Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

20th Anniversary celebration with culinary creatives Julia Turshen, Christina Tosi, Gabrielle Hamilton, Fanny Singer, and Will Guidara

November 10, 2025·52 min·4 clips

Julia Turshen explains why writing a recipe is like writing a poem—both require economy and life.

A 20th anniversary becomes an archive. The episode revisits food writers, chefs, and restaurateurs from earlier Design Matters interviews, and the good stuff comes through the side doors: childhood, wages, hunger, boredom, ambition. It starts with appetite. Baking is less showpiece than urge, the clear little joy of wanting to eat what just came out of the oven. Restaurants get treated as places with ethics, too. One voice remembers wanting a room that could welcome someone with a line cook's paycheck and a line cook's palate. Debbie gives the memories room to breathe, so questions about access, taste, and money can sit there without getting polished flat. The best stretch turns inward. A guest remembers a mother who sent her to farms, temp agencies, and the everyday work of earning her keep. Math looked sensible for a while. Actuary offices, front desks, and professional tracks mostly taught her what her body would not tolerate: sitting still. She wanted to stand, move, travel, wander, and make a job out of making things. Her family valued creativity, but mostly after work, not as the work. The French Culinary Institute arrives after college as a trial run with stakes, a place where a feeling could prove itself. The episode keeps circling formation: pressure, permission, resources, habits, hands on materials. Will Guidara closes it with apprenticeship, learning through what he could see, touch, and understand.

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