Guest Profile

Linda Watson

Linda Watson is a food evangelist: convinced we can make the world a better place by voting with our forks. She started the Cook for Good project after becoming obsessed with the national Food Stamp Challenge: living on a dollar a meal per person for a week. Her three-week experiment became a lifestyle, this website CookforGood.com, the book Wildly Affordable Organic, and now the Wildly Good Cook videos and teachers' training program. Her story took a romantic turn recently when she wrote the spoof Fifty Weeks of Green: Romance and Recipes. She teaches cooking classes and give talks on thrift, sustainability, and creating your dream life across the country.


She lives with her husband Bruce in Raleigh, North Carolina. They're both avid hikers, so Linda is especially glad that WAO was named a Sierra Club Green Home Editors' Choice for 2012. At home, she's slowly converting their yard to an edible forest garden, with hazelnuts, kiwis, and more, as well as annual vegetables and plenty of oddly gorgeous plants and lots of ivy.


She's had an odd but thrilling career so far, including developing a top-secret expert system for the Institute for Defense Analyses, working with authors Tom Clancy and Douglas Adams on computer games, riding the dot-com wave with Egarden.com, and being the director of her county political party and the Raleigh Independent Business Alliance.


Linda writes about healthy, affordable eating for The Huffington Post. You'll also find her writing for the Organic Trade Association, EcoBonus, and as a featured blogger on GoodVeg and DrGreene.com. She teaches classes and give talks at a wide range of venues, from the Share Our Strength's national Conference of Leaders to SAS Institute, from Whole Foods to food banks, from Slow Food groups and co-ops to colleges, clinics, and businesses.


She gives cooking demonstrations at farmers' markets and speaks to groups who are interested in cooking great food, controlling expenses, losing weight, raising healthy children, fighting hunger, reducing their impact on the planet, or using the skills we have to live the life we want. These classes are clean as well as delicious: she scored 100% on the ServSafe manager training test. The exciting part about the Cook for Good lifestyle is that you can focus on one of those goals and create lots of other goodness as side effects.