An Interview with Kimbal Musk by Karina Gordin, MSc

Kimbal Musk—the tech entrepreneur turned culinary visionary—relaxes in his signature cowboy hat at The Kitchen American Bistro, his upscale community restaurant nestled in the heart of Boulder, Colorado.

Known for his passion for sustainable agriculture and culinary innovation, Musk has become a leading figure in the farm-to-table movement.

As we settle into a booth overlooking the bustling kitchen, it’s clear that Musk’s commitment to creating a more sustainable food system and promoting sustainable agriculture is deeply rooted in his love for nature, community, and good food.

Karina Gordin (KG): Thank you for taking the time to share your insights with Well Being Journal, Kimbal. It was a pleasure to enjoy dinner here at The Kitchen and witness your commitment to sustainable, locally sourced food firsthand.

What inspired you to get involved in regenerative and sustainable agriculture and cooking, given your background in technology?

A Passion for Food from an Early Age

Kimbal Musk (KM): I grew up in South Africa and started cooking when I was about eleven years old, mostly out of a desire to enjoy better-tasting, more flavorful food.

My mom is a dietitian, so nutrition always came first in our house. That meant a lot of whole-grain brown bread and plain yogurt. But even as a kid, I believed healthy food could still taste great, and that’s what got me curious about cooking early on.

My mom said, “Great, if you want to cook, you should learn to cook.”

My grandmother was a fantastic cook with a garden in her backyard, so I had some inspiration and a source of support.

But cooking was very much not the gift my mother was going to give me. But it turned into a gift—I started to cook at age eleven and never stopped.

KG: Can you recall the first meal you prepared for your mother and siblings?

KM: My mom said I can cook anything I wanted so I went straight to the vegetable section at the supermarket—just as she taught me to do—and got potatoes for French fries.

Next, I headed to the butcher shop, which was separate from the grocery store back in those days, and I picked up some chicken. I remember the butcher being really helpful—he recommended rubbing the chicken with salt and cooking it in a hot oven for an hour.

Back in the eighties, ovens were rudimentary and unpredictable, but the butcher told me to turn up the temperature as high as it would go and cook the chicken for an hour.

As a kid, his instructions seemed simple enough, so I cranked the oven to its highest setting, which was probably the equivalent to 450 degrees Fahrenheit today. I followed his instructions, and after an hour, the chicken came out perfectly cooked.

Funny enough, the French fries were a total disaster. I didn’t realize you needed hot oil to start, so I dropped the potato strips into cold oil—my first culinary mistake. They absorbed too much oil and ended up extremely greasy. But they resembled French fries and tasted like French fries, so I ate them—another mistake.

The experience was still really positive overall, and everyone was excited. The next thing I started working on was scrambled eggs—and have been perfecting them since.

Scrambled eggs are one of my all-time favorite dishes to prepare, and I’ve even shared a recipe for my signature soft scramble in my new cookbook, The Kitchen Cookbook.

It takes less than five minutes to prepare but requires 10,000 hours of practice to get right (and I’ve given it my 10,000 hours). I’ve made sure to include a QR code in the cookbook that links to a video demonstration of the technique to help guide you through the process.

From Tech Startup to Culinary School

KG: At what point did you realize that cooking was something you wanted to pursue professionally?

KM: For many years, food was just a passion, but professionally I was focused on business. Back in 1995, my older brother Elon and I founded the startup Zip2—a software company that brought a searchable business directory and door-to-door directions to the internet.

As Elon often described it, Zip2 helped you find the closest pizza parlor and guided you on how to get there. It really was an exciting time for the dot-com boom.

Elon handled the coding while I managed the interface. In 1999, we sold the company to Compaq, and I suddenly had the financial resources to do whatever I wanted. So, Elon went on to Paypal and I went straight to culinary school.

KG: Was that the turning point when you decided to transform your passion into a profession?

KM: Almost. I had enrolled in a career-level course at The French Culinary Institute. It’s still around today, now called the International Culinary Institute—a prestigious cooking school known for quite a few distinguished graduates, including Chef Bobby Flay.

But it was truly a military bootcamp kind of culinary training—like Full Metal Jacket meets Hell’s Kitchen.

Instructors literally screaming at you for six, seven hours straight for eighteen months. You just can’t believe how much they can scream. To put it in perspective, out of the twenty-five students in the class, I was among six that graduated.

But looking back, that really intense training prepared me for an intense period of cooking. I graduated in August 2001, and just one month later, September 11th happened.

