“Food is so much more than just a thing,” McGinnis said. “You gather around food.”

At PLU, the philosophy of food involves educating students, faculty and staff about social justice, sustainability and community, McGinnis said. The university works to create a positive dining experience to ensure students are nourished and ready to learn those lessons.

And that positive experience goes beyond the plate. It takes into account conversation, tablescapes and the company.

PLU brings people together in the University Center Commons, where students dine together and with professors and staff members. Dining staff come together around the Chef’s Table in the heart of the Commons to develop recipes, entertain honored guests and cook up new ideas.

Down the street at PLU-owned restaurant 208 Garfield, the PLU community and beyond gather to enjoy each other’s company and products grown, produced or bottled by alumni.

“Gathering around food is so important socially,” McGinnis said. “There are conversations that happen at the dinner table at home, around the table in the Commons, that just don’t happen anywhere else. We see all of those occasions as opportunities to educate our students, to educate our community.”

Lionheart Coffee Co. in Beaverton, Oregon, doesn’t skimp on the details. The year-old coffee shop features three blends and four brew methods, spotlighting a new local or regional roaster each month.

“It’s a labor of love,” she said.

One night, while Reese enjoyed dinner with friends, the coffee shop transformed from a daydream to reality. A year and an online crowdfunding campaign later, Lionheart was born. The result is a community-oriented shop that prioritizes atmosphere, experience and quality, Reese said.

The lover of coffee said she is on a temporary hiatus from coffee herself, with a baby on the way. “I already have a list of coffees I’m going to have as soon as I give birth,” she quipped.

But she’s showing her love in other ways, providing TLC to the products and the customers who love coffee as much as she does. A standard morning at Lionheart includes plenty of visits from a growing base of regulars from all walks of life: church groups, students, creative types and more.

Events there underscore the shop’s dedication to building community around coffee. In June, for example, Lionheart will host a quirky competition called a Latte Art Throwdown, during which competitors will show off their milk-pouring skills to create beautiful designs that float on the top of patrons’ cups. It’s a popular competition in Portland, and Lionheart will be the first to host an installment outside Portland-proper, Reese said.

“People are willing to come to Beaverton from Portland,” she said. “It means they trust us.”

Other events and activities include adult coloring parties and cold brew tastings.

Through Lionheart, Reese said, she and her husband are living out what they are meant to do.

“We’re definitely not doing it for the money,” she said. “Every day it’s worth it.”

The heart that went into producing the port epitomizes the story told from vine to bottle at Benson Vineyards Estate Winery in Manson, Washington, overlooking the shores of Lake Chelan — great tasting wine made with a whole lot of nostalgia.

“We’re family here first and foremost,” Benson said.

And the wine tastes as profound as the story behind it. The port is buttery and intense, yet simple. It begs for drinkers to bury their noses deep in the glass to investigate all the flavors.

Betsy Kronschnabel, the tasting room manager at Benson Vineyards, said the best word to describe it is “jammy.” The first taste reminds her of black cherry cordials, the flavorful fruit covered in velvety chocolate.

“Starting with the nose, it smells warm and really smooth,” she said. “Then you sip it — it’s very fruit forward.”

Scott Benson and his wife, Rebecca (Gilge ’98), met at Pacific Lutheran University in Tingelstad Hall. They lived a floor apart. Scott graduated in 1996, earning a bachelor’s degree in history with a minor in political science. Rebecca graduated with an education degree two years later. She teaches fourth grade in Chelan.

After working a technical job at Boeing right out of college, Scott Benson changed course and the pieces started falling into place for his future in the wine business.

“We made a very abrupt plan to move down to Willamette Valley,” a region in Oregon known for its wine, Benson said of him and his wife. There he studied winemaking and vineyard management at Chemeketa Community College.

Around that time, his parents bought the 30-acre property where Benson Vineyards stands today. The farmland was covered in red and golden delicious apples. Chelan didn’t have an established wine industry then. Now, roughly 30 wineries dot the lake’s edge.

“There’s not a lot of people who come to Chelan for the apples,” Benson said. They come for tourism, camping, boating and time shares. Wine seemed like a natural fit, he said.

In late 2001, Scott and his wife moved to Chelan to begin work on the winery he and his family were building from the ground up — literally. They moved 33,000 cubic yards of dirt, erected a collection of stucco buildings and transitioned apple orchards into acres of wine grapes of many varieties.

“We had to build the infrastructure,” Benson said. “We did all the work ourselves.”

The first harvest year was in 2004, which yielded about 800 cases of wine. Now, Benson Vineyards produces up to 5,000 cases of wine each year. About 70 percent of the wines produced are reds, the other 30 percent are whites.

About 27 acres is dedicated to 20,000 grapevines. Benson Vineyards is 100 percent estate grown, meaning all the fruit is produced on site. “It’s a story for us,” Benson said. “We wanted to really showcase Lake Chelan.”

