A Mindful Eating Experience with Edward Espe Brown

Join us for a special hands-on class and eating experience with Edward Espe Brown.

Edward Espe Brown is a Zen priest and the former head cook at Tassajara Mountain Zen Mountain Center. He helped found Greens Restaurant in San Francisco and is the author of the baking classic, The Tassajara Bread Book. (It’s the very first bread book Managing Partner Amy Emberling ever bought about bread—it started her on her bread-baking journey!).

Together we’ll make two items—one being a vibrant Red Cabbage Salad bursting with five colors. 

As you might expect from a Zen priest though, this class is about much more than the food itself, it’s about the experience of eating it. Edward will guide us through of experience of truly tasting what we put in our mouths. In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, an Austrian poet and novelist: 

“What miracle is happening in your mouth? 

Instead of words, discoveries flow out

from the ripe flesh, astonished to be free.”

More about our guest

Edward Espe Brown found his way to Zen practice in 1965, and dove in whole-heartedly. He was the first head cook, or tenzo, at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and in 1970 his best-selling book, The Tassajara Bread Book, was published. His teacher, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, ordained him as a priest in 1971, giving him the dharma name Jusan Kainei (“Longevity Mountain, Peaceful Sea”). In the years since, Edward helped found Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, worked with Deborah Madison in writing The Greens Cookbook, and has written several other cookbooks, including The Complete Tassajara Cookbook, and Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings. He edited Not Always So, a collection of Suzuki Roshi’s lectures, and in 2007, he was the subject of a critically acclaimed feature-length documentary film entitled How to Cook Your Life, directed by Doris Dörrie.

In 2018, No Recipe: Cooking as a Spiritual Practice, Edward’s book about finding our own way in the kitchen–and in life–was published. One of Edward’s students, Danny Parker, put together a book of his lectures, selected from 30 years’ worth of teaching; The Most Important Point was published in 2019.  

In addition to studying Zen, Edward has also done extensive vipassana practice, yoga, and chi gung. He leads regular sitting groups and meditation retreats in Northern California and offers workshops in the U.S. and internationally on a variety of subjects, including cooking, handwriting change, and Mindfulness Touch. 

Photo credit: Maya Gilbert