“They are folks that, if I don’t speak up for them, what does that say about me as as a leader to them?”

Alicia talks with John Currence, a chef based in Oxford, Mississippi who co-hosted a series called the “Big Gay Mississippi Welcome Table Dinners” to protest at the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which sanctioned religiously-motivated discrimination, particularly against queer and trans people. They discuss the political uses of food—both as a tool of protest and in bringing people together — and what makes for a “stunning” vegan breakfast.

Written and presented by Alicia Kennedy
Produced by Sareen Patel

Transcript

ALICIA KENNEDY: This is Meatless, a podcast about eating from How We Get To Next. I’m Alicia Kennedy, a food and drink writer. I’ll be having conversations with chefs, writers, and more about how their personal and political beliefs determine whether or not they eat meat. This show asks the question, “How identity, culture, economics, and history affect a diet?”

In this episode I talk to John Currence, a James Beard Award-winning chef based in Oxford, Mississippi. He owns the restaurants City Grocery, Big Bad Breakfast, Bouré, and Snackbar. He received nationwide attention in 2014 for his Big Gay Welcome Table dinners, which were a protest against the Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which would have allowed for businesses to discriminate on the basis of sexuality or religion. We discuss breakfast around the world, the role of activism in his restaurants, and how a bacon-loving southern chef reacts to vegans.

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ALICIA KENNEDY: Hello John, thank you so much for chatting with us for “Meatless.”

JOHN CURRENCE: Of course, thank you.

ALICIA KENNEDY: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

JOHN CURRENCE: Oh we’re just jumping into it hard, right. I grew up in New Orleans, and I ate everything, with the exception of tomatoes, I think, until I was about 18 years old. So, you know, New Orleans, you know, I grew up in the 60s and early 70s, you know, sort of in the shadow of the civil rights movement in New Orleans, and, you know, food was still, sort of, a very vibrant, an honest part of the culture of New Orleans. So, you know, Caribbean, Spanish, French, you know, food and, you know, plus the, sort of, food of the Cajuns of South Louisiana, you know, were all very distinct parts of the, you know, what I grew up with.

You know, I had a father who was in international business, in oil and gas, and my mother who traveled with him occasionally, who was fascinated with food, sort of, forever, you know, traveling with him to India, to the Far East, to Western Europe. You know, was a kitchen tinkerer, so she was always coming home and, sort of, recreating the things that she had eaten in these places which she traveled with my dad. So there really wasn’t anything that, you know, that I didn’t eat, or wasn’t put in front of me, and food was a huge part of my life. And, you know, sort of, beyond that, I had grandparents that had gardens and farms in North Carolina and Georgia and spent summers with them, and so, you know, saw an entirely different plate of food in the summers that my brother and I would spend, you know, up there with them in the summers of our childhood.

ALICIA KENNEDY: And when did you become a chef?

JOHN CURRENCE: Well I don’t know, it depends who you talk to, I might never have actually. I started cooking, I guess, I mean my first cooking job was the morning after I graduated from high school, I got a job on a tugboat, working as a deckhand in the Gulf of Mexico, and was informed that I was going to be the cook when I arrived. And I had a blast doing it, and, you know, sort of, working this little galley kitchen all summer long, cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the same ten guys every day. You know, it was an interesting challenge and, you know, I had a good time with it. So when I got off to college and, you know, and I wanted to make extra money it was easy to just, sort of, go out and, you know, and pick up a sandwich shop job or a short order, you know, café line job.

And so I had, you know, kind of, a couple of those, just to make beer money when I was in school, and ultimately ended up at the University of North Carolina, landing a job at a place called Crook’s Corner, which, you know, was by total mistake in the, sort of, the early, mid 80s. A bunch of my friends were working there, and so I picked up a job in the kitchen. Sort of, unbeknownst to me, you know, what was going on there was that the chef and owner was a gentleman named Bill Neal, and at the time, you know, Bill had been recognized by Craig Claiborne in the Times for the work that he was doing in food.

And he was, you know, what he was doing was taking the food of his childhood table in the low country of South Carolina, and when I say that, I mean, like, cornbread and collard greens, you know, for the first time and bringing them to, sort of, the fine linen, I mean the white linen, fine dining table for people to eat. And, you know, he was very accomplished in French technique, and so he was basically, sort of, like, taking these foods, you know, of his childhood that he loved and elevating them, you know, sort of, through French technique. And you know, all of a sudden I’m just in the middle of this, and he ended up, sort of, taking me on as his protégé. And that’s who I really did my training under.