The Bensons go beyond simply showcasing the area; they make it hard to leave. Natural light and breathtaking views flood the upstairs tasting room, with French doors that open to a tranquil balcony overlooking the sweeping grapevines, snowcapped mountains and glassy water.

Grassy lounge areas intersect with perfectly placed brick walkways and patio furniture fit for wasting the hours away (though, it’s hardly wasted time).

People come for a good time, stay for the views and return for the wine.

“There’s a story from vine to bottle we can tell here,” Benson said, stressing that visitors can see the entire process in front of them as they sit and sip. “We don’t have any secrets.”

The property is open practically year-round, Benson said. It hosts concerts and charity events. But it isn’t your grandma’s winery; the Bensons unapologetically describe it as a party destination. It isn’t unusual, for example, for so-called Parrotheads to enjoy a bottle of wine along with the musical stylings of a Jimmy Buffett tribute band. It’s all about kicking back and having fun, because it is Lake Chelan after all, Benson said.

“The louder we are, the more wine we sell,” he quipped. Stuffiness was never in the playbook. “We de-emphasize the restrictive nature of wine.”

The Bensons say they aren’t trying to appeal to the perfect palate; they’re trying to appeal to everyone. It wouldn’t be much of a party otherwise.

That said, Benson and his employees can talk intelligently about their wine and its production. They know the rules well enough to break them — but not too much. Walking through the rows of wine barrels and talking about the science of it all, Benson’s nerdy side comes out. But he likes to keep all that stuff behind the scenes.

“It’s just wine,” he said. “When it’s sunny like this, I don’t want to think too hard about it.”

Benson and his wife stress the importance of giving back to others, and the couple is committed to fostering community. Charity events centered on education are especially important to them, as is a local group called Chelan to Africa. Started by a local doctor, the organization raises money to support a small orphanage in Lesotho. The Bensons will host a seventh annual charity event for the group this August. They say their commitment to community service was born at PLU.

“We take care of our family, we take care of our employees and we do our best to take care of the community as a whole,” Scott Benson said. “That’s really important to us.”

Rebecca Benson says her husband also takes care of his employees, paying living wages and creating a place where people want to come back and work year after year. Workers even call the winery “our place,” she said. “Scott works to make that true,” she said.

Scott Benson said it’s the right thing to do and it’s simply good for business: “We can’t do what we do without good people.”

“We’re doing our part to keep Portland weird,” said Jace Krause ’04. “We’re kind of weird guys ourselves.”

Krause and his business partner, Ryan Lynch, started the food cart in 2012. Back then, Krause said the goal simply was to avoid going broke. Fast forward four years and the duo isn’t just feeding hungry mouths and paying the bills, they’re a popular addition to the Portland food scene. They were even featured on an episode of the Food Network show “Eat Street” in 2013.

“I wanted to create a job for myself where I could be myself,” Krause said.

That took a lot of hard work and missed weekends in the beginning. For the first couple years of business, Krause and Lynch worked six days a week without vacations. Now, they have a full staff of employees and work three days a week. The rest of the time they dabble in creative projects, primarily making music with their band Fort Union, and managing food cart logistics.

Customers sing out orders with names that most would recognize (and chuckle at): the Little Gritchard, the Sriracha Mix-A- Lot, Free-Range Against The Machine, the Egg Zeppelin and the sandwich that started it all, the Yolko Ono. The latter recently was named one of the five best breakfast sandwiches in Portland, Krause said.

The rules for naming the food cart’s creations: it has to be a song, band or album name and it has to be “punny.”

“The one that makes us laugh the hardest wins,” Krause said of the brainstorming sessions.

Krause said his food cart focuses on locally sourced products, from regionally harvested eggs to the ingredients in their homemade spicy aioli.

“There are so many people in Portland doing awesome stuff,” he said. “It would be a shame not to feature that.”

Krause said people imagined something much simpler when he uttered the words “food cart;” “a hot dog cart on the sidewalk” they thought. But there’s nothing simple about what he and his business partner do.

“It’s basically a restaurant in a trailer,” he said. “We always say we work hard and play hard.”

It’s often busy. On weekends, they cook eight to 10 eggs at a time nonstop from 9 a.m. until they close at 3 p.m. (the food cart is open 8:30 a.m.-2 p.m. weekdays). Krause loves chatting with regulars in the process. His friends are his customers and his customers are his friends.

“Food always brings people together,” he said. “It brings me joy to make them food. I’m taking care of them in a way.”

Krause doesn’t just take care of his regulars. He says homelessness is prevalent along Hawthorne. To help in some way during the holidays last year, he and Lynch took donations for local shelters and one day after closing time cooked a hot meal for people off the street. They fed about 50 people, and the plan is to make it an annual effort.