My mom was a well-known nutritionist and dietician at the time in New York, and she volunteered me to join local (world’s best) chefs and restaurateurs in feeding thousands of rescue and relief workers at Ground Zero.

It was an extraordinary experience—sixteen hours per day, every single day, for six weeks.

KG: That must’ve been incredibly impactful. Can you share what a typical day looked like for you working alongside those chefs at Ground Zero?

KM: Top chefs from around the world would volunteer for a few days at a time, preparing everything from comfort foods such as pasta dishes (arguably the best pasta ever) to olive oil poached salmon with dill sauce.

It was unforgettable—chefs, farmers, and fishermen all coming together to nourish the firefighters with the freshest food.

In those moments, you could really see the power of food bringing community together and uplifting spirits.

The firefighters would arrive at our makeshift cafeteria, exhausted and silent. They’d remove their dusty shells and have this grim, gray look about them.

But after the hot meal, you could see the energy and life return to their eyes. They’d begin to talk and share stories, at least for a little while, before donning their shells and heading back into the wreckage—giant piles of metal still melting weeks after the World Trade Center fell.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to have served the community. Using my skills in such a meaningful way also helped me process the trauma. I came away from that experience convinced that I wanted to cook professionally and use food as a means to bring community together.

That’s what cooking is at its core—it’s community, it’s love—if you choose it. People tend to treat food like a pill or a chore, something you need to get in you and out of the way.

What I try to teach my family, and hopefully demonstrate in my book, is that food is a gift you give yourself three times per day—make it a good one.

So, while tech is neat and plays an important role in almost everything we do, I can’t not do food. Cooking is my act of service, my love language.

So, in 2002 I came out to Boulder, Colorado, and two years later I finally opened my first restaurant, The Kitchen American Bistro, with the goal to be a world-class neighborhood community restaurant.

The Kitchen and a Commitment to Sustainable Agriculture

KG: When you first opened The Kitchen, was sourcing locally and sustainably a core focus, or did that evolve over time?

KM: Back in 2004, Boulder didn’t have the same access to the high-quality and variety of foods that New York had, so it was definitely a struggle.

The food landscape was largely industrial, with little emphasis on sustainable agriculture, and heavily reliant on highly processed food—the type that causes rampant obesity and diabetes.

Very low nutrient, high calorie. But the way I saw it, we did it to ourselves, and it was up to us to fix it. So, with the help of my team at The Kitchen, we started reaching out to local farmers—long before the farm-to-table movement became mainstream—to offer our food scraps for compost and in turn source meat and produce.

One of our team members at The Kitchen also started a nonprofit to build school gardens, and we helped fund it. The program was gratifying but we were working with only two schools per year, and it didn’t scale very well.

Everything was fine but I felt like there was more I could be doing, and after opening the restaurant, I started getting drawn back into tech and losing my way. I didn’t love tech, I loved food.

The wake-up call came in 2010, at the age of 37, while snowtubing on a children’s run in Jackson Hole (an activity that you wouldn’t think is dangerous). I got on the same child-sized inner tube as my children, who were four and six years old at the time.

At 6’5”, I was too big for the tube, and when it hit the breaking mats at the bottom of the ski hill, I was launched headfirst at thirty-five miles per hour. The ground impact ruptured my spine at C6 and C7 and left me paralyzed on my left side for three days.

I remember lying face down in the snow; it is burning my face. I’m trying to turn over, but I can’t really turn over. I didn’t understand what was going on. I finally managed to turn, which the doctor later explained did more damage than the actual fall. In this type of accident, you’re not supposed to move at all.

At the hospital, the doctors said I was lucky that the break was on a zero-degree angle, and with surgery they can remove the paralysis.

All I could do was nod my head—the only thing that moved—and tears streamed down my face. It’s an inconceivable thing to describe.

I went into surgery on a Tuesday night, and I told myself, if they could fix me, I would rededicate myself to bringing real food to everyone, whatever that meant.

I didn’t yet have a clear vision of what that meant. The next morning, I woke up and they said the surgery was successful.

Big Green: Inspiring the Next Generation Through Gardening

KG: What were the first steps you took, both in terms of your recovery and your mission?

KM: The recovery took a long time: two months horizontal. I wasn’t allowed to get up to even use the restroom. That was brutal. And then it was probably another six years of rehab just to get the pain to go down.

I reminded myself that even at the most painful times it was nothing compared to being paralyzed, so that kept me going.

