Rick Bayless

I don't know how many others are into Food TV, but I watched the series that just ended, Top Chef Masters, which pitted many famous chefs against each other to win the top prize of $100,000 for the charity of their choice. Rick Bayless, owner of Frontera restaurant in Chicago, is one of my favorite TV Chefs because of his total passion for Mexican cooking - he really wants to show the world that Mexican cuisine belongs alongside French, Italian, Asian, and all other cuisines of merit - that it is not just about tacos and refried beans! But the reason he is one of my favorites is that within his passion and love of what he does, one also sees kindness and caring, a real gentleman, a class act.

Rick won, and his charity is The Frontera Farmers Foundation. They help small farmers regroup, retool, and revise their operations to survive and thrive in today's world. We have all seen and heard about the alarming rate at which small farms are disappearing.

I grew up on what today is considered a small farm. It was a 10,000 acre cattle farm. Obviously, at a point in time that would NOT have been considered small. But that was before we had a clue how "big" the big farms would get when owned by gigantic corporations. But in the eighties, my dad was losing $150,000 a year. He didn't understand it how and why it was costing him more that ever in history to farm, and it was costing him more to buy groceries at the market than ever before, so where was the money going? Bigger is not always better for us!