Hetty McKinnon

I started making salads from my tiny terrace kitchen in Surry Hills, Sydney in 2011. Twice a week, I would dream up hearty, delicious, vegetable-packed salads, pack them onto the back of my bicycle and cycle them around my neighborhood, delivering lunch to locals. The Arthur Street Kitchen was created! Soon, the local salad-eaters became an intrinsic part of my community. The exchange of the salad box was accompanied by lively conversation, exuberant laughter, and a constantly evolving hunting and gathering of stories and histories. The salads came to represent the joyful connection that is felt when cooking and sharing food with others. This phenomenon of sharing salads soon went national, with the release of my first cookbook Community, which told my story of sharing salads in Sydney and featured sixty of my hearty, plant-based salad recipes.