Chef Katherine Gage Boulud’s perspective on food was shaped by her foodie upbringing and work in high-profile kitchens. Now she aims to expand the minds and palates of picky young eaters across the country with her advocacy for Spoons Across America, a not-for-profit that teaches students in Pre-K through middle school the joys and benefits of healthy eating.
“One of the most important elements of what we do [at Spoons Across America] is encouraging families to create a ritual of enjoying a meal together that is a place of respite from the rest of the world,” Boulud says. “Statistics show that children will be less likely to do drugs, have a teenage pregnancy, or commit suicide if they are connecting with their families at the table multiple times a week.”
Born in New York City and raised in New Jersey, Boulud felt she always had “a foot in the city,” as her mother’s identical twin lived in Manhattan and her father worked downtown at the New York Stock Exchange. She grew up enjoying family meals where everyone sat down, said grace, had conversations with each other, and tried new dishes—even if they weren’t sure they’d like them. Food wasn’t forced on anybody, and Boulud always understood that if she tried something and didn’t like it, she wouldn’t have to try it again for another six months to a year. Food was always something that was happy and positive, she says, noting such favorites as her grandfather’s Caesar salad, his fresh linguine with clam sauce, and buttery-sweet soft-shell crabs, which she still adores to this day. That sense of excitement at the table made her a more adventurous eater when she dined out at restaurants.
“Going out to dinner, we’d always [take] the opportunity to impress the waiter by ordering something that seemed a little more grown-up,” she recalls.
Boulud’s mother loved to cook. Her grandfather loved to cook. She too fell in love with cooking, proficiently following recipes by great chefs as a teenager. Cooking and entertaining were favorite hobbies, and she enjoyed keeping up with the best restaurants. When it came to school, however, the idea of a culinary career had yet to cross her mind.
Instead, she earned a degree in art history with a concentration in media and politics. After college, she began studying journalism with the intent to go into cable news. But while volunteering for a U.S. Senate campaign, she was hired full-time as the deputy finance director to spearhead fundraising efforts and organize special events. When that campaign ended, she visited family in Palm Beach for the holidays, and her grandmother suggested that she take a class at the regional culinary school while she was in between jobs. “After one semester, I was hooked,” Boulud shares.
While double majoring in culinary arts and hospitality management, Boulud wrote for the school newsletter and cooked at local fundraisers. As a student chef, she trained under chef Zach Bell at Café Boulud in Palm Beach and was selected to cook at the American Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival. The latter experience set off a series of summers spent living abroad and working in Michelin-starred kitchens in the South of France, Paris, Bali, and Spain. (When not abroad, she worked at Restaurant Daniel in New York.) On the Riviera, she fell in love with the fresh produce and embrace of communal meals. She launched the blog Miel et Lavande (Honey and Lavender) to feature the region’s lifestyle and culinary culture.
She would also eventually fall in love with chef Daniel Boulud, whom she married in 2013. They welcomed a son, Julien, in 2014 and a daughter, Gigi, in 2017. Though Boulud was still involved in her husband’s restaurant group, she was also coming to terms with being a wife, a mother to two small children, and a young woman who was prioritizing her family’s health and wellness.
“It was not just about me anymore,” she explains. “It was about looking after my family and being very conscious of what my children were putting in their mouths. But I also wanted to teach other children how to have good nutritional habits, too.”
Boulud returned to school to study nutrition education, with the goal of teaching children about healthful eating, especially in relation to school lunch programs.
“I felt like if I could take what I knew as a chef and add the nutrition side of it, then I would be able to go forth and help children in schools, improve the school lunch system, and get kids eating more healthfully,” she says. “If you start with parents, it can sometimes feel like an uphill battle. But if you start with the children and they bring it to their parents, the parents are much more receptive.”
While Boulud was immersed in her studies, her aunt invited her to a benefit for Spoons Across America. Boulud admired the group’s mission of educating children and families on the virtues of good nutrition, supporting local farmers, and coming together at the table around shared family meals. Plus, it already had a nutrition curriculum it was using in schools.
She began volunteering with the group—mostly as a chef during Spoons’ fifth grade “dinner party projects,” when program graduates prepare a full meal and host their families in their schools’ cafeterias—and became the vice president of its board of directors in 2018. Since then, she says she has been fully involved in fundraising, forging new partnerships and developing ideas that can bring the organization into every school and after-school program across the country.
“There’s nothing she doesn’t do for us,” says Travis Hicks II, Spoons Across America’s director of development. “She’s a perfectionist and a go-getter [who] goes out of her way to talk about us any way she can. Martha Stewart wouldn’t be at our events if Katherine hadn’t written her a letter to invite her. She’s one of our No. 1 cheerleaders.”
One of Spoons Across America’s free initiatives is the Food Exploration Project, which brings together key points from its school-based program. It includes a kit with such necessary “nonedible” tools as a 12-session curriculum guide with handouts and parent newsletters, two books, an electric skillet, child-safe knives, cutting mats, measuring cups and spoons, trays, mixing bowls, tasting cups, and 500 wooden stirrers. Many of the recipes can be adapted to use food that is local and seasonal.
“The idea is to entice kids into the world of food and to get them to really feel like they’re doing the exploring themselves,” Boulud explains. “It’s very fun in the sense of a science project or experiment in class, where they can put their food explorer cap on and be able to taste things themselves. Kids like to have that kind of control and power over something that’s clearly important, but it’s not something that most kids are doing, and it allows them to have that pride in, well, impressing a server by ordering something they didn’t expect you to order. Kids like to be impressive. They like to act grown-up, and that’s something that the curriculum appeals to. It’s a good path in with them.”
Spoons Across America is currently in 200 schools and community-based organizations, but Boulud says the goal is to keep expanding its reach every year. To do that, fundraising will be key, which is good because Hicks says Boulud is a powerhouse. This past February, she raised $150,000 at the inaugural Spoons Across America Winter Hat event at Café Boulud Palm Beach. Then, Spoons raised another $400,000 at its spring fundraiser in New York. Boulud notes that the organization’s current goal for this year is to line up corporate sponsors and foundations that will commit to Spoons for a longer period of time so it can focus more on growth and programming.
“If you don’t educate children about food, then how will you get them to eat healthier?” she asks. “I’m not saying that [Spoons] is the entire solution, but I do insist that it is the first step and a critical step in that solution.”
With Boulud in the mix, it’s a recipe for success.
Story Credits:
Shot on location at The Brazilian Court Hotel and Café Boulud, Palm Beach
Makeup: Deborah Koepper, Deborah Koepper Beauty, Palm Beach
Wardrobe: Carolina Herrera (with the exception of yellow dress by Badgley Mischka)
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