By 
Over a year in the making, I have wanted to interview Kimbal Musk for quite some time.
When The Kitchen first opened in Fort Collins years ago, I began to follow the expansion of the Real Food ideology. When I say Ideology, it’s not dogma per-say, however, after a conversation with Kimbal it seems like one to him. He lives, breathes, and will stand by the idea to his death that Real Food can be (with the right economic and social push) accessible to everyone.
On a bright winter day, we were able to sit down with the incredibly busy man himself and ask him a few pertinent questions about how he is changing the landscape in regards to food, not only in our Front Range community but nationally as well.
The stunning photography you see in this piece (including the cover) comes from our very talented Taylor Stone. As we shared a meal, we began the interview by diving into the culture. Hence the inner cover intentionally calling to mind our mutual love of Johnny Cash.
Kimbal Musk | Taylor Stone © 2020
Anthony Cross:
What music have you been listening to recently?
Kimbal Musk:
Johnny Cash— a lot of Johnny Cash.
AC:
Old stuff?
KM:
Well, a little bit less known.
AC:
Great stuff—
KM:
Going through the At Folsom Prison album is amazing. I have loved him for so long but I don’t think I’ve ever listened to that album until a month ago.
AC:
You know it’s funny about a month and a half, two months ago, I went through and listened to that whole thing again.
KM:
Oh yeah?
AC:
He’s kind of in the water right now— I don’t know what it is, but there is a resonant, raw quality about it that’s really, really beautiful and applicable right now, you know?
KM:
Yeah, and his songs are much shorter in At Folsom Prison — I think its whole set might have been 45 minutes?
Kimbal Musk & Anthony Cross | Taylor Stone © 2020
AC:
Are you practicing it, like to perform it? I know you play a little guitar—
KM:
Yeah, I broke my neck about ten years ago, almost died, and was paralyzed for a few days and then horizontal two months. It really started getting my life focused on food. But one of the things I started doing after that, was learning Johnny Cash’s music. I played music before, but I never really learned Johnny Cash. Something about it became more and more meaningful. Even the song “Hurt,” which is an intense, sad song, really resonated with me on how I felt. Before I broke my neck I had really been in a numb place where I wasn’t happy at all.
AC:
Sure—
Kimbal Musk | Taylor Stone © 2020
KM:
So in February I’m gonna just play for some friends, you know, but I formed a band, a Johnny Cash cover band.
AC:
Really?! So this is a culmination of a little bit of time since it’s been a while since the accident.
KM:
February 14th is my 10th anniversary.
AC:
Wow, so it’s just a private little concert? Or are you going to be headlining Red Rocks anytime soon?
KM:
We’ll see how well we resonate, but I doubt it. [Laughs]
AC:
I mean that stuff is almost universal — Do you write anything yourself?
KM:
I’ve written a few things in my life. That’s the kind of thing I do more as I get older. But what I really love is finding songs that I resonate with. Of course, different songs resonate at different times, and some songs that I’ve learned years ago will come back into my life.
Kimbal Musk & Anthony Cross | Taylor Stone © 2020
AC:
Do they attain new relevance?
KM:
Yeah, exactly.
AC:
How much time do you spend practicing every day, since it’s therapeutic in a way?
KM:
I’m practicing probably 30 hours a week, you know—
AC:
That’s a lot! Especially for somebody as busy as you are—
KM:
Yeah. I’m one of those guys who will make time if there’s a pressure point. If I wasn’t doing this little show in February, then I’d probably be doing more like five to ten hours— I always do five to ten hours a week regardless. It’s kind of a nice stress reliever for me.
AC:
Especially with a high-pressure occupation, and then it also keeps your mind active in that sort of creative way.
KM:
It takes you to a different place…
AC:
So let’s go way back to the origin of Big Green; give me and our readers the low-down.
KM:
Let me start from the beginning. Truly the idea came from one of our employees here at The Kitchen, to give them credit. The Kitchen’s mission in 2004 was to work with local farmers, doing “simple real food” that is delicious because it’s grown locally. Each farmer puts a different kind of love and attention into their product. The Kitchen was profitable out of the gates, and one of our employees came to us with an Idea— his name is Bryce Brown, he is a wonderful philanthropic guy.
He is one of those guys that could probably take a position in any part of the restaurant. He is so talented— he asked us if we would be interested in supporting kids and food, and educating kids. His grandfather had done school gardens in New Zealand. We helped him form the Growe Foundation which still runs today in Boulder, and it’s a wonderful organization. I sat on the board there and it was great. We financially supported and also helped build it. My frustration with it was that it grew very slowly. It was a two-school-gardens-a-year organization. That’s tough.