“It’s easy for us to make food,” he said. “Everyone needs to eat.”

Krause doesn’t take himself too seriously, but he works hard to please his customers.

“I always make sure there’s a perfectly cooked egg on every sandwich,” he said. When he has time to enjoy breakfast himself, Krause said he prefers his eggs scrambled, though he admits his scrambled eggs are nothing like his grandma’s — which he says are perfect. That’s how he got started with eggs.

Kevin O’Brien, PLU’s chair of environmental studies, said the key is people learning the story behind their food and asking if they’re comfortable with that story.

“The easiest and most damaging habit is thinking that food comes from a grocery store,” said O’Brien, who is also an associate professor of Christian ethics. “Go to a grocery store and be aware.”

This concept isn’t just foreign to schoolchildren. The disconnect between consumers and the food they buy and eat is a very real issue for many people of all ages. Responsible food consumption is a complex, and at times polarizing, issue. It is often overwhelming for advocates who wish to change their habits and the institutions that helped formed those habits.

For Perez, O’Brien and others, the first step is learning and talking about the food industry.

Perez said her food advocacy has evolved over time, and she takes steps when she can to reduce negative impacts on the food system, the people within it and the environment. She’s a vegetarian, she composts and she does her best to understand where the food she buys comes from, accounting for potential use of child labor and other factors. She is mindful of what produce she buys, what season she’s buying it in and where she purchases it, and she tends a garden when she can.

But Perez acknowledges that there’s no perfect solution to all the problems related to industrialized food. Those problems include overly processed products that cause widespread health issues, environmentally harmful chemicals and inadequate wages for a dwindling population of farmworkers.

“It’s a tricky situation to shop ethically at all,” Perez said. But it’s important for people to avoid getting wrapped up in guilt, she added. “Take mindful, intentional steps forward. Start talking about it.”

O’Brien said that’s an important piece of the puzzle to avoid being overwhelmed by a vast and complicated issue.

“Don’t try to do everything. Do something,” O’Brien said. “The best place to start is where you are. We can all do something.”

One manageable step for O’Brien was becoming a member of a CSA, which stands for community supported agriculture. Members buy a share of a farm’s harvest, pay per year and receive a basket of food each week in return.

In a good season, members get a variety of healthy, locally sourced produce that came from a farmer they know. In a bad season, they’ve invested in a farmer whom they want to stick around for future harvests. O’Brien said he’s bought a share at Zestful Gardens, a Tacoma-based organic farm owned by PLU alumna Holly Foster ’96, for about seven years. He said she is always growing something, even in less fruitful seasons.

“It’s an investment, and it’s insurance on their part,” O’Brien said of the annual cost. “I know she’s going to grow. She can always grow something.”

O’Brien said CSAs are becoming more popular. Beyond providing healthier food and a healthier environment, O’Brien said buying local and knowing the farmers who sell the food creates a community bond people don’t get from the corporate food system.

“Food is best when you enjoy it with other people,” O’Brien said.

Perez and O’Brien agree that early childhood education is a huge factor in sparking change in the food industry. Perez said it’s important that children understand where food comes from and how it affects the people who grow, harvest, purchase and eat it. That helps plant the seed for a commitment to caring for the earth, Perez said.

PLU alumna Nicole Laumb is already hard at work planting that seed. The 2011 graduate said her first experience growing food herself wasn’t until her mid-20s, just a few years ago. Laumb worked for a school garden program in Fort Bragg, California, while working with AmeriCorps.

“Up until that point, I had purchased every head of lettuce I’d ever eaten wrapped in plastic,” she said. Since then, Laumb has bounced from a goat farm in Eatonville, Washington, to a startup farm in Northern California, followed by the after-school enrichment program where she teaches today. There she runs garden-related classes for children.

“I don’t want the next generation to have to wait as long as I did and that’s why I took myself off the farm and into a classroom,” Laumb said. “I want kids to have an understanding of their consumption, environmental practices and where food comes from at an early age.”

For those who are already wrapped up in the food system, Laumb said, small steps can be taken to initiate change. She urges everyone, when it’s feasible, to start a backyard garden. She said that intimate experience with food, if widespread, will spark a cultural shift.

“Seeing what it takes to make something grow gives you more of an empathy for that process,” Laumb said. “Once you’ve done it and sweated through it, there’s an inherent change that takes place.”

She also said people should try to purchase food locally when possible. Her definition of local means food that was grown or produced within 100 miles of where it’s sold, though she noted that’s not necessarily an option for everyone.

Luke Gillespie, a senior environmental studies major, said his advocacy focuses on the people with few options – or none at all. He said food deserts, or the unequal distribution of food in urban areas, are problems nationwide. That means many low-income areas don’t have any grocery stores, and a collection of liquor stores and convenience stores often stand in their place.

