Seeds to Sauce teaches the hands-on skills needed to artistically both grow and prepare food. Webster’s definition of “art” includes “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination.” We seek to bring art into our students’ meals so that they are created and consumed with conscious consideration, skill and creativity.
Our instruction offers tangible ways to address pressing ecological problems through our activities— our daily bread. Albert Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Society’s current ecological problems were created by following a mechanistic-reductionist worldview that spawned an industrial food system focused on quantity with its byproduct of unhealthy and unsatisfying foods. We teach how to create artisanal food rooted in a long traditional philosophical, cultural and spiritual understanding that offers a living-holistic worldview focused on quality with its offspring of healthy and satisfying foods.
Our classes spend time in gardens, time in kitchens and time in discussions that connect not just these two places but ourselves to a living, beautiful world we are here to enjoy and embrace. Currently we offer these classes in different settings primarily in Northern California’s San Francisco Bay Area, with a focus on Sonoma County. Founder Chas Moore delights in assembling an evolving mixture of fellow teachers to join him in sharing their devotion to the natural world and its expression in haute cuisine. We embrace the virtual world and offer this website as a means to spread the seeds of our vision.
Please connect to us both in this virtual realm and in the physical world of our classes. In the process, we will help you reconnect to yourself, nature and the divine. You will leave all of our fun classes with particular skills, technical knowledge and a larger understanding of food systems. So that we may have more art in our daily meals while helping to make the world a more delightful place for all to live. Realizing as most religions throughout time and across the globe have, that food is not only sacred but that our relationship to it reflects our most deeply held spiritual beliefs.
Chas Moore has spent a lifetime cultivating his own relationship with food—from the haute kitchens of France to the organic gardens of California. His love of gardening led to his selling baby greens at his local grocery as a pre-teen; then, a love of chaos led to his working in restaurants as a teenager. A Sous Chef in New Orleans in his early twenties, he dug deeper into food studying French pastry at L’Ecole LeNotre, Provincial cuisine with Roger Verge, and restaurant management at Cornell. After running restaurants and catering operations in DC, he moved to Telluride, CO. to create Evangeline’s as chef/owner. Recognized by The New York Times six weeks after its opening, his New Orleans inspired restaurant continued to be praised and recommended throughout its seven-year run (Travel & Leisure, Los Angles, Sunset, Fodor’s, Zagat’s and Rocky Mountain News.) His continuing journey into food flavors and culinary understanding led to northern California. Weaving together a holistic understanding of food systems earned him a New College degree in Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community with a concentration in Ecological Agriculture. Love, gardens, chaos (even chaos theory), restaurants and ecology all sprout up in his talks, classes and demonstrations, which he’s given in environments from the Telluride Wine Festival to the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center to the Ecological Farming Conference. When he’s not talking, he’s probably got food in his mouth or is doing yoga, but he does also manage to design and consult on edible environments, run an ecological foundation, play with his dog Clementine and cat Martin, and write, as well as, teach.
Kendall Dunnigan, a native of the San Francisco North Bay area, has a deep love of and commitment to the beauty and health of the natural world she grew up in. This finds expression in her work as an artist, educator, designer, agro-ecologist and community organizer. She empowers her students with ecologically based insights and examples of hope, while providing them a critical analysis of the power dynamics in society as it relates to sustainable agricultural education and practices, urban agriculture, improving access to healthy, affordable food for all (community food security), popular education, and skill building for democratic engagement. Her students not only receive knowledge of potential solutions, they become infused with her infectious inspiration to get out and become change agents. All of this can transpire in what appears just to be an afternoon art class in the garden. Kendall co-wrote “Growing Communities” which outlines how community gardening is a community building process as well (with both the theoretical understanding and application of how to do it included). She is the director of and core faculty in the BA Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Communities program at New College of California’s North Bay Campus in Santa Rosa. She not only teaches about community, she lives it as a co-creator in a rural intentional community at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in the western part of Sonoma County.