So that was the genesis of it. I, you know, I returned to New Orleans to help a friend open a restaurant called Gautreau’s in the neighborhood that we grew up in, and, you know, what I came away from, you know, with, in Chapel Hill, you know, just knowing that, you know, I really enjoyed working in a professional kitchen. Getting to New Orleans and getting into another gear where it was, you know, highly competitive, there was a tremendous amount of history in the kitchens and the city of New Orleans, you know, that’s what really, sort of, cemented, you know, for me that that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

ALICIA KENNEDY: Right, and can you talk a bit about your restaurants and what inspired the genesis of them?

JOHN CURRENCE: Sure, so in about 1992 at the age of 27, I was just stupid enough to think that I was ready to, you know, open my own restaurant, and I was at a crossroads in New Orleans, and I had some, you know, some frustrating experiences.

I went to Oxford, Mississippi, to visit a high school friend for the weekend, because it was as far away as I could get from New Orleans on a tank of gas and get back in time to work on Monday morning. And so I went to visit, and, you know, one thing led to another and, you know, we started drinking beer and, you know, decided that we could solve all the problems of the world through food and why would we want to, you know, take on the street fight in New Orleans when there’s this little town in Mississippi that, you know, was clearly hungry for something.

There was nothing going on at all, and there were all these, sort of, prime real estate spaces that were completely available to us to do something in. And, you know, my initial reaction was, you know, “Why the hell would I want to end up in Oxford, Mississippi?” You know, as I went home back to New Orleans and thought about it, I made a second trip back about three weeks later and, you know, it, sort of, unfolded for me, and, you know, I saw what the potential was, a ridiculous opportunity presented itself to us and, you know, next thing I know, you know, we’re, you know, putting on a little rascals show, you know, cobbling together, you know, duct tape and broken glass to, you know, to put together our first restaurant, you know, for next to nothing. I mean, you know, it’s a fairy tale story in, sort of, how little it took for us to get City Grocery open, which was my first.

You know, and it was just an immediate success, because there really was nothing else in town. There were a bunch of younger professionals that were, you know, at work and wanted something and, you know, they responded to what we did, which was, you know, nothing more than, you know, us taking the best quality ingredients we could and putting together, you know, the very simplest of dishes, executed as well as we could, you know, sort of, like, the Zuni cafe chicken. You know, crab cakes, you know, it was just really, really, very straightforward things, you know, that I knew.

It was just a smash hit, and so we just went from there, you know, I thought that I would spend a couple of years in Oxford and, sort of, move on and come to, you know, come back up to New York or go to, you know, back to New Orleans or what have you and that, you know, life would just progress. And 27 years later, you know, here I am still in Oxford and churning away at it, and we’ve opened, you know, a dozen restaurants in Oxford over those 20-something years. You know, and, you know, it’s home.

ALICIA KENNEDY: So your book, Big Bad Breakfast, has eggs and bacon on the cover and one of your breakfast ten commandments is, “You shall lather with butter.” So I just wanted to ask what you think of vegans, if anything at all?

JOHN CURRENCE: Well, you know, I think, you know, there’s, you know, I love bluster, and, you know, and so anybody who takes a different path, you know, the inconveniences, you know, stove jocks, you know, is always, sort of, you know, fodder for that cannon blast. You know, it’s interesting that, you know, in our kitchens we actually, we take vegetarianism and pescetarianism, you know, and all, you know, dietary restrictions, you know, extraordinarily seriously. And, you know, we really look at, you know, somebody coming in that has, you know, special dietary needs as a challenge.

You know, it was about 15 years ago that I started talking about it to my guys, I’m, like, “Look, you know, how tiresome is it just cooking he same thing every day?” I mean we change our menus, you know, regularly enough but, you know, you still are, you know, night in and night out preparing the same dishes. So that when somebody shows up, you know, you’ve got the opportunity to create something different, you know, for them. And our, you know, what, you know, what I’ve had, the ability, you know, to learn from, you know, some of the finest people in the industry, whether it’s Ella Brennan or Danny Meyer is that the, you know, the significance of, you know, taking care of people, you know, can never ever ever get lost or even the slightest bit muddied, you know, or, you know, you’re not, you know, you’re not fulfilling your commitment to what you do.