Gillespie has devoted his senior capstone research to the issue, and plans to make his work available to local organizations that are equipped to tackle the problems associated with food deserts.

“If there’s anything you can do, understand your place in the food system and acknowledge that place might look different for people who are in more vulnerable positions,” he said.

Gillespie, as with most advocates for a more sustainable food system, doesn’t have all the answers. But he said the solutions lie with members of affected communities. People in privileged positions who want to help should listen, not talk, he said.

“Without listening,” Gillespie said, “I wouldn’t understand the problem as well as I do today.”

Halvorsen worked in the food industry before and after studying public relations and English at PLU. She tried for a long time to break into the kitchen. When that effort and a monthslong job search in the communication field hit a dead end, she decided to take control of her destiny. Halvorsen started sharing a kitchen with the people who launched Taco Del Mar, back when it was a small operation, and got cooking. In the beginning, she focused on boxed lunches.

Fast-forward a couple decades and Halvorsen now boasts an impressive reputation, one that landed her a catering gig with the Clinton Foundation last year. She poured wine at Hillary Clinton’s table.

“It was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done,” Halvorsen said, laughing. The Democratic candidate vying for president of the United States ate halibut that night, she added. “She thought it was lovely.”

Ravishing Radish currently shares a kitchen space with Pyramid Catering at Capitol Hill’s Immaculate Conception Church.

The church kitchen emphasizes utility. It bustled on a recent Saturday afternoon before a wedding scheduled at the Fremont Foundry. Transport trucks and equipment hummed as the smell of freshly prepared food and fresh-cut flowers wafted through the room.

Halvorsen quickly ran between the kitchen, her office and the liquor closet, getting ready for a tasting with future clients. No details were missed in the tasting room: candles flickering, wine uncorked and ready to be poured, and perfectly placed menus on pearly white platters.

Halvorsen worked in the food industry before and after studying public relations and English at PLU. She tried for a long time to break into the kitchen. When that effort and a monthslong job search in the communication field hit a dead end, she decided to take control of her destiny. Halvorsen started sharing a kitchen with the people who launched Taco Del Mar, back when it was a small operation, and got cooking. In the beginning, she focused on boxed lunches.

Fast-forward a couple decades and Halvorsen now boasts an impressive reputation, one that landed her a catering gig with the Clinton Foundation last year. She poured wine at Hillary Clinton’s table.

“It was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done,” Halvorsen said, laughing. The Democratic candidate vying for president of the United States ate halibut that night, she added. “She thought it was lovely.”

Ravishing Radish currently shares a kitchen space with Pyramid Catering at Capitol Hill’s Immaculate Conception Church.

The church kitchen emphasizes utility. It bustled on a recent Saturday afternoon before a wedding scheduled at the Fremont Foundry. Transport trucks and equipment hummed as the smell of freshly prepared food and fresh-cut flowers wafted through the room.

Halvorsen quickly ran between the kitchen, her office and the liquor closet, getting ready for a tasting with future clients. No details were missed in the tasting room: candles flickering, wine uncorked and ready to be poured, and perfectly placed menus on pearly white platters.

Once she finished setting the ambiance, she shuffled over to the fresh-cut lilacs and arranged centerpieces for the wedding buffet. The flowers came from the yard at her home on Bainbridge Island.

Nobody working that day walked. There’s no time to waste for staff who sometimes cater up to five weddings a day. Ravishing Radish caters hundreds of events each year all the while experimenting with new dishes and hosting public tastings for as many as 150 people.

Sometimes the masterminds behind the beautiful dishes get to eat their creations. A quick sample of the prosciutto- wrapped Yukon gold potatoes was a welcome treat on that hot afternoon.

David Thomas, a sous chef who was hard at work dressing up a plate with a red-wine reduction sauce, said just about everything on Ravishing Radish’s menus is made from scratch. The short ribs are a fan favorite — the dish is “over-the-top, all- the-time” good, he said. It’s an all-day process to make the ribs: braising the meat, straining liquid, reducing the sauce and more.

The result is worth it — a dish Halvorsen said melts in your mouth and doesn’t require silverware.

Staff members slow down and soak in the good stuff when time allows. Halvorsen said she holds Champagne Fridays, during which employees drink bubbly and try new recipes the team dreams up.

“We eat well,” she said.

She said her employees set Ravishing Radish apart from other catering companies. They care deeply about the clients and are passionate about providing the best experience possible.

“Everyone has fears,” she said. “We try to understand their fears and make it seamless for them the day of.”

Presentation also is a priority. The company’s motto: “Food is art.”

Malek said her desire to foster community with ice cream started with her experience at Pacific Lutheran University. The communication major said leaving a tight-knit campus, where everyone knew professors and classmates well, encouraged her to find that same atmosphere in her professional life.