Feeding Body, Mind, and Soul: Caring for Our Communities Through Food

Dig into 2025 with Feeding Body, Mind, and Soul: Caring for Our Communities Through Food, part of our annual New Year Wellness and Renewal series. From restaurateur and chef Toriano Gordon bringing vegan soul food to Oakland and the greater Bay Area, to organic farm owner Leslie Wiser growing culturally relevant produce to feed seniors in the Oakland and San Francisco Chinatowns, to public health researcher and clinician Dr. Daphne Miller teaching doctors-in-training on urban farms in Richmond, the panel features diverse stakeholders all working to answer the same question: how do we use food to holistically care for our Bay Area communities? Moderated by SFGate Food Editor Jessica Yadegaran, the panel will explore how different ingredients, food and farming practices, and cuisines speak to the heart, culture, and wellbeing of their neighborhoods. Speaker presentations and discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A and book sales and signing.

About the Panelists

Toriano Gordon is a devoted father and husband from San Francisco’s Fillmore District. After dedicating a decade of his life to helping at-risk and formerly-incarcerated youth in the San Francisco Bay Area, he decided to pursue his lifelong passion of cooking. Toriano experienced a huge shift in his health and well-being after adopting a plant-based diet, and he now feels compelled to share this with others. He is the owner and founder of Vegan Mob.

Dr. Daphne Miller is a practicing physician, author, and professor of family medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. For the past decade, her writing and teaching has explored the frontier between biomedicine and the natural world. Her widely acclaimed first book, The Jungle Effect, chronicles her nutrition adventures as she travels to traditional communities around the globe. In Farmacology, Miller brings us beyond the simple concept of "food as medicine" and introduces us to the critical idea that it's the farm where that food is grown that offers us the real medicine.A contributing columnist to the Washington Post as well as other newspapers and magazines, Miller holds a medical degree from Harvard University and an undergraduate degree from Brown University. She lives and gardens in Berkeley, California.

Leslie Wiser was born in Chicago and raised throughout the Midwest in St. Paul, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. When she was in her early 20’s, she spent a season working on a 10-acre organic farm in Palmer, Alaska where her passion for regenerative agriculture took root. Being a first-generation mixed woman of Chinese-Taiwanese, German, and Polish Jewish descent, she rarely found her story and cultural heritage reflected in mainstream society or American agricultural communities. The lack of representation has continually inspired her to explore her multi-faceted heritage through the work she pursues. When Leslie had her children, she knew that food would be their main connection to their Korean Chinese-Taiwanese heritage. Radical Family Farms is the culmination of a 20-year dream to farm and just another step in the lifelong exploration of self.

Jessica Yadegaran is the food editor at SFGATE, where she has led a team of reporters since 2023. She has been covering the Bay Area food and dining scene for 17 years, previously as a reporter for Bay Area News Group, which includes the San Jose Mercury News. Before that, she spent time in various editorial roles at Seattle Magazine, the San Luis Obispo Tribune and the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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