June Jo Lee, Food Ethnographer and Author

I grew up transnationally between Seoul, Palo Alto and Texas, eating my mom’s “alien kimchi.” Teased by school kids for my “stinky food,” I often felt like the alien immigrant on my green card. Kimchi was my tricky food because I hated feeling alien, and also I loved my mom’s kimchi.

It took years to transform my deep cultural disconnection and dislocation into pleasure and wonder about flavor messages from my homeland – wild forest greens, slippery ocean kelp, fragrant sesame oil, fermented mother sauces, and my mom’s fizzy-funky water kimchi.

I studied cultural anthropology at Harvard, and have spent my career as a food ethnographer for the food industry. I conduct fieldwork in ordinary and extraordinary kitchens to deep dive into modern consumer culture. Food is my portal to understand generational shifts and track early signals of our future. What’s good-to-eat reveals our Modern Hungers — our deepest needs for self-improvement, our desperate desires for connecting deeper, and dreams of our future.

I deliver strategic insights for impact-oriented businesses to scale up and bend culture. From 2014-2024 I was the Resident Food Ethnographer for Google’s Global Food Program, feeding Googlers breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks in 57 countries. Now, I work for farmer-owners of Organic Valley Cooperative. I keynote conferences for educators and the food industry. 

I co-authored picture book biographies, Sandor Katz and The Tiny Wild (2022) and Sibert award-winning Chef Roy Choi and The Street Food Remix (2017), which was named a “Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far)” by Kirkus.

For a taste of my work as a food ethnographer, see my TED Talk and Nutrients paper; and my How To Make Kimchi as a children’s book author.

San Francisco, California is my home.