So, you know, I, you know, in order to charm, you know, a girl that I fell in love with in Chapel Hill, you know, when I was a young man, you know, took the path of vegetarianism just, sort of, not, you know, for no other reason than, you know, I wanted to impress her, you know, with my commitment. But, in as much as, you know, I have, you know, tried to keep that in mind always, you know, I don’t think that I ever really, I think when the door really swung wide for me was traveling to Gujarat India about four years ago with, one of my dearest friends in the world is our chef at Snackbar, Vishwesh Bhatt. And just, sort of, seeing the world of possibility, you know, in Gujarat, which is extremely, extremely, you know, an extremely conservative state, very religiously conservative, and as a result, the population, you know, is, is very vegetarian.

And so seeing the insane spectrum of possibility out there that, you know, that there was in flavors and textures, you know, in the food that was available. And then even, you know, noticing beyond that, because, you know, there’s such a, you know, a challenge with water purification over there. That you completely take out of the equation any sort of raw vegetable preparation for the most part. So everything is just, is cooked very deeply, you know, so that, you know, there’s no thread of intestinal issues. That, you know, here I was, like, there’s this insane amount of food, you know, that’s available that I just would’ve never considered, and then that’s even leaving this, this, of the whole screen of possibilities you can go beyond with into, you know, raw foods on top of that. It’s, like, I could not have been any more excited, you know, to come home and start cooking again.

So, you know, I don’t, I don’t, you know, judge people, you know, I think, you know, where we, you know, we run into, you know, into speed bumps every once in a while. Is, you know, when, you know, it’s more event things that we do. Sort of, like, when we have a, you know, an event that is, sort of, billed as the “meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, and meat dinner, come and get your meat.” You know, and then we, you know, we’re told, you know, an hour before the event that it’s, you know, it’s offsite in another city, “Well, we have two vegetarians that are coming, and we have one pescetarian and, you know, one ovo-lacto,” and, you know, well, OK, what are we supposed to do about this, and how much more could we have advertised that this is, you know? And so it becomes a, you know, in those moments, sort of, an issue of consideration, you know, that, you know, at times there is this challenge to, sort of, like, “Well wait a minute, so we need to adjust our, you know, entire world, you know, to, you know, to catering to the whims of somebody who’s, you know, not let us know in advanced what’s going on.”

Like, because I don’t think that the converse is true, you know, that you go to a vegetarian restaurant and go, “We’ve got somebody that wants a steak coming in tonight,” right? And it’s an absurdist argument, you know, but, you know, the bottom line is, like, you know, this is, sort of, a greater issue when it comes to politics and morality and, sort of, what’s going on in the world. I just think we all have to be, you know, more considered of one another’s, you know, sort of, needs and, you know, conveniences and inconveniences. And so, you know, in those moments, is there still a little rumbling in our kitchen, you know, from time to time or, you know, at an event? Sure there is, you know, but again, you know, for me, I really deeply believe that there’s nothing that, you know, gives our guys a great opportunity to showcase than to say, all of a sudden, “We’ve got somebody in the house that needs to be taken care of, let’s go to the walk-in and put something together.”

You know, that when they walk away, you know, the feeling is, holy cow, I mean it wasn’t just, like, these guys took their side vegetables and all put them on a plate and went, “Here you go.” You know, we can really do something special and make somebody feel taken care of, so. I think that answers it?

ALICIA KENNEDY: Totally. So we, vegans and vegetarians, talk a lot about breakfast kind of being one of the hardest meals for someone who doesn’t eat meat, especially someone who doesn’t eat eggs. Like, what would you serve a vegan for breakfast that you think would actually be stunning?

JOHN CURRENCE: Well, you know, I think that there is, you know, because we have been so trained to think that, you know, our, our breakfast, you know, the American breakfast plate is what breakfast should be. You know, that was, sort of, part of what the idea of opening Big Bad Breakfast was about, was, you know, taking the opportunity to do, you know, other things. Like, this is, eggs and bacon are just, you know, one, you know, one answer.

