Whose race are you running?

I left London without knowing what I was walking toward.

I knew what I was leaving. The restaurants, the reputation, the trajectory that looked, from the outside, exactly like success. Twelve years of building inside a system I’d never stopped to question. A chef’s version of the correct life.

What I found, once the script ran out, was a question I should have been asking years earlier. One that kept creeping in until it was too loud to ignore: is this actually what I want?

We never ask that clearly. I think it’s because sometimes we are afraid of the answer. It’s a question that requires stopping long enough to notice we’ve been running someone else’s race.

The kitchen is usually the first place you can see the inherited design clearly. Maybe because of my job and my passion, but that’s where I started looking inward.

What you eat, where it comes from, what it costs your body over time. These are all borrowed choices. And if you’ve never questioned them, you’ve never actually designed the life you’re living.

Whose are you maintaining?

Food sovereignty is competence. The ability to understand the most intimate system you have: fermentation, seasonality, sourcing, preparation. To make decisions based on knowledge rather than convenience. To trust your own judgment over society’s recommendations. Or worse, what we see on social media, what we absorb from a media machine built to tell us what to want.

The same muscle as everything else you’re trying to build.

Once you start practicing it in the kitchen, it gets hard to stop applying it everywhere else. That’s how The Mindful Kitchen Map was born. That’s what it was written to be. A thinking tool. A framework for understanding the kitchen as a system, and the system as the first place you practice building something that’s actually yours.

A practice that reflects who you are and what you build.

It’s hard not to romanticise it. It’s my first book and lots of love went into it. But it reverberated through everything I did and still do.

I don’t have a lambo, don’t swim in luxury, but I am more content than ever. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t all start with food.

The harder question most people avoid: what does a good day actually look like for you?

A random Tuesday in March. Before thinking about the quarter or the milestone. What are you doing on that Tuesday? Where are you? Who’s there?

Sit with that question long enough and most of us realise the answer is not what we’ve been building toward.

That overwrites the motivation problem. We can focus on our design. The life we actually want.

And the design problem starts earlier than most people think. In the most basic, most daily, most intimate choices. What you eat, how you prepare it, what you understand about where it came from. That’s where the practice begins. With a skill we all naturally have.

In May, I’m teaching a week in Volterra.

Volterra is a medieval hill town in Tuscany. Stone walls, narrow streets, a food culture that still knows what things are made of. The right place for this kind of conversation.

The week is called Sovereignty through Craft. Seven days of cooking, fermenting, learning, and talking with a small group of people who align with the values that matter.

A working week. A rest from the unnecessary chaos that surrounds us. You’ll make things with your hands. You’ll eat well. You’ll have real conversations with people who are each building their own version of a conscious life, and you’ll leave with a clearer picture of what yours actually looks like.

I’ll teach from The Mindful Kitchen Map. Fermentation, plant-based cooking, food as a system. But the real curriculum is the week itself. Watching how other people have designed their days. Noticing what you want to take home. Understanding, from the inside, that success is not one shape.

Everyone there will have a different answer to the question.

That’s the point.

Come to Italy.

The Transmission School, Volterra. May 18 to 25.

If you want to know more or secure your spot, reach out directly → Sovereignty through Craft — May 18–25 — Full details & enrollment

Bookings and questions: info@thetransmissionschool.org