AC:
That is tough —
Kimbal Musk | Taylor Stone © 2020
KM:
I mean in my lifetime we wouldn’t be able to finish Boulder. That’s how crazy slow that was. But in the world of school gardens that was as fast as it got, you know. No organization moved fast in those days. After the accident in 2010, I just looked at my life and said:
“I have so much to give in this world; I’ve kind of not focused on food.”
I had these restaurants— it was helpful to Hugo, my co-founder, who is running it, and I was helpful to Bryce, but that’s very different than doing it.
“What you see is what you get. It’s not that complicated.”
—Kimbal Musk
AC:
And being invested in it—
KM:
You’re either a helper or actually doing it. And so while I was in the hospital I was like:
“If they fix me, I’m going to focus on food and I’m going to focus entirely on food and bringing real food to everyone.”
Real Food is the food you trust to nourish your body, trust to nourish the farmer, and trust to nourish the planet. What you see is what you get. It’s not that complicated.
AC:
Absolutely.
KM:
One of the challenges was that The Kitchen was just too expensive. So how can we get something that’s more affordable and that would resonate with the rest of the country? I’m also really proud of Colorado— Colorado is this Silicon Valley for natural foods.
AC:
I was going to ask “Why Colorado?”
KM:
I never moved here with any intention to build a big food business, but once I was here, I realized that Boulder was really the epicenter for natural real food— Horizon Organic Dairies was founded here, Wild Oats started here, Chipotle, which I sat on the board of, is here. And you’re like,
“Wow, this is like the epicenter of Real Food in America.”
I love that. So Colorado to me is this group of people who really embrace an active lifestyle; that does mean that it’s not always a low-calorie meal. If you’re an athlete you need to get real calories in you, but you want them to be good calories. You want them to have nutrition in them. It all kind of revolves around this Colorado lifestyle of loving the outdoors. This is the healthiest state in the country.
Kimbal Musk & Anthony Cross | Taylor Stone © 2020
AC:
What a great place to start a venture like this.
KM:
We have all of these wonderful iconic restaurant food companies that have come out of here. And you realize that Boulder, Denver, and Colorado as a state are on the forefront. I think California is also a leader, but California can be a little bit more … “I’m better than you…” [Laughs]
AC:
Last time I went to LA, I found a Perisian restaurant just off the beaten path, and the meal was brilliant. It was delicious and was with fresh lamb for $10, which was insane to me. The next day, I was invited to this cafe in Beverly Hills that some friends were ranting and raving about, only to be served a horrible omelet plus a strange banana cappuccino thing for $35. The sheer economics of it has to play a part of all this as well, I assume.
“The only way you ever go into any business is through naivete.”
—Kimbal Musk
KM:
I think the economics really matters. If you’re a normal person in Colorado, you can’t go out and spend, you know, $30-$40 every time you go out. It doesn’t really matter how wealthy you are, that’s just kind of silly.
AC:
If it’s not as good, if not better than some of these fast food/fast-casual places, it’s never going to really catch on with the right demographic. The real prize has to be the people who are going to passively fall into this, basically saying, “wow, this is better.”
KM:
What I love about Next Door is [it’s] in Boulder, Fort Collins, and Denver, and if you might think, well, those are similar markets… but they’re actually all three very different markets.
AC:
You had a Kitchen in Fort Collins for a while and then it changed to a Next Door; I was very happy when it did switch not that The Kitchen was terrible but—
KM:
I think it might be our busiest restaurant we have in the national group. Bigger than Boulder or Denver— that warms my heart because if Fort Collins loves our food, that tells me that we have a real shot at bringing Real Food to everyone.
AC:
Oh yeah, I’ve always said Fort Collins is a very interesting balance between very liberal, modern ideals and a very rich agricultural history. That was the biggest debate that I saw reading about you. This idea that you are a “naive punk” entering the very established world of agriculture and trying to change things up.
KM:
The only way you ever go into any business is through naivete. [Laughs]
Kimbal Musk & Anthony Cross | Taylor Stone © 2020
AC:
Right, I mean I started a print magazine in 2018 so… who are we kidding here. [Laughs]
KM:
[Laughs] That applies almost to any business— naivete is the only way for business. Anytime I’ve gone into a business and someone says, “that’s a really good idea!” those are the times I failed because you realize that either people have tried this idea too many times and it’s failed, or there are too many competitors already in the market.
I actually rely on being naive when I go into these places, and I do my best not to learn from the very old players— you can learn from relatively new players, but you don’t want to learn from the very old players because they’ll never change their ways.
AC:
Square Roots is expanding, right? How’s that going?
KM:
That’s going very well. So our goal with Square Roots is to bring Real Food into every major city in the country, and eventually the world, by empowering the next generation of young farmers. I spent a lot of time trying to get into farming by acquiring land. That was just a totally thankless task. I leased some land in Memphis and converted to organic farming. The idea [was] that I would then split it up into parcels for young farmers. You know farming outdoors, with climate change today—
AC:
It’s unpredictable.