During bedrest, I had a message from God—and I’m not a religious man—but the message was clear: God was calling me to help connect children to the food they eat.

So once I was back on my feet, my former wife, Jan, and I redesigned the school garden into a more scalable model, which we named the learning garden—or Big Green. These learning gardens are beautiful outdoor classroom garden beds that are easy to teach in. Plus, they can help improve test scores and transform what kids are eating.

The power of kids growing their own food is incredible. You hand a kid a carrot or lettuce, they’ll reject it outright. But let them grow the carrot and they’ll happily eat it right out of the ground, dirt and all.

Growing carrots is like a magic trick: to a five- or six-year-old, all they see are these tiny green sprouts poking out of the ground. They pull up those tops and are like, “What?!”

KG: That’s a great way to educate kids about food!

KM: We also train teachers to teach science through the growing of food. Within just a few years, we had built 650 permanent outdoor classrooms across the United States, including in Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Denver, Memphis, and Pittsburgh.

The model was gaining such momentum, and then COVID hit. We were required by law to stop, and soon after that schools closed. It was really hard, especially when you’re doing such good things.

We had a real crisis of meaning—what are we doing if we’re not allowed to do this kind of work anymore?

After about six months of sitting and waiting, we learned that even when schools reopened, nonprofits like ours wouldn’t be allowed on school grounds because of restrictions on outside visitors.

So, we pivoted and began exploring the idea of a Big Green DAO—decentralized autonomous organization—inspired by the crypto world. It’s worked out incredibly well and now we’re running a group of nonprofits that focus on growing food and helping Americans create their own community gardens.

During COVID, community gardens were a big deal because they not only provided time outdoors but also a sense of connection during a time of isolation.

After the death of George Floyd, we partnered with a nonprofit in Minnesota to build a community garden to help heal and unite the community.

We also partnered with some home garden nonprofits and broadened our reach to include both community and home gardens. Our mission is simple: if you’re helping Americans grow food, we are here to help you.

Together with urban farmers, we’re now also transforming blighted or abandoned lots into productive farms that grow a lot of food.

So, it’s not farming in rural areas, but revitalizing the underserved neighborhoods in Memphis, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities that can be hubs for community growth through food.

With the DAO, we have an incredible opportunity to come together and collaborate on a much larger, nationwide scale rather than just at city level. We donate millions of dollars to nonprofits across the country, which is a huge deal for smaller organizations that might typically operate with budgets of $50K or $60K.

Suddenly, they are voting on how to distribute a million dollars among different nonprofits (and they can’t vote for themselves of course).

If you know of a nonprofit in your area focused on food and farming, we encourage you to invite them to apply to join the DAO.

I should add that this isn’t just about helping nonprofits succeed—it’s about grooming the next generation of leaders.

We’re really hoping to see other communities and nonprofit organizations adopt this model, and we’ve published our white paper and open-sourced everything because we have no desire to control it.

We simply want people to give it a try.

KG: Before we switch gears, can you briefly touch on your indoor farming project, Square Roots?

KM: I co-founded Square Roots in 2016, mostly in response to a challenge we faced at The Kitchen.

We wanted to source more locally-grown produce, but that’s not something you can do year-round, especially here in Colorado—in January. You have to rely on other states or even countries for your fresh produce.

(Globalization has its advantages, but it’s not necessarily fresh, flavorful foods.) With indoor farming, however, you can grow nutrient-dense foods with zero pesticides year-round, contributing to a more resilient and sustainable agriculture system.

KG: Do you test the nutrient density?

KM: Yes, we perform tests, but taste is also paramount. That’s what I was describing earlier with my mom—I grew up with my mom really not caring about how her cooking tasted, whereas I have always believed taste matters as much as the nutritional value.

A lot of the nutrient density is where you get the flavor. At Square Roots, we’re able to replicate the climate of Genoa, Italy, in June 1997. Not any old June, but the best June for the most flavorful, nutrient-dense basil.

Optimizing Indoor Farming for Any Climate

KG: Can you elaborate on how your indoor farming system optimizes year-round growing conditions?

KM: We use repurposed shipping containers that can grow the equivalent of about two acres of outdoor produce. Everything is 100 percent controlled—lighting, humidity, and temperature—for optimal energy efficiency, and the containers can be shipped anywhere they’re needed most.

We’re now doing R&D in a country in Africa, and the climate is completely different to where we farm in Michigan. Like worlds apart. And what we do in Michigan on our R&D farm can be duplicated in the same energy efficient way in Africa.

