For twenty-four years, my job was to make people choose things.

I was born and raised in Limerick, with a humongous appetite for life and cake, neither of which has waned. Dublin's home now, after Paris, Brussels, and a long American stretch across New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, where I spent those years at the top end of advertising and media, working out how the world's biggest brands get chosen. Not noticed. Chosen. The two are not the same, and the gap between them is where I made my living.

I know how brands sell, how it works from the inside. Most products don't fail because they're not good enough. They fail because nobody made the right person feel the right thing at the right moment. That was my job, and I was good at it. The only thing that's ever changed is what I point it at.

So I left. I went and learned food from the ground up, the way I'd once learned brands. Ballymaloe made me a cook. The Culinary Institute of America put me through its wine program, which I just about survived, and I came out a Certified Court of Master Sommelier . I trained in integrative nutrition + health in New York, then in culinary medicine and metabolic health. It took years, and it was the most useful and meaningful thing I have ever done.

People call that a pivot, but I have always known it was a correction.

Speaking the language that matters

Most brand people don't speak health. Most health people don't speak brand. They have spent a career on one side of a wall. I have stood on both sides, which means I have the rare, valuable ability to understand both the science of what food does and the commercial reality of how people choose which foods to eat. That is the whole job. That is the whole point.

I am deadly serious about real food, the people who grow it and cook it and stake their business on it, and about what it does for the people who eat it. I just happen to think the best way to take it seriously is to make it impossible to ignore.