My Food Journey Part 5: Returning to School
After working full-time in food service for about four years I reached a breaking point.
In early 2018, I quit my last restaurant job at Heartwood. I was exhausted, underpaid, and honestly disenchanted with the restaurant industry. I was working my ass off, and it just wasn’t adding up. Around that same time, I had started dabbling in freelance work,cooking for events, retreats, and festivals, and that winter I took a real stab at going fully freelance.
I cooked at a large food festival, took on a few contracts, and experimented with what self-employment as a Chef might look like. Some of that journey is shared more fully in my portfolio, but by the end of that winter, I started to feel uneasy. I realized that many of the people who needed food education, kitchen support, or nourishing meals simply couldn’t afford it. There were deeper structural barriers at play.
I didn’t just want to work harder inside the same system. I wanted to peel back the onion a few more layers and understand the bigger picture. So, in September 2018, I returned to university and enrolled in the Sustainability program at Dalhousie University.
One of the things that made this program unique is that sustainability couldn’t be studied on its own. Every student had to do a double major. My classmates came from wildly different backgrounds: computer science, philosophy, biology, political science, theatre, environmental studies. It was deeply interdisciplinary, and that diversity of perspectives mattered.
I paired sustainability with social anthropology.
On the anthropology side, I took an incredible course called Food Activism, which opened my eyes to the lived realities of people working within food systems around the world. From farmers in South America to agricultural workers in India, and the constraints imposed by a globalized food economy. It shifted my understanding of food away from just production and consumption, and toward power, labour, and justice.
One of the biggest realizations I had during my degree was this: sustainability is complicated.
Environmental factors often dominate the conversation: greenhouse gas emissions, efficiency, what can be measured. Science, and policy by extension, tends to obsess over numbers because numbers feel controllable. If we can measure it, we can target it.
But I came away from my degree with more questions than answers. Sustainability, I learned, has to be understood through three interconnected pillars: environmental, social, and economic. Focusing on one without the others often leads to unintended consequences.
Here’s an example that really reshaped how I think. People often say that eating local is better for the environment. And sometimes it is. But often, the honest answer is: it depends.
Take strawberries in Nova Scotia. A small farmer in the Annapolis Valley growing strawberries and driving them to Halifax in a diesel truck may actually have a higher greenhouse gas footprint per unit than strawberries imported through a large, global supply chain with massive economies of scale and mechanized efficiencies.
That doesn’t mean importing strawberries is “better.” I still prefer the local ones. But it does mean the story is more nuanced than we like to admit. Add to that the reality that many local farms rely on temporary foreign workers who fly in from Jamaica and Mexico, and suddenly aviation emissions are part of the local food equation too.
This is where my thinking shifted. For me, local food isn’t primarily about efficiency or emissions. It’s about resilience.
It’s about having regional systems that can withstand supply chain disruptions. It’s about local economies, livelihoods, and communities being able to feed themselves when global systems falter.
In my final year, I completed an internship with Farmers’ Markets of Nova Scotia. I interviewed market managers and food businesses across the province to understand what was holding back the growth of the local food economy. Over and over again, one issue surfaced: access to kitchens. It was a barrier I had personally experienced years earlier, and one that countless others were still facing.
That internship is where the idea for Food Web was born.
I later pitched the idea to the Lab2Market Launch program at Dal Innovates, was accepted, and received $15,000 in funding to work on Food Web full-time during the summer of 2023. And to further equip myself for building something at that scale, I went on to complete a Master’s in Management, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University.
Returning to school didn’t pull me away from food.
It gave me the language, tools, and systems-level understanding to finally work upstream where change actually becomes possible.
And that leads into the current chapter, Building Food Web
This writing is always free to read.
If it nourished you in any way, you can buy me a coffee below and help fuel what comes next ☕️
