A renowned chef and Emmy-winning Public TV host spent some time in Rochester this past weekend.
Lidia Bastianich was at the Hochstein School on Sunday in an event sponsored by WXXI and talked about her perspectives on food, farming and what she has learned as she traveled around the country for her work on PBS.
Bastianich is also talking about the memoir released earlier this year called “My American Dream,” and it talks about her family having to flee a former Italian city after it was taken over by the Communist regime in Yugoslavia.
The 71 year old Bastianich says she originally wasn’t going to write a memoir at this point in her life, but was spurred in part by recent debates over immigration.
“Given the light of the immigration, the situation that’s going on, I am the immigrant, I am the ‘perfect’ immigrant if you will, who was given an opportunity and who given that opportunity, really embraced it,” she told WXXI News.
The talk Bastianich gave at Hochstein Sunday was also attended by a number of local veterans.
Lidia has done specials for PBS about veterans who return home and use farming as a way to get back to civilian life, called “Homegrown Heroes.”
She says she is grateful for the sacrifices made by American veterans.
“Getting to know what they do now that they came back and what is their life like. And I was amazed to find that there’s a whole veteran community in farming. The veterans are really looking to the land to get their hands literally dirty to come back to society with products and make a good life at it.”
