For Heather Kroll ’93 Bailey, the light-bulb moment in her career came when she learned that her daughters’ generation may have a shorter life expectancy than her own. A central cause? Staples of modern diets such as sugary drinks and processed meats.
The realization motivated Bailey — who has been a chef since graduating from Colgate — to go back to school to study nutrition. She put that knowledge to work by founding The Optimal Kitchen in 2007, where she promotes a plant-based diet through classes, recipes, nutritional consulting, and the sale of her own healthy prepared foods.
Bailey has loved cooking since her childhood in Manhattan, when she took classes in Chinese and Italian cuisines. Working as a chef in restaurants on the Caribbean island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, for six years after college taught her to focus on using the ingredients that are on hand. “We received produce once a week — it was flown over on a plane or came on a boat,” she recalls. “You had to work with what was available.”
Today, she has a flourishing garden at her home in East Orleans, Cape Cod, where she grows several kinds of fruits and vegetables, including varieties of squash, cabbage, and peas, as well as 10 different types of herbs. Using that produce in her dishes for The Optimal Kitchen has offset her food costs by 40–50%, she says.
Each week, Bailey sells her muffins, salads, soups, and other foods at local shops and the Orleans Farmers’ Market. She also offers a subscription to her community-supported agriculture (CSA) meal plan to provide families with the ability to have healthy prepared foods at hand. “What many people want is to not have to do the cooking themselves,” she says.
The Optimal Kitchen offers customers a weekly pickup that typically includes frozen soups, vegetable grain bowls, dips, and a sweet treat. Bailey is known for her Thai noodle salad and her sugar-free and grain-free muffins, which are sweetened with fruits or vegetables. Her most popular muffin flavors are carrot ginger and banana coconut. During the pandemic, the population of Cape Cod exploded, providing a boost to her business.
To further support her community, Bailey gives nutrition talks at the local library and offers classes on how to prepare healthy meals with local ingredients. She also discusses how our eating habits affect the environment. “I’m trying to make people understand the connection between what’s good for your body and what’s good for the planet,” she says. “Plants have far less of an impact on our carbon system than animal products.”
All the nutritional recommendations out there can seem overwhelming, Bailey acknowledges, but she sums up her best advice this way: “Stop focusing on what you shouldn’t eat and focus on what are the best things you should be eating. Fill your plate with vegetables, and try to incorporate a vegetable you’ve never eaten before each week, such as Swiss chard or daikon radish. The more vegetables you eat and the more diversity of vegetables you eat, the healthier you will be.”
Bailey is the author of two cookbooks: The Flavors of Summer: A Guide to Everyday Eating from The Optimal Kitchen and Cool Weather Favorites: A Guide to Everyday Eating from The Optimal Kitchen.