KM:
It’s so unpredictable, so you go into it thinking:
“Well, we’ve been doing this for thousands of years well; we will farm this particular product.”
Well no, actually you can’t, now the weather has changed. So we went through that very hard learning process. Square Roots is a way for young farmers to get in in a climate-controlled environment. We could grow the same basil in Antarctica, in Memphis, or in the Gobi Desert, and it would be the same delicious product. We would want to look at where the young farmers want to be, so maybe not Antarctica.
AC:
Not a huge demand.
KM:
Yeah, we give them a climate-controlled farm. And we empower them to grow the best tasting most nutritious basil, or mint, strawberries, or whatever we decide to grow over time. And our goal is to replace the current industrial food system. Where right now you have frankly very poor labor practices, and you’re shipping food from places as far away as China to get to a grocery store shelf in Michigan. It’s terrible for the environment, the food doesn’t taste good, and it’s not respecting the local farmers at all, right?
AC:
It’s just a single point of failure as well— gas prices go up, your food prices go up.
KM:
And the reason we do it is that we haven’t figured out how to grow it locally until recently, and modern-day technology enables us to grow the best tasting product.
AC:
Is taste really important to the whole debate?
Kimbal Musk | Taylor Stone © 2020
KM:
I think you lose if you don’t focus on taste. The industrial system knows that if you add salt and sugar, you get people to eat it because it does taste better. You may feel terrible afterward, it’s just zero thought towards nutrition. At Square Roots, we can grow the best-tasting food without any of that. That is a way technology is now enabling real food to be better than that.
AC:
That’s a bold claim, but I believe it. So you’ve got, what, one in Brooklyn right now?
KM:
One in Brooklyn, one campus in Michigan— we will be opening a few more this year, but I’m not in charge of announcing that. The vision with Square Roots is having the two campuses graduating 20 farmers a year. These new farmers will be graduating and understand real food. Understand modern-day technology, and understand plant science.
AC:
Right— how much do they have to pay?
KM:
Oh, we pay them. I mean it’s a living wage depending on the market. It’s not a large amount of money, but it’s enough for them to get by. It’s like a community college that pays you.
AC:
It’s all about agricultural literacy and about education for you then as well?
KM:
We work with them throughout the years and place them into the food industry in some form, and about 80% of our graduates have stayed in the food industry. Because our goal is to create the next generation of farmers, we need to not just train them, but also make sure that the next step stays in the food industry.
AC:
So the whole goal is that within 10 years, everything that you get, pretty much, is local. With some exceptions surely—
KM:
With some exceptions, you want everything to be as local as possible. Romaine lettuce presently takes eleven days to get to a grocery store shelf from when it was farmed and shipped from all over the world. Eleven days! You have enormous food waste because it doesn’t survive very long from when you buy it. You grow that locally, and you have 14 days of shelf-life.
So you just don’t have the food waste that you had before. Then you also have food safety. When you know where the food came from, like at Square Roots where [we] have a transparency timeline. We know who planted the seed, who farmed it, who harvested it, what time of the day they harvested, when did it get to the grocery store, and when the customer bought it. The customer can just scan a QR code and see all of that information. If anything goes wrong, we catch it within a few hours. There have been two major scares with romaine lettuce in the past few years. It takes them about six weeks to clear the system, and then they are still not able to find out where it was farmed, so they can’t even identify the source of the problem.
AC:
It’s a lot of decentralization to it, you really get more redundancies as well—
KM:
If you want food safety solved, and if you want food waste solved, and you want food to taste better and to be more nutritious. That gets solved by local.
AC:
So on to the really important topic at hand, what do you have growing in your garden this year?
KM:
I have a huge garden. We have a season here in Colorado, but over the winter, what I do is I grow thyme and garlic. And you’d be amazed, I mean I had fresh thyme today even though it’s the middle of January. It just survives the whole winter. And then in March, we have Plant a Seed Day coming up, you know about that?
AC:
Oh most definitely—
Kimbal Musk | Taylor Stone © 2020
KM:
So Plant a Seed Day is when we start planting, so I’ll plant carrots, radishes, kale, and things like that— as you get closer to the summer months, then you start doing blooming vegetables like extra zucchini and tomatoes. I have like 50 different types of tomatoes growing to sort of find out which one works better for my environment—it’s wonderful. Last summer, or probably like 18 months ago, I planted a peach tree and I got my first peaches. That was very nice. I didn’t expect to grow peaches for a few years, you know, sometimes that can happen.
AC:
Personally, I have an olive tree that is producing fruit although it’s very young. It’s in a big pot that I take inside in the winter. And since it’s self-pollinating, it will produce olives year-round. It’s amazing what you can get away with growing here with all this sun.
KM:
Oh wow, that’s really cool — I might steal that idea.
[Both Laughing]
