Before she became the "Queen of Greens" and racked up five IACP awards, Deborah Madison spent almost 20 years at San Francisco's Zen Center. In this warm, candid, and refreshingly funny memoir, Madison tells the story of her life in food—and with it, the story of the vegetarian movement. Here Madison evokes her childhood in Northern California's Big Ag heartland, sitting sesshin for hours on end at the Tassajara monastery, working in the kitchen of the then-new Chez Panisse, and the birth of food TV.