At least, that’s what Kimbal Musk did. He and big brother Elon (who founded a few little tech companies you may have heard of—think Tesla and PayPal) struck it rich in 1999 when they sold their first web company, Zip2, to Compaq. But while Elon delved deeper into the tech industry, Kimbal turned toward his true passion—food. Today, the younger Musk owns a family of eight restaurants (collectively known as The Kitchen) and has taken up the role of clean-eating messiah, guiding people toward making healthier, more sustainable food choices. MORE: 9 Ridiculously Easy Ways to Grow Veggies and Herbs Inside “Our mission is to transform cities around the world into real-food meccas,” says Musk. “Where you’re cooking for your family and you’re really aware of the foods you’re putting in your body.” He and his business partners, Jen Lewin and Hugo Matheson, are accomplishing this goal by implementing local buying policies for their restaurants and via a nonprofit known as The Kitchen Community, which connects kids in underprivileged areas to community gardens, where they learn firsthand about how real food is grown. It’s all part of Musk’s philosophy: food builds and strengthens communities. “A lot of people think about food as fuel, where you need to get nutrients in your body,” he says. But there’s more to it than that. “We’re social beings, and food is one of the things we can use three times a day to connect with family or with friends.” MORE: The $1 Way to Instantly Boost Your Clean-Food Cred And for Musk, a shared eating experience doesn’t mean scarfing down a 15-minute fast-food meal in unison. It means real food that comes straight from the community. All of Musk’s restaurants prioritize sourcing ingredients from local farmers with whom Musk and his business partners have close, personal relationships. These farmers not only benefit from The Kitchen’s business, but also from a training program the restaurant provides to teach small farms how to sell to restaurants instead of just relying on farmers’ markets. That same philosophy—community through food—forms the basis of Musk’s nonprofit. The Kitchen Community’s learning gardens do more than teach kids to appreciate real food, they also connect the community. “We bring teachers together in a city like Chicago, 100 teachers at a time, and get them engaged with other teachers and with parents,” explains Musk. “Because they’re not going to learn from the industrial food system.” MORE: The 8 Best Foods to Buy at Any Farmers Market In the gardens, kids, teachers, and parents learn more than just where food comes from; they also learn to respect fresh, organic food and how to identify produce when it’s at its peak. When Musk visited a garden one day, he says he saw the most amazing lesson: A teacher gathered students into two groups to pick through vines of tomatoes and choose which vegetables (yes, they really are vegetables) were ripest. The kids then traded the tomatoes to learn how pioneers “shopped” for food. “To see them tasting cherry tomatoes and then rejecting big ones—when at first they valued the big tomatoes more because they were bigger—was incredible,” says Musk. Since Musk and his business partners started the nonprofit in 2011, The Kitchen Community has built 259 gardens.