You know, to, you know, I always think of, you know, like, upma or, you know, grits and mushrooms, vegetables on sauté, you know, with polenta or grits. You know, that you substitute out your dairy for, you know, for non-dairy liquids, you know, in order to cook them off. You know, then it’s just all about the seasonings that you use. You know, in order to make those things sumptuous from, you know, from a different angle. So, you know, when I think about dishes, you know, I think about when I was heavily designing, you know, in the days when, you know, when I was in the kitchen every day and was coming up with, you know, with four specials every day. You know, we, my dishes were, you know, always comprised of something hot, something cold, something sweet, something salty, something crunchy, something soft.

And so, you know, with me, you know, you get into it a dish like that then, you know, you can use some pickled ramp, some sautéed mushrooms, you know, garnish it with some crispy garlic and all of a sudden, like, that bowl of polenta, you know, becomes something that’s, you know, that’s a little more transcendent. You’ve got, you know, layers of flavors and textures going on and at different temperatures and things happening. And so, you know, I guess the real bottom line is I think the first thing that I do is go, “Well let’s just push the egg plate to the side, that’s off the table,” and, you know, breakfast can be whatever you want. I mean this idea that, you know, you either have a pancake or you have eggs or bacon, you know, is breakfast or, you know, it’s not breakfast is kind of BS.

You can eat whatever you want, and when you look at breakfast in Malaysia, you know, in Malaysia, I did a writing assignment in a, for a foreign magazine years ago, where they sent you to a blind destination. Mine was Kuala Lumpur, and so I had no idea until I arrived at the airport where I was going, and got on a plane, you know, for a place that I’d never been before or knew anything about. And given a budget and just told for two weeks go do whatever you want, and then write about what you learned while you were there. And so, you know, I thought I was going to write about food, and I explored food deeply, all over the country, but really ended up being more fascinated with the people that I met.

The food was amazing, and I never ate at the same place twice except one place, which was a little breakfast stall down in an alleyway across from the hotel that I stayed at in Kuala Lumpur, and they made something that they called roti, which is not like an Indian roti, it’s more like a paratha or the, sort of, layered flat bread that you pull out and it’s, like, it’s no thicker really that, like, two or three tortillas stacked, and you pull it and it’s doughy, and, you know, and all they did was, sort of, fold scallions and vegetables into it and, you know, had this, sort of, sweet and salty soy sauce to dip in and some dahl, like, some black dahl that was, sort of, all the way cooked down. It was, I mean it absolutely blew my mind how delicious it was, and it cost, like 17 cents, with an extra, like, 8 cents for coffee. Like, so I went back, you know, a second time, this was just so amazing.

And I think, you know, oddly, and I don’t know what this says, when we were in India, you know, the only place that we went to eat twice was a breakfast place, you know, there was the Irani culture in Mumbai, are Muslim exiles from Iran that moved into India and they created a series of these sort of Parisian-looking bistros, that sort of specialize in Irani chai and breakfast. And so they make these sort of delightful, powerful breakfasts and cumin-scrambled eggs and ketchup. So while, you know, we might not satisfy the vegans with scrambled eggs, you know, the, you know, from a vegetarian standpoint, you know, this is really, sort of, a delightfully, perfectly-scrambled eggs with spicy Maggi ketchup on them. It was, like, these super, like, crazy soft, sort of, Portuguese yeast rolls, you know, or as satisfying a breakfast as I ate anywhere, so.

ALICIA KENNEDY: To bring it back to your restaurants, now you have a lot of fundraisers and a lot of messaging around social justice issues. What inspired you to bring those into your restaurant?

JOHN CURRENCE: Well, I think, you know, it started with common decency and understanding when we open that, you know, I never get a lesson in, you know, from a business ethics class that, you know, that we have some sort of implied responsibility to give something back to our community. But it seemed to make sense to me, and I guess I don’t know if it’s how I’m wired or, you know, what I got from my parents or a combination of both, you know, just how I was raised. And so we began, you know, working in the community immediately upon opening, you know. So I just felt like if you don’t feed your community and all you do is take, you know, from them, I mean that’s a parasitic relationship that’s ultimately going to fail.

So, you know, we started working with a number of different non-profits in town. And, you know, that grew into, you know, me just, sort of, you know, feeling, you know, a greater responsibility to, to be a voice for the people that I employed. You know, when you have the opportunity to speak and people will listen to you, and you represent people, I mean it’s, sort of, it starts with your family. I mean you’re going to do whatever it is to take care of your family, and I don’t like to refer to, you know, the folks that work on our team together as family because I think it sounds, kind of, cliché and disingenuous.

