The Nomad Cook / The Culinary Art of Cannabis / Life Beyond The Pop-Ups | Travis Peterson
Fell Into Food PodcastShow Notes
Travis Petersen is the chef and founder behind Nomad Cook, a culinary cannabis brand that's hosted more than 1,200 cannabis-infused pop-up dinners in 117 cities across 37 states, and the person who helped the American Culinary Federation build its first cannabis chef certification course. He got his start on MasterChef at 31, years into a sales career in oil and gas — and built everything else from there.
He bombed his tacos and got eliminated in the second episode, three minutes of total airtime. Ten days later, a recession hit his oil and gas company and he got laid off with a year's severance. That accident of timing is the entire reason Nomad Cook exists. He calls it the stars aligning; it's also just a guy who decided to spend a free year finding out if he could actually cook.
We get into how a newspaper photo of a sold-out cannabis dinner sent him into his own backyard for his first pop-up, and how that snowballed into touring 20 days a month with 500 pounds of gear and a sous chef in tow. He breaks down what terpenes actually are — sativa and indica only describe how the plant grows, not how it makes you feel.
He's also walking away from the touring life at the height of it. His last public Nomad Cook pop-up dinner is September 5th in Miami, and after that he's moving Nomad Cook into education only while he starts a new venture helping small businesses with AI automation.
Social Instagram: the_nomadcook Website: https://www.thenomadcook.com/ ACF Cannabis Course
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CHAPTERS / TIMESTAMPS
00:00 — Intro: Travis Petersen, the Nomad Cook 02:24 — The first backyard pop-up 04:48 — From oil and gas to MasterChef 09:54 — Writing the cookbook, building the ACF certification 15:02 — What a cannabis dinner actually is 19:05 — Terpenes, the entourage effect, and the mango trick 23:20 — Inside the dosing system 27:49 — Why the touring life is ending 33:25 — The Paris takeover surprise 51:23 — What's next: education and AI
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