KG: What crops are you currently researching & developing?

KM: At the moment, we’re working on cultivating the perfect tomato year-round. Firstly, tomatoes are a really great crop for experimentation, but also there’s a shortage in the world of good tasting tomatoes.

There’s not a shortage of bad tasting tomatoes. But good tasting, high nutrient-dense—there is a shortage.

Anyone reading the Well Being Journal likely appreciates truly great tasting tomatoes. But most of the time, they’re like not as good as the tomatoes we remember, so this is one of our favorite crops to experiment with to get the best flavor with the most energy efficiency.

Instead of sixteen hours of light, can we do fifteen hours? How does that affect the flavor profile? How do the seeds from different genetics grow in this climate versus another climate? It’s constant R&D.

We have twenty shipping containers running at the same time, so we’re running twenty different climates for our tomatoes. The containers are stackable, shippable, and allow us to grow fresh, flavorful foods with far fewer inputs—picked at peak freshness. What more can you ask?

KG: Speaking of innovations in agriculture, are you familiar with electroculture? It’s a gardening technique that uses copper rods or other conductive materials to capture ambient electricity to enhance plant growth.

From what I understand, you can simply place conductive material in the soil near your plants and tap into the earth’s energy to boost growth.

Some advocates have even found that electroculture can increase the plant’s natural resistance to pests, cutting down the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides. I might try electroculture on my tomatoes this spring, and maybe even combine it with agrohomeopathy.

Who knows, it might enhance the flavor too!

KM: That’s really fascinating, we are always on the lookout for innovative ways to make farming (and gardening) more accessible, especially to newer generations.

Most of our young folks are living in the city, and convincing them to move to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to do traditional soil-based farming is a tough sell. So, bring innovative farming techniques to them.

Innovations in Sustainable Agriculture: Rethinking Traditional Farming

KG: Many traditional soil-based farmers are stuck in the industrial food system and could also benefit from innovative, sustainable solutions.

KM: I couldn’t agree more. In the United States, we have millions of acres of commodity crops like corn and soybeans, and the acreage is only increasing. A lot of damage has been done to the soil, but it’s fixable, especially with the help of innovative grazing techniques and holistic animal agriculture.

Here at The Kitchen, and with my family, we practice thanking the animals and showing gratitude for the circle of life.

We actually did something fairly controversial a few years ago—we put the names of our two lambs—Nessie and Bessie—on the menu: “Nessie and Bessie with couscous.”

As you can imagine, there was quite an uproar, mostly from the non-meat eaters. But we explained that it was a way to honor the animals and remind people that the meat came from living beings. That reminder is only a good thing.

Plus, the way I see it, any farmer that cares enough to name their animals won’t treat them poorly, right? That’s the standard we’re striving for at The Kitchen—creating a deeper connection with what we’re eating, be it a tomato, an eggplant, an egg, shrimp, lamb, or chicken.

If you eat at one of the many commercial chain restaurants, and let’s say you order a chicken sandwich, that piece of chicken had grill marks lasered onto it, thousands of miles away in a factory. That’s not an exaggeration.

If you eat at one of the many commercial chain restaurants, and let’s say you order a chicken sandwich, that piece of chicken had grill marks lasered onto it, thousands of miles away in a factory. That’s not an exaggeration.

How does that honor our land and animals?

As a restauranteur, I understand that pre-marked meat is more cost-effective than installing a grill, and the machine can apply marks in seconds compared to a cook at the restaurant, but at what cost? What’s the real cost of this convenience?

KG: We vote with our dollars, so what other factors should we keep in mind when selecting a restaurant to dine at?

KM: Definitely look on the menu for seasonal dishes. Restaurants really should be celebrating the seasons. If you are celebrating the seasons, you are also supporting the farmers. You are helping to sustain what farmers are growing in that season and supporting a supply chain that matches the seasons.

Composting is also important, for both restaurants and home kitchens.

I can share a fun story: we have a bistro in Denver that is located in a train station. It’s a fun location but pretty awkward to get deliveries and trash pick-ups there. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve built strong relationships with our farmers, so they pick up our compost and deliver food directly to us, which saves on excessive packaging.

At one point, the landlord called us, wondering if we were hiding our trash. But the fact is, we just don’t have very much trash!

Our wines are kegged so we don’t deal with a ton of bottles, and nearly all our food scraps go to compost.

We’ve been able to minimize our waste so much that the landlord thought we were up to some funny business. He has to deal with trash and waste with almost every other restaurant, but we’ve bypassed the industrial food system model altogether.

