Today, I talk with Lan Thai, known to most by her nom d’guerre “Chef Lando.” She was born the youngest of five in a Thai refugee camp at the end of the Vietnam War. When her family immigrated to the U.S. a year later, they bought a farm in Southern California where Lando was raised on the food they grew, and that her mother turned into daily feasts for her family.

Lando believes that good food isn’t just nourishing. When her mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2016, Lando knew she could help. She took the skills and values her mother raised her with on the farm, and began to cook. Using a combination of research into medicinal foods and a dogged stubbornness to try and save her mother’s life, she helped take a dim prognosis of two months for her mom to live and turned it into two years.

Now, Lando has set her sights on the rest of us, believing that what we eat and how we grow it is at the core of healing a sick planet and those of us who live on it.

Since 2019, she’s opened three locations of Enclave, her farm-to-fork cafes in and around San Diego, and she’s just purchased a 19-acre regenerative farm about an hour north of the city to supply them.

For Lando, food is medicine, food is art, and food is what’s going to save us all.

With this episode, I’m doing something I’ve never done before. When Lando and I talked, we really got into it, and our conversation went way longer than these usually do. Instead of trying to chop it down into a more digestible length, I decided instead to just cut it in half. So this is part one of my conversation with Lando. Part two will drop next week. Seems like a good way to kick off the second season of Road Hungry.