CONSUMED with Jaime Lewis

Matt Cross Tap Takeover Episode Maggie Przybylski and Morgan Murphy are the married team behind Two Broads Ciderworks, a cidery in San Luis Obispo that they launched in 2017. Matt and I had our eyes opened wide to the process of turning local apples into dry, beautiful cider. This is what you might know as hard cider — an apple cider that has fermented and become alcoholic. San Luis Obispo County...

Dr. David Cleveland and his students at the University of California at Santa Barbara set out to research the way locally-grown food is consumed in Santa Barbara County. They discovered that Santa Barbara is feeding just about everyone but itself, and that a good amount of what gets shipped out comes back via warehouses in northern and southern California among others. David saw this as just one s...

Maggie Cameron owns Paso Robles restaurant The Hatch with her husband and partner Eric Connolly. They also own and operate a new pizza joint called Della’s, which is right next door to the Hatch in downtown Paso Robles. She says the two restaurants are very different: that Della’s is the gin to The Hatch’s whiskey. Spoiler alert: Maggie and I laugh really hard at one point in our conversation and...

Los Osos Mycologist Dennis Sheradin studied biology at Cal Poly Pomona, moved to work at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and became a photographer of the natural world, including insects, reptiles, amphibians, plants, and yes, mushrooms. His photos have appeared in National Geographic, Ranger Rick, and California Wild, and he is active in field monitoring and DNA collecting for mushrooms around the worl...

Hearst Castle is a 90,000 square-foot estate built by media magnate William Randolph Hearst between 1919 and 1947. Hearst famously entertained the who’s-who of his age, including Charlie Chaplain, Clark Gable, Winston Churchill, Hedda Hopper, Greta Garbo, George Bernard Shaw, and many more. In 1958, the Hearst family gifted Hearst Castle to the state of California, making it a California State Par...

Roberto Monge was born in a village near Suchito, El Salvador, and lived there until he was 8 years old, when his family had to flee the war-torn country of their birth. Since landing in the United States many years ago, he has poured his life into rebuilding the village of his youth, wherever he lives. And that’s how I met Roberto: at a barbecue in his backyard years ago, surrounded by our neighb...

By day, Stephen McConnell is a general contractor, but by nights and weekends, he is an independent wine and restaurant critic — like, really independent. On his food blog eatdrink101.com, he details his opinions on restaurants across the Central Coast, including white linen and fine dining establishments to fast food chain restaurants. On his blog wine1percent.com, he sips a new wine every day an...

Claire Tuohey-Mote and Ellen Burke are members of the San Luis Obispo County Food Systems Coalition, a community-based organization whose goal is to promote a sustainable, equitable, profitable, resilient, and health-promoting food system. From my perspective, the FSC brings all the players to the table to help everyone thrive: consumers, farmers, those who are food insecure, government, nonprofit...

Niels and Bimmer Udsen started Castoro Cellars Winery on Paso Robles’s Highway 46 west in 1983, making them one of the area’s oldest wineries. With a focus on Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel, the Udsens built a huge following of people who love their “dam fine wine.” Music and art have always been a big part of what the winery has to offer, with a concert series presented by the San Luis Obispo F...

Vincent Rodriguez is a 14-year-old home cook and caterer from the high desert of Hesperia, California. I learned about him through my friend and his aunt, Alli Wallace, who said he is a crazy talented cook, that his parents give him an ingredient allowance every week, that he could talk my ear off about how to cook a roast. I decided I had to meet Vincent, so he and his mom Tasha drove up from Hes...

The story of Chef Ricky Odbert and his restaurant, Six Test Kitchen, is one of remarkable extremes. After graduating from culinary school, he moved back to his hometown, Arroyo Grande, California, and started his own restaurant, serving multi-course, inventive, fine dining menus — in his parents’ garage. With just one other person working with him, Ricky steadily built a following until the health...

