Vivian Howard built a following by letting PBS viewers into her Kinston restaurant for five seasons of A Chef’s Life, documenting the daily grind of running a farm-to-table establishment in rural North Carolina.
Now she’s back with a new show that finds her occupying a different role—less chef calling the shots and more a student. Each episode of Kitchen Curious, which debuts October 6 on PBS, tackles a question that’s become a flashpoint in national food debates: What exactly is a complete protein? Is whole-grain pasta worth it? Do seed oils cause inflammation?
To find answers, Howard bounces between cooking demos in a converted church at the end of her driveway, grocery store consultations with nutritionists, and field trips to food producers. The show feels particularly timely as Americans navigate an increasingly confusing landscape of health advice from social media wellness gurus and government officials.
“We have to look to experts,” Howard tells the INDY over a video call from her home in eastern North Carolina, “particularly when it’s about what we’re putting in our bodies and what we’re spending our money on.”
Ahead of the show’s release, the INDY spoke with Howard about sorting through conflicting food advice, why she chose to work with PBS again, and bringing new life to an old church.
INDY: What drew you back to television after taking a break to focus on your restaurants?
Vivian Howard: I honestly just didn’t feel like I had much to say. I had a lot of ideas, but they didn’t fit into a cohesive package. I’ve always believed that I didn’t want to just be on TV to be on TV. I wanted to have something that was meaningful and added to the conversations that we’re having around food. So it really just took that long to figure out where the national conversation around food was, and to figure out what I had to say about that.
What did you ultimately land on in terms of what you have to contribute?
One of the things that’s really changed since I was on TV last is that we get so much of our information from social media. There are a number of different voices out there weighing in on what we should eat and shouldn’t eat. I’m a food professional, and looking at all of these different ideas, I don’t even know what’s right and wrong. So I wanted to tackle a lot of those things.
It’s striking to hear you, as someone with so much culinary authority and experience, position yourself as someone asking questions rather than an expert dispensing wisdom.
We all need to do a little bit of that. Just because someone says something doesn’t mean it’s true. We have to look to experts, particularly when it’s about what we’re putting in our bodies and what we’re spending our money on. I feel like this show is relevant and timely and really entertaining.
Tell me about the church you converted into a studio.
I live across the road, now, from the house that I grew up in. This church was always there. It’s not the church that my family went to growing up.
For the past 10 years, there have only been two cars out front of the church on Sunday mornings. Three years ago, the Methodist diocese came in and shut the church down, and because it was on my land, I was able to buy it. It was like a time capsule when we went in there.
It had not been touched since the ‘60s—you know, red woolly burled carpet and wooden church pews. The fellowship hall was in the back with the kitchen. So that’s been really a fun part of this—giving new life to this structure that’s been in my life forever.
Was going back to PBS a no-brainer for you, or did you consider other options?
I’m glad you asked that question. Honestly, having been on PBS for so long, I was interested in perhaps being on another network or streaming service. And I’ve dabbled in that over the years, even during the time of A Chef’s Life, I met with other networks. But what I’ve learned over and over and over again, and what [other networks] told me, is that they don’t want this type of content. They don’t want a show that is about a tiny town in the middle of nowhere and an unknown chef. That’s the first thing I heard. This is not flashy or commercial enough to speak to those networks.
The other thing is that PBS—their goal, their mission, is to make programming that improves people’s lives. And it is the only place that you can look nowadays—whether it’s TV or social media or the written word—where you’re not being sold anything. There are no brands, there are no calls to action. It is like the only pure media out there.
Vivian Howard in the archives
I spoke with Ken Burns a few months ago about his upcoming American Revolution series on PBS, and he expressed a similar sentiment about PBS’s unique role in the media landscape—that what you’re able to do there, you really aren’t able to do anywhere else.
Yeah, and the reason people don’t know that is because they don’t know how PBS works. PBS has always run on a shoestring. It does not have the marketing and the PR to have a succinct message that all Americans understand. In many ways, that’s the beauty of it.
It’s been hard to be on PBS from the very beginning, because all the shows that you watch on PBS, for the most part, are produced by independent producers like me, and those independent producers raise all the funds to make that show. That was something that was always like, ‘God, we got to do all this fundraising.’ But the benefit of that is that you’re not answering to a brand or a network based on like, ad dollars. We have so much more control over the show that we make because we do it ourselves, and we fundraise for ourselves.
So I know that people are confused about me having a show on PBS, when everybody thinks PBS is shuttering. But PBS is not shuttering. Federal funding for PBS was cut. I’m not saying it’s not going to hurt the stations, but PBS is our nation’s public broadcasting network, and I feel like that’s an important thing to have for our own national security, and I hope that we can sustain it. And I’m here to tell you that I’m most proud to be on PBS now.
Eastern North Carolina has always been central to your work. How does Kitchen Curious continue to honor those roots while maybe expanding beyond the regional?
Most of the show is filmed in eastern North Carolina. All the grocery stores we go to are in my community. Many of our field trips are in and around eastern North Carolina. I do spend a fair amount of time in Charleston—our partner is South Carolina Television. So I had to do some filming in South Carolina. Other than that, we go to California for one shoot. And then there is one more location that I’m going to leave as a surprise. It’s in the last episode.
A lot of the time, the answer to eating more nutritiously is getting stuff as fresh as you can, going to the farmers market, eating things with the least level of processing possible—which, of course, not everyone has access to. Is that something you get into?
The most accessible takeaway I learned from the nutritionist that we work with—and I think it speaks to all socioeconomic groups—is eat the rainbow. You don’t have to count all of your grams of protein or dietary fiber, but we do need to eat the rainbow. So look for foods that are colorful and have as much variety in your diet as possible.
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