For chef, author and Emmy-nominated producer Georgia Pellegrini, learning traditional skills is about more than preserving old ways of doing things. It is about reconnecting with the natural world, using your hands, and finding a sense of community.
Pellegrini is the host of the PBS series Modern Pioneering, which explores people who are creating, growing and living in ways that are connected to the land.
Pellegrini’s path to Modern Pioneering began in professional kitchens. She said that while working as a chef in New York and France, she became interested in the people who supplied restaurants with ingredients they had grown, harvested or foraged themselves.
Those relationships inspired her first book, Food Heroes, followed by a second book about her journey as a chef seeking to hunt her own food and understand the full process behind a meal. That eventually led to Modern Pioneering, which focuses on what she calls “manual literacy.”
“It’s a way for people to access these things that are real and lasting and tangible,” Pellegrini said.
She said modern pioneering does not require large amounts of land or a complete lifestyle change. Instead, it can begin with small acts of working with your hands—from making fresh mozzarella at home to growing food in a small urban space.
A response to a technology-driven world
Pellegrini said the growing interest in gardening, preserving food, foraging and cooking from scratch may be connected to a desire to balance increasingly digital lives.
“I think it’s the antidote to our technology-driven lives,” she said.
Pellegrini said modern life often encourages people to specialize in narrow areas of knowledge, but there is also a desire to understand practical skills and become more capable in everyday life.
She used herself as an example, saying that while she has a college degree, she does not necessarily know how to fix everything in her own home.
“There is a craving to balance that with these other skills,” she said.
Growing up connected to the Hudson Valley
Pellegrini grew up in the Hudson Valley on land purchased by her great-grandfather about a century ago. She said that upbringing shaped her connection to nature and her appreciation for the knowledge passed down through generations.
She remembers learning from family members who knew the plants growing around them and understood their uses.
Pellegrini said that perspective changed how she viewed the natural world—including plants often dismissed as weeds. She recalled learning that purslane, for example, has nutritional value and is more than something growing in sidewalk cracks.
Rediscovering skills through community
Through her workshops and the television series, Pellegrini said she has seen people respond emotionally when they learn traditional techniques.
She said using their hands often brings back memories of family members who practiced similar skills.
“It reminds them of a grandmother or a mother or an aunt or a father or a grandfather,” she said.
Pellegrini said those experiences create opportunities for people to slow down, be present and build connections with one another.
“It creates this really real feeling of community when they’re in a room doing it together,” she said.
For those looking to begin exploring these ideas, Pellegrini encourages people to start by becoming curious about the land around them.
“Start to look at the world in a more curious way,” she said. “I think that’s a really more present and inspiring way to be in the world.”
Pellegrini will present a “Modern Pioneering” Screening and Apple Shrub Workshop at the Jeffersonville branch of the Western Sullivan Public Library on July 31 at 5:30pm. Registration is required.
Image: “Modern Pioneering” host Georgia Pellegrini (left) with Alexis deBoschnek at her Uplands Regenerative Farm in Delhi, NY. (Georgia Pellegrini/PBS)