Bun LaiBun Lai

I’m the second best chef 👩🏼‍🍳 in my family (after my mom 👵🏼), and the bigsecondgest kahuna at Miya’s, the first sustainable sushi joint on earth 🌏, which we do today as pop-ups at my farm and in other ecosystems. 

When not doing Miya’s stuff, I whip up culinary solutions to chronic diseases by helping people achieve optimum health through the most nutritious, environmentally restorative food. I do this by creating deeply meaningful, thought-provoking, educational, and motivational food experiences for groups, as well as by building  dietary action plans for individuals. 

Thanks to true friends in high places and more good luck than is fair for any one person to have, I am the recipient of the White House Champion of Change award, a James Beard award nomination, and in high school, the coveted Golden Shovel Award, given to the class’ best bullshitter. As a sustainability advocate and educator, I’ve written articles for Scientific American, Harvard Design, The Hill, and The United Nations. For those articles I did not bullshit one iota. I've spoken at Google, National Geographic Society, Foreign Policy, Harvard School of Public Health, and the White House, for which I bullshitted a little.

I've headlined a badass Earth 🌏 Day event with Jarobi White of A Tribe Called Quest, and even rolled it for a sustainability pow wow for architect Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam War Memorial! I’ve collaborated on numerous films, too, my favorite of which are Blind Sushi, which was the finalist for a James Beard award and a Hollywood International Film Festival award winner, and was produced by Eric Heimbold who first got his break by making the Who Let The Dog’s Out video; and Little Fish, which was a New Yorker Documentary Official Selection; and the one we did for VICE that featured my mom, who is usually too humble and shy to be interviewed.

Once, Saturday Night Live said I was fired for cooking insects, and Mental Floss put me as number 383 me on their hilarious list of their 500 Most Important People in History, and most prestigiously, I was 3rd on a list of the Top 10 hottest chefs in the world. It really happened. You can Google it. And, umm, most recently I was featured in The New York Times, Wired, Popular Science, Bon Appetite, CNN, NPR, and lots of international media, too, for which I am grateful to have had these amazing platforms to share my half-baked ideas.

Nobody makes a difference on their own. But, together, we are powerful enough to heal this profoundly suffering planet, one sick person and one ecological problem at a time.