An Invitation to Learn from the People Shaping the Future of Food

EducationNews

Feb 16

This spring, I have the incredible honor of developing and teaching a new virtual course through University College Cork: Food Heritage in Action.

While I will guide the course, what excites me most is the opportunity to bring together an extraordinary group of guest lecturers whose work is reshaping how we understand food, culture, sustainability, and enterprise.

Christina and I often reflect on how fortunate we are to have crossed paths with so many visionaries, researchers, teachers, farmers, chefs, and craftspeople from around the world. These are people doing meaningful, groundbreaking work, not for recognition or trends, but because they genuinely care. They care about land, tradition, culture, nourishment, community, and the future.

Part of the reason I developed this course was to create a space where others could learn directly from these individuals and engage with their work in a meaningful way.

**What Is Food Heritage in Action?**

This innovative pilot program integrates history, anthropology, gastronomy, and entrepreneurship to explore how food heritage can serve both as a source of cultural identity and as a model for sustainable enterprise.

Each week combines a guest presentation with discussion and application, ensuring students don’t just hear ideas but also engage with them, question them, and explore how they might apply them in their own lives and work.

Learning from Practitioners Doing the Work

The heart of this course is the people sharing their knowledge and lived experience - individuals working at the intersection of culture, ecology, craft, and nourishment.

We begin by grounding ourselves in Ireland’s rich but often underexplored culinary heritage with Dr. Regina Sexton of University College Cork. A food historian and cultural scholar, Regina has spent decades documenting Irish food traditions and the cultural role of everyday cooking in shaping identity. Her work reveals how food carries memory, resilience, and a deep sense of place.

In Week 2, Dr. Aidan O’Sullivan of University College Dublin explores how experimental archaeology helps us understand the historic and prehistoric past. Through his work at UCD’s Centre for Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture, he reconstructs ancient technologies and lifeways to show how people built, cooked, ate, and interacted with their environments. His work reminds us that food is not just sustenance, it is a sensory experience that helps us interpret human stories and landscapes.

Dr. Aidan O’Sullivan (black shirt middle) during our Food Tour of Ireland at UCD’s Centre for Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture

Ethics take center stage in Week 3 with Mike Keen of Eat Your Environment (UK). His work explores the relationship between food, ecology, and human adaptation. His Human Diet Project includes an expedition across the sea ice of northern Greenland, where he will live on a traditionally hunted seal while studying how a nose-to-tail diet interacts with the human microbiome. Collaborating with researchers and Inuit hunters, his work examines how traditional foods sustained Arctic communities for millennia and explores the boundary between fermentation and decomposition, a frontier that has shaped human dietary evolution.

Week 4 brings us to Mexico City with Galia Kleiman, founder of La Cocina de Galia. Through her fermentation atelier, she teaches workshops on fermentation, microbiome health, and traditional preservation. Her work bridges culinary craft and functional nutrition, and her fermented foods are distributed throughout Mexico City. She is also co-founder of Ferment Oaxaca, the largest fermentation summit in the Spanish-speaking world, and serves as Mexico City chapter leader for the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Sharing a quesadilla with Galia Kleiman loaded with Mexico City

Week 5 expands the lens globally with Una Fitzgibbon of Bord Bia. Her work sits at the intersection of Irish food identity, sustainability, and global markets, helping position Irish food on the world stage while preserving authenticity and connection to place. She demonstrates how national food identity and storytelling can serve as powerful cultural and economic drivers.

Una Fitzgibbon presenting at the Food Lab in October 2019

In Week 6, Robert Sikes, founder of Keto Brick, offers a perspective shaped by nutritional precision, entrepreneurship, and personal performance. A professional natural bodybuilder and coach, he created Keto Brick to provide metabolically efficient, nutrient-dense fuel. His work challenges conventional dietary narratives and demonstrates how clarity of purpose and nutritional strategy can shape both health outcomes and business innovation.

Week 7 features Jason O’Brien, founder of Odaios Foods and Roundstone Bakery. Trained as an archaeologist with a deep interest in hunter-gatherer lifeways, Jason applies ancient food principles to modern production. Odaios Foods focuses on nutrient-dense products rooted in traditional practices, while Roundstone Bakery produces long-fermented sourdough grounded in craft, time, and place. His work explores how we can scale traditional food practices without losing their integrity.

Week 8 explores how ancestral and traditional foodways can inform modern enterprise through the Modern Stone Age approach. I will lead this session and share what we are building at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, illustrating how archaeological and ethnographic research can directly inform a modern commercial restaurant.

Jason O’Brien and Bill foraging in County Mayo, Ireland

In Week 9, Christina Schindler, CEO and co-founder of The Modern Stone Age, shares the journey of building a values-driven food business. Christina leads operations, growth, and community engagement for the Modern Stone Age Kitchen and Food Lab, ensuring the mission, reconnecting people to nourishing food and traditional knowledge, is implemented in a way that is sustainable, accessible, and community-centered.

Our final session invites students to synthesize what they have learned and explore opportunities for bringing food heritage into their own lives and communities.

Christina & Bill Schindler out from of the Modern Stone Age Kitchen

Why These Voices Matter

Traditional food knowledge has always been passed down through people: through relationships, stories, and lived experience.

Today, many of these traditions risk being lost, misunderstood, or commodified without context. At the same time, interest in local, ethical, and meaningful food continues to grow.

The individuals joining this course are helping bridge that gap. Their work demonstrates that heritage is not nostalgia, it is living knowledge capable of nourishing communities, strengthening identities, and supporting resilient local economies.

By sharing their work, we are not only preserving knowledge. We are helping ensure it remains relevant and alive.

Beyond Recipes: Food as Story, Identity, and Nourishment

Food carries terroir. It carries time. It carries memory.

It is one of the most powerful storytellers we have because it engages all of our senses at once - taste, smell, touch, sight, and sound - nourishing us not only biologically, but emotionally, culturally, and communally.

This course invites students to see food not as a commodity, but as a living expression of place, identity, and human connection.

Bill & Christina eating insects in Mexico

A Personal Note

For Christina and me, this course represents something deeply meaningful. Our work has always been shaped by the generosity of others who shared their knowledge, traditions, and stories with us.

Creating a space where those voices can be heard, respected, and learned from feels like a natural extension of that journey.

Food heritage is not about looking backward.

It is about carrying forward what matters.

And learning from the people doing that work every day is one of the most powerful ways to ensure these traditions continue to nourish us in every sense of the word.

Join Us

If you feel called to explore the deeper meaning of food, its history, its cultural power, and its potential to shape sustainable and meaningful work we invite you to join us.

Food Heritage in Action is open to participants around the world and welcomes anyone passionate about food, culture, sustainability, and enterprise.

Come learn from an extraordinary group of practitioners, engage in meaningful discussion, and discover how traditional food knowledge can inform the future.

Registration details and course information are available here and the full course is 600 Euro.

We hope you’ll join us.

Take the Class

Dr. Bill Schindler

Dr. Bill Schindler, author of Eat Like a Human, is an anthropologist, chef, and global leader in ancestral foodways. As the Founder of the Food Lab and Executive Chef at Modern Stone Age Kitchen, he transforms ancient techniques into modern practices for nourishing, sustainable eating. Bill’s research and teaching empower people to reconnect with traditional diets and improve health through fermentation, nose-to-tail eating, and other transformative methods.

https://modernstoneage.com