Peggy Markel’s Stories, Lessons & Insights

Peggy Markel shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.

Peggy, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. What are you being called to do now, that you may have been afraid of before?
I have enjoyed gathering people for my International culinary programs for many years, 33 to be exact. I have loved a long livelihood of making relationship to certain countries, their food culture and places to stay within their country for a long while. I have become very familiar with the food traditions of 5 different countries and 5 different continents. Italy has been my primary country for trips and my second home. My programs were mostly a foundation of food, wine and cooking. Now I see a transformative element that has always been there that I am not afraid to include now.

My last sailing adventure included Ashley Wick, transformational coach, from Boulder. We invited 6 women to come on board to “Find The Current Within”. An invitation to reconnect with your “genius”. Sometimes we get lost or too far along with responsibilities to remember our own personal flow. This trip includes food, wine and travel but flirts with the edge of self reflection. Not everyone feels comfortable doing that. This is a big part of who I am in my personal life and I’m ready now to be able to include meaningful conversation amongst us all around the table, as well as offering creative retreats.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I am a 5th generation Southerner who grew up being very connected to food and the natural hospitality of being with people and feeding them. Traveling in other cultures exploring their food traditions has come easy to me, so did learning Italian and immersing myself into the Italian way of life. I would like to think that my programs are unique. I curate them depending on who I know and who I am connecting with. Could be a hotelier, a restauranteur, a farmer, a vintner, or other food artisans.

I’m a writer, photographer, illustrator, a Southern storyteller and seeker. I left home at an early age to explore the world and have since designed and directed far-flung food and culture trips for over 33 years. I mostly design programs for small groups of individual travelers that are built on long-term relationships, handpicked properties and carefully crafted itineraries. Each trip is a deep dive into the most delicious culinary happenings in each destination with a hands-on approach. Guests learn how food is made or learn how to make it themselves. I like to offer an insider’s look into the most influential kitchens and tasting rooms around the world from Morocco to India.

Here is what is written about my brand on my website that’s actually valid and descriptive:

“It’s hard to describe a Peggy Markel Culinary Adventure until you experience it for yourself. She has mastered a balanced rhythm and flow, and her deep, authentic relationships with locals allow you to feel like you’ve been dropped into an instant, welcoming circle of friends at the most interesting dinner party wherever you are. A true multi-hyphenate, Peggy’s trips are as wonderfully dynamic and soulful as she is. She plays the role of curator, translator, educator, poet and provides the context for guests to experience a perfect alchemy of place, people, and food. For Peggy, food is a pathway to deeper learning, self-nourishment, openness and connection.

When not traveling, she lives on the fourth floor of a 16th century Palazzo in the center of Florence, Italy as well as in a pied-à-terre in Boulder, Colorado to be near her family.

Peggy Markel’s Culinary Adventures delivers personalized, educational, hands-on travel experiences that feed the soul. With a perpetual curiosity and reverence for the rich tapestry created by food and culture, Peggy Markel has designed and directed carefully hand-crafted food and culture trips around the world for close to 35 years. She is a pioneer not only in culinary travel, but was instrumental in bringing Slow Food to America and championing the farm to table movement as early as 1993.

Following her intuition and inspiration, Peggy built lasting relationships with chefs and purveyors throughout Italy and continued designing adventures that include Morocco, Sicily, Gulf of Naples, Aeolian Islands, as well as Spain, Scotland, Portugal and India. Though the market for culinary travel has certainly grown since these early years, no one has been able to match the depth and dimension of her programs.

Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. What was your earliest memory of feeling powerful?
One’s early life is full of impressions and choosing one to comment on is hard. I”m not sure that is something I’m conscious of. I can remember expressions of awe around beauty. My father was a gardener, so I became one as well. I remember harvesting my first radish in the early morning sun. I pulled it up by its little root and held it in the sunlight. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Alive and beautiful and I could eat it. I was certainly cognizant that I could grow food and that I wouldn’t starve. I also remember learning to ride a bicycle and felt invincible. I was the only girl on the neighborhood baseball team and I was strong and held my own. I could walk fences. What I felt was not consciously powerful but insatiably curious and naively fearless.

What have been the defining wounds of your life—and how have you healed them?
This is a very personal question. I could have chosen something less vulnerable, but it seems the most poignant.

