Rose Wilde—with her fun, colorful outfits and bright red lips—commands an audience with the same sense of smart approachability contained within the recipes in her cookbook Bread & Roses. Her ability to connect the dots between the reasons to embrace ancient grains and larger-scale social issues—ranging from the health benefits of diversifying our diets to strengthening agricultural viability—must be, at least partially, due to her background as a human rights attorney.

Alongside playful, grain-forward recipes, Bread & Roses offers a primer on grains, cooking techniques and tools, and geography of foods. A self-proclaimed “grain geek,” Rose offered the festival audience an actionable recommendation to replace 15–30% of the all-purpose flour in a recipe with another grain, as a way to explore ancient, heirloom and alternative grains without changing the structure of the end product while incorporating more nutrition and complex flavor. Her demonstration included fragrant quinoa upside-down muffins and an amaranth and corn crumble featuring papaya, raspberry and lime.