Unfortunately, composting is not widely supported by cities and municipalities, so I encourage composting in your own kitchen or backyard if space allows.

We work with a nonprofit called Make Soil that helps homeowners do their own composting. It’s really not complicated at all. Makesoil.org.

Choosing Safer Cookware for Healthier Cooking

KG: In addition to composting and seasonal, regenerative cuisine, should diners also look for restaurants that use quality, nontoxic cookware?

KM: Restaurants are such fast-paced, high-production environments that premium cookware may be a lot to ask for, but it’s something you can absolutely control in your own kitchen.

Personally, I don’t like to use aluminum cookware. I find that it leaches into food and affects flavor, especially if you’re cooking with acidic or salty ingredients. No one likes that.

KG: Do most restaurants use aluminum cookware?

KM: You’d be surprised how many busy commercial kitchens do have aluminum cookware—it’s super lightweight, which makes the job easier when you’re moving a lot of pans and not 6’5” like me. I can lift a heavy pot.

Another advantage is that aluminum doesn’t require special care like cast iron or certain steel cookware. Aluminum heats up and cools down faster, which is helpful in a fast-paced kitchen, and it tends to be more affordable. But you get what you pay for—aluminum is thinner and more prone to scorching.

If you prefer to use Teflon, get into the habit of gifting yourself a new pan every holiday season, especially if it gets heavy use or the coating gets damaged or starts degrading from overheating.

Some manufacturers offer a mail-back recycling program where you can fill the box that your new Teflon cookware arrived in with old pans and send them back to the company for proper recycling.

If nothing else, I’d recommend replacing any Teflon pans made before 2015, as they’re likely to still contain PFOAs—the forever chemicals that were used in nonstick coating before they were restricted by the EPA.

Besides that, you really can’t go wrong with solid bottom stainless steel or cast-iron cookware. The heavier the pan, the more evenly it will distribute heat.

KG: I recently came across a study that found cooking in iron-containing cookware can significantly increase dietary iron intake.

This can be particularly beneficial for addressing iron deficiency and anemia, especially in low-income or developing nations. For individuals with higher iron levels, though, cast iron might not be the best choice since the additional iron absorbed from the cookware could increase the risk of iron overload. ^{1, 2}

But setting aside cookware, and the physical aspects of cooking, do you find that your mood or state of mind can affect the outcome of what you prepare?

KM: That’s interesting—I use cooking to calm myself. All the repetitive movements of chopping, stirring, kneading, and folding really get you into a meditative flow state.

Plus, experimenting with different colors, textures, flavors, and cooking techniques becomes a creative outlet, which can be therapeutic after a long day of work and linear, structured thinking.

On days when I’m anxious or very stressed out—and I can be a pretty high-strung guy—cooking gives me the time and space to use a different part of my brain. What I notice is that I am more likely to burn myself if I am really stressed out. That snaps me back to the present, very quickly.

Just like burning yourself with a hot pan or cutting yourself with a knife, the consequences of not being present are immediate.

Bringing Love and Sustainability Into Home Cooking

Cooking has become a way for me to manage my stress or anxiety from the day, and transition from workday to home life. Reconnect with myself and my family.

That’s really my take-home message for everyone: the best thing is a family meal. Cook with your kids, cook with your significant other, and make eating together a ritual. That’s what makes life worth living.

You can dine at the most sustainable restaurant, but when you cook at home, you’ll very naturally care more about the ingredients, you’ll naturally include vegetables with your meal, you’ll naturally add the right amount of salt, and naturally put a little extra care into every step. An easier way to say that is love.

KG: I can only imagine the amount of love that went into creating The Kitchen Cookbook. I absolutely enjoyed the pastured strip steak with a side of mushrooms at The Kitchen and look forward to recreating it at home with loved ones—with the help of your cookbook!

KM: Remember to warm your plate before plating the steak—it’s that little extra care that shows appreciation for the meal and the moment shared together.

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¹ Shally Sharma, Ritika Khandelwal, et al. “Effect of cooking food in iron-containing cookware on increase in bloodoglobin level and iron content of the food: A systematic review,” Nepal J Epidemiol. 2021 Jun 30;11(2):994–1005.

² Nils Thorm Milman. “Managing genetic hemochromatosis: An overview of dietary measures, which may reduce intestinal iron absorption in persons with iron overload,” Gastroenterology Res. 2021 Apr 21;14(2):66–80.