Sophia Roe’s Big Plans For 2025 Include A Baby

If quiet quitting is the new thing, nobody told Sophia Roe. The James Beard Award-winning chef is raising a custom culinary studio in Brooklyn, New York, working on a forthcoming food-centric web series, Signature Dish with Sophia Roe, a series powered by Toast, preparing to pen her first book in the fall — oh, and she’s pregnant with her first child.

If this all sounds hauntingly “hustle harder, girl boss,” put away your knives. The reality is, this is just how the woman is programmed. Her secret: everything she does is rooted in a deeper purpose.

Take Apartment Miso 2.0. The 1,000-square-foot commercial property is designed to serve as a headquarters for Roe to shoot long-form YouTube videos (she plans to relaunch her channel later this year) and for chefs to hold pop-ups or to use as a commissary kitchen. But more than that, Roe sees it as a clean, well-lit place for the neighborhood to gather and build connection.

“I always wanted to create a space that felt beautiful, open, and welcoming as a hangout, not just for myself, but also for the community,” she says. Roe envisions hosting bread and pasta-making classes, among other gatherings. The multipurpose venue will have a custom kitchen with components on wheels for flexible configuration and the glass-front Sub-Zero refrigerator of her dreams. Of the “deep red, moody, sexy” interior design aesthetic of the moment, Roe says, “this is not that. I don’t want the space to feel trendy at all. I just want it to feel nice and welcoming.”

For Roe, community is a cornerstone of her other life’s work: food activism. She grew up as what academics and policymakers would call “food insecure,” but the private chef-turned-television host and producer puts it more bluntly: “I grew up hungry — and I’ve been pretty pissed off about it since,” she says.

When Roe says she’s been “pissed” about hunger, she doesn’t mean it in a take-it-to-my-trauma-therapist kind of way. Certainly the experiences of growing up in the system and without enough to eat is what helped propel Roe to secure a culinary career some 16 years ago. “I wouldn't be a [professional] cook without it,” she says.

But more indelibly, these early experiences fired her up for the most compelling aspect of her work: advocacy for social justice in our food systems. It explains why Roe is so careful with her word choices: “hunger” connotes immediacy and compels a call to action, whereas “food insecure” is a term that softens the blow, as it feels far more remote — and that’s something that Roe says affects how society thinks about the issue as a whole.

“I still think there's a particular population of people that think hunger isn't an American problem — and that is wrong. I guarantee you, I walk by 100 people every day that are incredibly ‘food insecure,’” the Brooklynite says. “They might have jobs, cellphones, or press-on nails and lashes — but that doesn't mean they're not experiencing hunger.”

For anyone even remotely paying attention to headlines, it's become impossible to ignore food inequity. Just in the last few weeks alone, a storm of events have further destabilized our food systems, including USDA cancelation of $1 billion in local food purchasing for schools and freezing farmer funds, H1N1 flu impacting egg prices, the defunding of USAID, and Border Patrol raids threatening field workers. But what to do about it can feel insurmountable.

That’s where Roe’s signature mix of compassion, practicality, and real-world problem-solving come in. Though she advocates for proper nutrition, she doesn’t judge when people fall short of perfection. “I hate when wellness [advocates] are like, ‘Stop feeding your kids hot dogs,’” she says. “This is a single mom of three who is doing the best that she can. It's not her fault she doesn't have five hours a day to trad wife, OK?”

It’s also through this sensible lens that she so successfully reframes massive, systemic issues as challenges that can be addressed with an IRL, neighbor-to-neighbor approach (a hallmark of her Emmy-nominated food show Counter Space, which aired on Vice from 2020-2023).

“There are a lot of ways to sit in your care and activism and I think yelling and screaming on social media, though empowering and great for awareness, might be the least effective way to make a difference,” she says. Instead, she advocates for thinking smaller and mobilizing within local communities by shopping farmers markets, accessing community gardens, meeting local farmers, and finding local and direct food sources as a means of driving down costs, increasing accessibility, and building connections.

“I think it's [about going] as local as small as possible,” she says. “I think a lot of times what happens is we look at the news and it blows our mind so much that we forget to think about our neighbor. You can have a massive, sweeping impact in your little community.” Not that it’s always easy. “People always ask: ‘How do you get access to these community gardens and farms?’” she says. “You know what? It's hard. You’ve got to call, send emails — you might have to send five emails [until] somebody's going to eventually answer.”

Speaking of hard, just how does Roe plan to sustain such effervescent professional output once she adds the role of mom to the mix? By integrating parenthood with her identity as a professional and activist: spending time in restaurants (“It's literally part of my job. But that doesn't mean that my kid will be allowed to run wild in the restaurant. We're not doing that.”), making community work a family hang (“I'm excited to be able to create another wonderful community member that is just as fired up about this, but in a non-traumatic way,” she says), cooking with her child, and staying on the move. “I’ll still be schlepping around the city,” she says. “But I'll have a baby slung to my back, not a blender.”