time. As a high school student in Asheville, North Carolina, he says, “let’s just say I wasn’t a good student at all; I honestly hated it.” At his request, a school counselor allowed him to find a part-time restaurant job to fulfill credits for one of his courses. He approached the best restaurant in town Blackbird, and got an unpaid internship. He fell in love with the work, and went on to work part-time at the fine dining Southern for the next two years, supplementing that work with a second job at Ukiah Japanese Smokehouse. While he found it impossible to sit still in his high school classrooms, “something about cooking just never felt like work,” explains Nathan. “It just feels like I’m playing around with ingredients, and running around. It’s a blast.”
By the time they finished high school, all three had competed in high school culinary competitions at the state and national levels, and were passionately committed to advancing their skills as chefs. Their extensive restaurant work and competition experience through the Skills USA program nudged them beyond settling for a career in their home towns or states, instead aiming for the national stage. And that meant heading to the CIA, the best-known culinary school in America.
Because of their extensive kitchen experience before entering the CIA, they’ve found the school to be less scary, brutal, and intense than anticipated: “I thought it was going to be chefs yelling at your, people crying, and stuff like that,” says Tristan. While the school may once have been like that, the current emphasis on mental health and good work-life balance has changed things, though Tristan concedes that he can see the pressure ramping up as they get further into the curriculum.
All three have sought added challenges, and all are in training for the 2026 post-secondary school level of the Skills USA competition. One day a week, each of them “shadows” one of the two CIA entrants in this year’s competition. Tristan and Nathan also work part-time at American Bounty, one of the CIA’s three on-campus restaurants.
When I ask them about the kind of education they’re getting in food systems and sustainability, there is some difference of opinion. Jessie and Tristan both took the Introduction to Food Systems class together. While they felt it did a good job of outlining the shortcomings of our current food system, there was less emphasis on the inspirational, solutions side of the equation, how to fix our broken food system. Tristan put his finger on one common problem connecting large institutions like the CIA to small and medium local farms: it’s hard to find the kind of volume from one or two farms that the institution needs.
“In our Culinary Fundamentals class there’s this infamous thing called “egg day,” he explains, where we learn a ton of ways to cook an egg. You have to do them over and over again. My class went through a thousand eggs, and there were 20 other classes doing the same thing. It all went into compost.” This is mind boggling to think of. How cool would it be to hook up all those cooked eggs with local schools or food pantries, so they can have an egg party? Repurposing plans like this take coordination and planning, but are not impossible, and could even make a good exercise for the food systems class.
But Jessie’s experience in her Introduction to à la Carte Cooking class —in which chef instructor Roshara Sanders asked students to prepare multi-course menus for fellow students using batch cooking and à la carte style service—showed a much more food waste-aware school. Students were tasked with using all the waste food from the dishes they made that day to make an additional dish, to keep the excess from being composted.
For Nathan, his Introduction to Food Studies class was one of his favorites because his instructor is a lamb farmer, and could speak with authority on the dangers of CAFO’s (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and other aspects of the industrialized food system that he opposes. Nathan has also been impressed with the good job the school does with composting, and with American Bounty restaurant’s waste-tracking practices. All food waste is measured and tracked; presumably this accountability helps keep numbers low. I saw this system in use at the dining hall on the campus of Cal State San Bernardino when I visited last spring.
Today, the baseline level of knowledge and commitment to sustainable food system practices that young chefs like Jessie, Tristan, and Nathan will possess when they graduate are higher than they have ever been before. They are also hyperaware that they will be setting the example for how the average consumer thinks about, sources food, and eats. Nathan knows from experience that “the more local your food is, the better it tastes,” and the better off your local community is economically. Tristan adds that today, “being plant forward and sustainable is more than half of being a chef.”
Tristan is excited about learning from a José Andres, a chef who has made a global name for himself as a chef-food activist feeding the hungry in war- or disaster-torn countries and advocating for food system change. Nathan will spend part of his time at Single Thread working on its organic farm, and part of it in the kitchen, preparing that farm bounty for guests. “I’m very excited. I’ve never been to the West Coast in my entire life,” he says.
For each of them, there are questions they still want to figure out: for Tristan, it’s can he create, and not just copy and flawlessly execute delicious dishes? For Jessie, it’s how can she combine her chef skills with her love for drawing, painting, and color theory, and her love for teaching and leading? For Nathan, “It's a question of, will I be able to keep up in the kitchen, and will I be able to experience SingleThread to the fullest? I might just be in the back picking herbs all day,” he says. “Maybe I’ll want to cook for a restaurant that will teach me instead of having me just cut carrot tops. Or, I might find myself cooking on the line and having a blast.” In either case, he adds, “One of my goals is to be invited back.”
I look forward to hearing about how Jessie, Tristan, and Nathan’s externships unfold. “Reaping” plans to catch up with them after those experiences, so stay tuned!
Other News and Notes
For all of you Los Angeles friends and followers, please come join me at the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market this Sunday, March first, where I’ll be selling and signing books alongside the folks from Gonzalez Siemens Family Farm! Click here for details. I’d love to see you there!
Please read this compelling Civil Eats op-ed, ”Can the Food Justice Movement and MAHA Find Common Ground?” by nutritionist and food system pioneer Marion Nestle and public health professor Nicholas Freudenberg, both of NYU. They don’t know the answer to the question, but they make a very strong case for trying: if we really want to see food system change, we have to identify common ground with the large and vocal MAHA movement and push for political and legislative change.
Filmmaker, academic and food systems and sovereignty author Raj Patel recently shared this article, “Perils of Opening India’s Agricultural Market to the United States Business on LinkedIn, noting, “Among the perils of opening India’s agricultural market to United States business is the death of folklore. With the extinction of peasant lifeways comes the end of their songs and storytelling. It’s the price of cheap milk.”
I just finished reading forest ecologist Suzanne Simard’s brilliant memoir, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. It’s not new, but much of it will resonate with any of you who liked my book, Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System. Like the women in my book, Simard is a holistic, systems thinker who has challenged and changed conventional thinking. She intuited the interconnectivity of all forest trees before she embarked on her 40-plus-year-long journey of rigorously proving this hunch in scores of studies, and going up against a male-dominated forestry profession that couldn’t see the forest ecosystem for the trees. It’s an exciting journey of scientific and personal discovery and evolution.
Cacao savant Mark Christian sent me an amazing single origin Wild Juruá bar sourced from the Brazilian Amazon. The story of the bar is one of building the kind of short, transparent and direct supply chains that Reaping What She Sows advocates.
As always, subscribe to this Substack publication if you like it, share it with your friends, and leave a positive review for my book online. It makes a huge difference.
Stay safe, all, and see you in a couple of weeks!
Rooting for these aspiring chefs! Thank you for sharing about them, Nancy.
Thank you, Aki, I am too! Thank you for following their journey.