But, you know, I feel like, you know, sort of, the representative, you know, of these guys and when I look across the faces of, you know, the people that work for me, you know, they are immigrants, they are, you know, they are made up of, you know, folks from the LGBT community, you know, they are folks that, you know, if I don’t speak up, you know, for them, you know, what does that say about me as, you know, as a leader to them?

You know, these are the guys that give us the ability to make the living and the reputation that we do every day and so, you know, that to me could not be any more significant, you know, at all or important. And, so, you know, I think those two things combined, you know, are what, you know, sort of, really led me down that road, you know, when it comes to my, you know, enormously foul mouth when it comes to politics. You know, I think that is, you know, is probably, you know, largely due to the fact, and I studied American political philosophy and political science, you know, for years at a liberal arts school in Virginia. And, you know, so I feel like I have a very deep understanding for, you know, particularly now that we talk about, you know, about what the intentions of the founding fathers were when they wrote the Second Amendment and so on and so forth. I studied that stuff, I’ve read every one of the Federalist Papers, I know what the intention of these men was, when they were writing the Constitution, what they debated about. What their thought processes were, and, you know, we’re, you know, more often than not, we’re using false and incorrect arguments to, you know, to represent a defence for, you know, whatever it is that we’re arguing about.

And so, you know, I believe deeply in, you know, in virtues. In the importance, you know, of dignity to the office of the President of the United States of America. And when I see, you know, these things being washed away, and not just washed away, but more like cast off like ballast, as, you know, sort of, unimportant, I mean I’m sorry, it’s important for our president to tell the truth. It’s important for our politicians to tell the truth to the people. And you know, when you have, when you’re watching people lie on television, they say one thing one day and then they deny saying it the next day and people won’t even listen. You say, “Look, we have you on film saying this yesterday,” they say still, “It’s not true, that wasn’t me,” kind of thing. It’s terrifying to me, and then you go beyond that and, you know, you begin vilifying intellectualism as, you know, as a need for, you know, people who are just poor, they need to work and justify their existence.

And, you know, and then finally, you know, the demeaning the integrity of the press, of the free press, you know, to me these are all things that are terrifying red flags for, you know, what the, you know, what the potential future is, if this continues I mean, and, you know, sadly what we see is, like, these trends tend to play themselves out, you know, over a long period of time, it’s not just, like, there’s going to be four years and people go, “Wait, you know, this is bad.” You look at the segment of the population out there that still, sort of, you know, doesn’t find, you know, these sorts of conversations troublesome, you know. That scares me, I mean smart, intelligent, educated people, you know, out there that I know that have conversations that just don’t care about the fact that we’re being lied to every day. It really troubles me.

ALICIA KENNEDY: Is there, has there been a time when you have felt that you needed to put aside your politics for the sake of your business?

JOHN CURRENCE: Not as much as lots of other people in my life around me have felt like I needed to. And I mean, I think that, you know, to a certain degree, I have, I’m not as vocal, and I think a large part of it is because I just realize that, you know, on social media at least it’s just where most of my time is spent, you know, with that activity these days it’s, you know, you, because people have the ability to just, sort of, click you off, they don’t want to hear what you have to say, you know, basically, sort of, distilled followers on social media down to like-minded folks, you know? And so preaching to the choir is tiresome, you know, it doesn’t get any traction and you, kind of, you know, you do look at the clicks and the likes and what not, sort of, diminish, you know, it kind of turns into a yawn. So now, you know, the question is, you know, what can we do to be involved with, you know, non-partisan issues like, “OK, now it’s time to really talk about making sure that people are getting out and registering to vote in November,” and more than that, actually going out and doing it. Showing up and doing it, and being, you know, being the voices. You know, and, you know, working, you know, more directly on, you know, issues that are important, you know. I was thinking about it last night, sort of, before I went to bed, I was, like, you know, the blissful thing about this miserably hot summer has been, you know, there hasn’t been, you know, a school shooting, because everybody has been out of school. But, it could not be any sadder, you know, for me to think that, “OK, well, in about two weeks we can just start waiting for the first report to come in.”