I got hepatitis at 14. it was shocking. I was an athlete and a cheerleader. My arms were so heavy one day, I couldn’t roll my hair. it was the early 70’s. The diagnosis meant that I had to go into isolation for 6 weeks. I had to stop dating my boyfriend, a star football player (we date early in the south) and couldn’t even go to school, much less run the 50 yard dash. Plus, I couldn’t even leave my room. My father rigged a walkie talkie for someone to take from class to class. It sucked to be alone for that long, but I was also very tired and jaundiced. My mother tried to feed me liver. That sucked too. As I started to feel better some weeks later, my friends would bring me milkshakes to my window. I could say hello, we could laugh a little and I could drink something that actually tasted good. I was quite thin by the time the isolation was over. I learned that even when in isolation, you are not alone. I was not abandoned. But soon after, I became a different person. Perhaps I realized after weeks of contemplation that the Ra Ra life wasn’t for me. I became for better or worse, a hippie. My taste in music changed and so did my friends. My mind opened up to seeing the world in 3D. I wasn’t a cheerleader, I was a poet.
This realization changed the course of my life and without the isolation experience , I might not have noticed.

My mother died in her sleep of a heart attack while visiting me in Colorado. She was only 61. I was 26 with a small child of 3 who found her and said she wouldn’t wake up. When I walked in the room I saw my mother sitting up in bed with her hand in a book with her eyes open. Her light was on and the radio was playing “easy listening” music. I called her name from the door as i walk towards her. She didn’t respond. I got closer and put my hands on her shoulders to gently shake her, saying mom, mom..in that instant I realized she was stiff. I screamed. But didn’t run away without looking and thinking to myself that I came from that body. Her spirit still felt like it was in the room. It felt like a “conscious shock”. We are not our bodies. Only visitors. She was reading Aldous Huxley’s ISLAND, all about the after life. She must have been aware of something or it was just coincidence. They say she died peacefully without moving a finger between 2-4 am. The silent killer. You learn to move on but not without them forever in your heart, nor not worrying about your own. My husband had to phone my father. I couldn’t. Our first encounters with death leave us bereft but with a deep awareness of impermanence. It causes you to live large. My mother didn’t get a chance to do that.. so I do it for both of us. Fast forward 25 years and I’m present for my father’s death. He died at 90. Also peacefully, as if the angels of his gospel music on the radio called him home. I just now realized that both of them were at home listening to music when they died. I feel privileged that I got to present for both of my parent’s peaceful passing. Both poignant and meaningful and now I’m less afraid.

I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. Is the public version of you the real you?
These topics are all compelling. This one I feel I could answer without thinking about it for a few days. The answer is Yes. The public version of me is the real me. I started my business designing and directing culinary travel 33 years ago. The purpose was to connect us back to the land to an honest way of eating and being around the table. As Americans I felt we needed to be immersed in Italian food culture to find our way back to good food and conversation at the table..table as a platform to support discussions, emotions, be nourished with delicious simple foods grown close by us or at our fingertips. It’s how I grew up in the south, but noticed it was not a given and people were starving for it. I began in 1992 before the farm to table movement, but I was doing exactly that as well as Slow Food. I was a member by ’93 in Italy and was one of the first to bring it to America officially by ’96. There’s an Italian toast that says, “A tavola non si invecchia mai!” At the table one never grows old. We are present and in the moment in it’s fullness. That’s what I want to offer. Connection amongst ourselves and cultures. I am the same person at home as I am around those tables around the world. Except in Italy, I speak Italian and various other languages ‘un po’ when in different countries. But there is a thread of goodness that runs between them all in recognizing our similarities rather than our differences. That doesn’t change no matter where I am.

Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. What will you regret not doing? 
I have been trying to write a book for over 20 years. First it was going to be a cook book, then it was going to be a memoir. i have reams of writing and have structured a beginning but I feel I have several books within me. Each country where I have provided programs has such rich cultures that I could write a book on each one.

My grandparents had a wonderful old 100 year old house in the wilds of Clay Country. After my aunt Sarah died, the house has remained and slowly, slowly, it’s falling apart. We got most everything out we wanted to, but the heart and the space of the house is still beating and aching to be filled up. We talk about the longing of landscape, or the landscape of longing, I feel that the 40 acres we had and sold, aches for us. Cherokee walked that land and supposedly we were kin. Arrowheads were found. Cotton was grown on that land as well as watermelons. There was a barn with animals at one time across the road from the old home place. Next to the house was a garden that I remember my grandfather tending with a hoe and a smoke house where we played as children next to the 100 year old pear-apple tree and the fig bursting with sweet mushy fruit. The house itself was a place of deep nurturing. The biscuits for breakfast, the cornbread and black-eyed peas for lunch, the garden tomato soup for dinner. The stories that my old aunt Sarah told at night in the bed next to mine of the old ways and days, when she used to ride in the surrey with my great-grandparents to the primitive Baptist Church where they sang fa-so-la shape note singing. The old place is falling apart now. Aunt Sarah died at a 102. We have not been able to maintain the house, neither have we scraped it. It is probably lilting to the left or the right. It’s a shame to let something go that you can’t afford to fix. I do regret this and I’m not sure I will be able to before I pass on.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.peggymarkel.com
• Instagram: peggymarkel
• Linkedin: peggy markel
• Other: Substack.

Image Credits
Peggy Markel, Stephen Smith