Mike and Becky Hicks own Lincoln Market & Deli in San Luis Obispo, California, which is right around the corner from my house and their own house. If you’ve never been to this deli before, I’ll describe it: Lincoln is warm and cheery, an old building that’s been updated with colorful murals inside and out. There’s a long communal table in the front room, a grocery section, a bottle shop, a boutiqu...

Elizabeth Poett wears many hats. She is a seventh-generation cattle rancher on Rancho San Julian near Lompoc, California, a home cook, an entrepreneur, a mother, a wife, a daughter, and the talent behind a new show called Ranch To Table on the Magnolia Network, which is owned by Chip and Joanna Gaines. Now in its first season, Ranch To Table features Elizabeth’s recipes in the kitchen of her famil...

For years, I’ve driven past the dive bar Whiskey & June in Atascadero and promised myself I’d visit someday. I hate to say it, but I’ve still never gone in, and after meeting its owner, Daniel Green, I want to visit more than ever. Daniel came highly recommended as a good podcast guest by Jenna Congdon, the sommelier I interviewed in Season 1. She told me he’d worked at New York’s famous Eleven Ma...

Kari and Will Torres are partners in San Luis Obispo’s Farmhouse Corner Market, a restaurant and specialty grocery that has won the hearts of flavor-lovers across the area. The vibe at Farmhouse is very casual and cheery, but Will’s cuisine is anything but basic. Will and Kari talk about how they got here via a decade at JUSTIN Winery in Paso Robles, how they met at a power plant, and about their...

Beda Schmidthues owns and operates Beda’s Biergarten in San Luis Obispo with his wife Helga and their children. Beda and Helga are from Duisberg and Dusseldorf, respectively, but they’ve actually been living in the States longer than they ever lived in Germany. When they immigrated in the early 1980s, they never could have guessed at the success they’d have as a family-owned German restaurant in S...

Despite never having done anything like it before, Christa Pfleeger and her husband Eric bought a homestead in Huasna, east of Arroyo Grande. She is an in-demand commercial photographer who travels the world multiple times a year for brands like Google and Roxy, and he is an artist. The two of them lived in New York and L.A. for many years before choosing to try the homesteading life, growing thei...

By day, Carter Hiyama is a filmmaker and commercial photographer for his production company Datsu Films, and his wife Veronika Hiyama works in marketing for hospitality properties. But when COVID hit and lockdown kept them inside, this young Santa Barbara couple decided to start a creative nano-agency, just the two of them, called Sundae Cereal, which develops brands and assets for members of the...

Angela-Sarah North and Sadie Rogers each had a love for wild things long before they met in San Luis Obispo. Their respect for the natural world brought them together into a mentorship relationship, with Angela teaching Sadie to become a certified herbalist. On the podcast, the two of them discuss the ancient medicine of ayurveda, how edible and medicinal plants grow right in our driveways, the si...

Arcenio J. López is a Mixteco native from a village in Oaxaca, Mexico. When he arrived in Oxnard, California in 2003, Arcenio worked as a farmworker in the strawberry fields. Three years later, Arcenio was hired as a community organizer with the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project or MICOP, whose mission is to support, organize and empower the indigenous migrant communities in California...

Michael Palmer is the owner of McConnell’s Ice Cream in Santa Barbara, along with his wife, Chef Eva Ein. They’re not the original owners though: McConnell’s started in 1949 with Gordon and Ernesteen McConnell. The brand was beloved already, but when Michael and Eva took over, the vibe and the quality hit its stride. Today, people revere McConnell’s ice cream in its several scoop shops across sout...

Jack Dyer tells me about his roots in a a family of people with a heart for service, the moment he quit his day job to start a craft brewery, and how the company’s values play out in the call for environmental and social justice.

Brent Burchett and Kiah Twisselman_Burchett discuss their love for agriculture and humanity, their shared ability to hear where people are coming from, and their desire to effect change at a high level.

Jeff, Lindsay and Jade Jackson talk about music, farm food, their love for old things and old ways, and leaving a legacy.

Beth Vukmanic sits down in the backyard to talk sustainable wine, playing the harp professionally, and batch cooking dinners to eat after a killer HIIT workout.