And, you know, there doesn’t seem to be, you know, any sort of priority placed on figuring out, “How the hell do we address this problem?” You know, we’re clearly not interested in any, sort of, conversation about gun control, you know, we can, that’s a whole different road to go down. You know, there is a nation of children, and we have to think about the mental health issues that are at work here, there’s a nation of kids now that are going to never know going to school and not having to think about that. I mean, I never went to school and once thought that there was any, sort of, threat. Like, when I got on school grounds, it’s, like, you just went to school and you had fun and you played and you learned and you went to football practice and then you went home. You know, the threats were outside.

But there’s a nation of kids now, that they go to school every day, not knowing whether somebody is going to bust into that school and start shooting, that’s awful, you know? And, you know, and we haven’t just denigrated the, sort of, sanctity of schools but, you know, churches as well. I mean that’s insane to me, and it’s inexcusable. I mean, it’s, so, anyway, maybe there’s happier questions coming down the pipe, right?

ALICIA KENNEDY: Right, right, well what is the power of food and chefs to make social change do you think?

JOHN CURRENCE: Well I mean, you know, I still like to believe that the welcome table is a place where, you know, we can sit down and, you know, our appetites are a commonality that, you know, can help us come together and discuss these things. And, you know, and I hold onto hope that, you know, we will listen to one another and learn from one another. And, you know, and find a middle.

You know, from a physics standpoint, you know, I like to believe that we’re getting so polarized and that the gap in the middle, the vacuum is so great that nature’s abhorrence of it is going to help us create something that’s just going to suck up into the middle and create, you know, some sort of middle party that is, you know, is based on sensibility, you know, and decency and, you know, and get back to the work of, you know, of actually taking care of, you know, of our country again, you know, and our planet.

This is, I mean, I just, you know, to this day, you know, I still cannot believe that we as a country stood alone and walked off of the Paris Accord. The, you know, there’s no question in anybody’s mind whatsoever that, you know, that there are issues with rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and that if we don’t do something, you know, we’re killing the planet. So now I’ve completely forgotten the question.

ALICIA KENNEDY: Whether chefs and food can have any role in fixing these problems?

JOHN CURRENCE: Yeah, and, so, you know, first of all, you know, I like to think that we provide the opportunity at our tables for, you know, for people to talk. You know, I think, you know, the other thing is, is that, you know, having been handed over the course of, you know, of my career, having gone from, you know, it’s still, sort of, being at a, sort of, ignoble and ignored profession to it being, you know, a profession that has created ultra-celebrity. That more of us have a megaphone. You know, I have not been afraid to use that megaphone, and, and other chefs are getting, you know, less and less inclined to keep their mouths shut, you know, in, out of fear that it might have an effect on their business.

And so, you know, I think the more people who get involved, this, you know, we are a democratic republic, the more people that are involved, you know, the more likelihood there is that, you know, that we will see change. So, you know, I know that getting out there and, you know, beating on the stump, you know, in a vulgar fashion is not how I’m going to affect that. You know, I look at guys like Tom Colicchio who, you know, I think, you know, the world of Tom and his, sort of, monosyllabic responses on Twitter are the smartest out there. I mean I watch him every day, you know, shut people down, you know, with a half dozen syllables, you know?

It’s not running his mouth, it’s not being vulgar, you know, he’s just smart enough that, you know, he can look at these issues and, you know, in a matter of a teeny tiny sentence, concisely, you know, answer a question. And so, you know, I think that, you know, the more folks that get involved, the more that we band together, the more that we’re committed to, you know, trying to do what’s right, you know, the more possibility there is to see change.

ALICIA KENNEDY: And do you believe that cooking itself can be a political act?

JOHN CURRENCE: I believe that it can be a cathartic act. I don’t know. I mean, this is, I’m sure that there are a lot of people that could come up with a much more clever response to that than I could, you know, I think I looked at, you know, at cooking in a, from a rebellious angle at one point in my life, but I don’t know that it’s necessarily political. It’s definitely personal and, you know, the best way to, you know, to, sort of, reach people is through, you know, transporting them through personal experience.

And, you know, if we can touch them with our food, touch their hearts, you know, take them to a place of comfort, we’re going to have a much easier time, you know, sort of, opening their soul to consideration, you know, so, in that way.

ALICIA KENNEDY: Thank you so much John for taking the time.

JOHN CURRENCE: No of course, thank you.

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