The Chef in the Room: On Privilege, Healing Food, and Learning to Ask Better Questions

Look at this photo for a second.

I know what you might think when you see it. The dishwasher is half-open, the counters are buried under produce, and pots are in various states of readiness. It is not a curated shot. Nobody adjusted the lighting. There is no garnish placed with tweezers, no linen napkin fanned artfully in the corner. If you handed this image to a social media consultant, they would probably wince. I'm not even smiling properly!

I look at it, and I think: this is exactly what I want people to see.

This is a real kitchen, mid-session, mid-service. The parents of the father of the family I was cooking for took this, and I find it incredibly endearing. I am in the middle of cooking four to five days of lunches and dinners for a family of four — a postpartum family in those tender, exhausted early weeks when the last thing anyone should be thinking about is what's for dinner. That open dishwasher means I've already cleaned a round of equipment, and I'm already into the next round. Those counters full of produce mean something nourishing is coming. This is not chaos. This is mise en place in the truest sense — not the pristine, staged version they teach you at culinary school, but the real, inhabited, working version that happens inside someone's actual home when the stakes are someone's actual recovery.

I think of it the way a New York Times photographer might shoot a story about this moment in time — this crossover of personal chef and postpartum doula that I've been building for years. Not glamorized. Not minimized. Just true.

That's what I'm here to do on this post. Tell you the truth about this work.

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My name is Kristin Stinavage. I am a CIA-trained chef and a postpartum doula, and I am also a white-presenting woman who has spent the last decade cooking from healing food traditions that did not originate with my people or me.

That last part is the part I want to talk about.

I grew up in a collection of spots, but most of my early adolescent years were in Frederick, Maryland, and my teen years were spent in Kalamazoo, Michigan. But we grew up visiting my grandparents in Northeastern Pennsylvania, on land that knew how to grow things. My grandfather's dairy farm was where my father learned how to live off the land, along with me. My grandfather built that farm with his bare hands and was born in the same house my father grew up in. My great-grandfather was a coal miner, and there were stories of my strong great-grandmother slinging him over her shoulder to carry him home from the bar. Later in life, I met a friend who had a friend that were neighbors with my grandfather. There were feuds of sorts with the families nearby. Stories of attempts to set my grandfather’s barn on fire so that they could acquire the land. There were racial odds against the two families, my family being of Lithuanian descent and the opposite of Russian. The kitchen where my grandmother made something from not-quite-enough — these were my first teachers. Food as love made tangible. Food as survival remembered. My heritage is Lithuanian, Slovenian, Irish, Romanian Romani — people who knew displacement, who knew scarcity, who knew that a pot of bone broth was not a wellness trend but a way of getting through the winter.

That background gave me something real. It also gave me something I've had to look at honestly: even within the struggle that lives in my family's history, my light skin has opened doors that the same struggle closed for others. I've had access to spaces — culinary school, high-end kitchens, wellness industry roles, professional networks — that many of the communities whose food wisdom I've studied and now share have been systematically excluded from. Holding both of those truths at once is not comfortable. It's not supposed to be.

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At the Culinary Institute of America, I learned to make the mother sauces. I learned precision, technique, the religion of classical French cooking as the gold standard of professional cuisine. And even as I was grateful for that training — and I am, genuinely — I kept running into a question I couldn't shake: whose techniques get called technique, and whose get called peasant food?

The fermentation methods my great-grandmother used (fermentation is a whole art-form that I am still curating). The bone-to-broth ratio my grandmother understood without a recipe. The preservation knowledge that lived in the hands of immigrant women who never saw the inside of a culinary school — that same knowledge was starting to appear in expensive wellness retreats, in trendy Brooklyn restaurants, in lifestyle brands charging a premium for "ancestral eating" and "wild foods." Rebranded. Decontextualized. Profitable.

I saw it up close, working at Sakara Life, running operations for roughly 10,000 meals a week — a scale that clarified things quickly. I saw how "clean eating" got constructed, who it was built for, and who it implicitly left out. I saw how foods from specific cultural traditions got laundered through wellness language until their origins disappeared. I was part of that industry. I benefited from it. That's not something I get to walk away from just because I'm uncomfortable with it.

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The Schaghticoke people are an Indigenous nation of the northeast, and the time I spent with that community left an imprint on me that has never lifted. It lives underneath everything I do now. The way food carries memory, identity, and resistance. The way a community's relationship to land and nourishment is inseparable from their sovereignty and their dignity. The way that knowledge — real, rooted, generational knowledge — gets dismissed, extracted, or simply ignored by systems that only recognize what they can commodify.

That experience opened a door I have kept walking through. I've attended the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, sat across from leaders and grandmothers and advocates from nations around the world — Ojibwe, Māori, and others — who came carrying the weight of their communities' survival in bureaucratic rooms that were not built to hear them. I've helped fundraise to make that travel possible, to make it worth a grandmother's time to get on a plane and show up and try again. I've worked with the Watershed Center, with Solidair, with Radio Kingston's Seventh Fire Radio Show, trying in whatever way I can to make sure that money and attention move toward the people doing the actual work of cultural preservation.

I want to be careful about what I say here, because I am not the point of any of those stories. The grandmother who told me — directly, looking me in the eyes — that she had lost hope. That the bureaucratic walls had become so high and so indifferent that hope had become a luxury she could no longer afford. I have not lost that moment. It is with me when I work. It is with me when I write about healing food traditions. It is with me when I think about what it means to learn from a culture that has never stopped fighting to survive.

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None of this makes me an expert on cultures that are not mine. That's not what I'm claiming.

What I am claiming is this: I am a professional chef with classical training and years of large-scale food production experience, and I have chosen to dedicate my practice to postpartum care — the fourth trimester, those first weeks and months after birth when a person's body is doing some of the most demanding recovery work of their life. And in building that practice, I have been deeply shaped by the global traditions of postpartum nourishment: the Chinese practice of zuoyuezi, Korean miyeokguk, Ayurvedic warming foods, Vietnamese congee, Nigerian groundnut soups, and more. These are not trends. These are practices that communities have refined across generations, specifically because they work — because they understood what bodies need after birth long before Western medicine got around to studying it.

My cookbook, Nurtured Feast, is an attempt to honor that knowledge while being honest about who I am in relation to it. Every recipe that draws from a specific tradition is attributed to that tradition. The cultural context is named, not erased. The communities that created and preserved this wisdom are credited, not absorbed into generic "wellness" language. It is not perfect — this kind of work is never finished — but the commitment is real, and it is ongoing.

What I want the book to do, and what I want this space to do, is hold the complexity. Postpartum nourishment is not a lifestyle aesthetic. It is not a content category. It is deeply human, profoundly cross-cultural, and it has everything to do with who has access to care and who has been told their traditions don't count.

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So: this is me. CIA-trained chef, postpartum doula, person still learning, woman in an open-dishwasher kitchen cooking as hard as she can for people who need it.

I'm not here to perform wellness. I'm here to do the work and be honest about what that work actually looks like — including the parts that are uncomfortable, unresolved, and ongoing.

If that sounds like something you want to follow along with, I'm glad you're here.

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Kristin Stinavage is a CIA-trained chef doula and the author of Nurtured Feast: Rooted Recipes for Rest, Repair, and Renewal*, a postpartum cookbook bridging global healing food traditions with French culinary technique and evidence-based nutrition. She serves postpartum families in Seattle and beyond.