Sophia Roe Breaks Down the Food Industry

Sophia Roe likes to serve food en masse. When we spoke, the Brooklyn-based cook, two-time Emmy Award-nominated TV host and James Beard Award winner was making bread for an event the next day. She was baking her favorite style, pan de cristal, a high-hydration dough from Catalonia with a crispy yet fragile crust and a crumb cavernous enough for olive oil to slip through—“It’s 110% hydration. So that means if you're dealing with five hundred grams of flour, you're going to do the same amount plus ten grams of water,” she explained, multi-tasking—but it wouldn’t be the only kind she’d be making. “I could bring one type of bread to this event tomorrow, but I’m not. I’m bringing five types,” she says.

“My style is like…why bring one thing when I can bring five things? I’m that bitch,” she laughs.

Roe doesn’t hold back when it comes to food, and she credits that to growing up without it in Florida, where, shuttled between her home and the foster care system, there were times she’d go to bed hungry. “Now I just have this obsession with the fact that, because I’m a chef, I can make whatever I want and as much of it,” she says.

But Roe was always fascinated by food and cooking, watching shows like Great Chefs of the World on PBS where she could or reading books on food she’d borrowed from the library. At nineteen, she started working at a Vietnamese restaurant in Orlando and worked her way through professional kitchens, including Eleven Madison Park, and through private chef gigs.

Fast forward to today, and Roe has just received her second Emmy nomination for Counter Space, a two-season TV show exploring food systems. In 2022, she won a James Beard Award for the show, and for the last two years, she has hosted on the red carpet at the Awards. She is the food editor of Family Style, a magazine at the intersection of food, fashion, and art. She also has a culinary studio in Brooklyn, Apartment Miso, where sunlight streams onto white shelves and wooden tables filled with cooking equipment, objets d’art, flowers, and a palette of produce waiting to be turned into whatever she has in mind.

Roe’s dishes are treats both visually and gastronomically, but they never prioritize style over substance, because why not both? Her Instagram is filled with stacks of syrniki, summer salads, cups of cobbler, and even parfaits artfully splattered Pollock-style on the floor, coquettishly adorned with flowers like Kirsten Dunst in a Sofia Coppola classic—but she also wants you to eat it (the parfait was an accident). “I love that the idea of being a chef is so much about making something that you hope disappears,” she says.

In April, she went to Milan where, as part of Salone del Mobile, she worked with an assistant to bake more than sixty batches of different savory, high-hydration loaves of bread for a food installation with Family Style—the whole process took more than a hundred hours. Over one day, she baked and served attendees bread. She had colored some of the strands with turmeric, açai, and charcoal powders to “make the process a little more beautiful,” woven the strands together, and then shaped the loaves into playful squiggles to display on the stainless steel table that curved around her.

Salone is a trade fair, and people who had come from around the world to look at flashy new kitchens were caught off-guard by the enticing shapes so generously offered to them—until they saw her pulling the bread out of the oven, breaking it up and saying, “Mangia, you can eat this.”

“People were like, ‘Whoa, that’s bread.’ And then you’d just see this sea of hands fighting for a piece of it,” she laughs. “It was intense—in a good way.”

Bread responds sensitively to its environment, and she had felt anxious in the days before—”everything needed more hydration, everything needed more yeast, you're in the mountains so yeast was not doing what it does down here at sea level”—but found the experience almost voyeuristic yet beautiful. “I actually get to see you eat this thing and see you enjoy it,” she says. “There was that part of it, but there was also just a really cool part of people engaging with it, touching it, seeing how it's made, seeing the process, seeing the finished product.”

“Cooking is really a relationship between the chef or the people making it and also the people receiving it,” she adds. “I think people get kind of obsessed with the finished product, but I'm actually very much obsessed with the process, which is why I wanted to show people so much of it, because I just love it deeply.”

For Roe, though, it wasn’t just about sharing her process—she also wanted to make visible the labor behind her work, and behind food. “It’s so important to remind people that people make their food, you know?”

Counter Space, the TV series behind her many nominations, takes that statement one step further, diving into the global food network that, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), employs more than 1.2 billion people. Hosted by Roe, the show looks at not just the people making the food, but the systems behind it. “Food insecurity, value chains, supply chains, I'm obsessed with them. I can talk about them for ages,” she says.

With production by Vice Media, Roe and the team filmed the first season while the world was in lockdown, and the series premiered on Thanksgiving Day in November 2020. The timing was almost perfect: Millions of people around the world were at home and dealing with empty supermarket shelves where things like yeast, flour, and bucatini used to be. For some, it was their first brush with supermarket shortages, as the pandemic caused the fine-tuned cogs on the wheels driving the global food system to slip. Counter Space gave them an insight into why.

In perhaps a rare approach when it comes to discussions about food justice, the show refuses to separate the æsthetic and sensory pleasure of eating from the wider forces, both good and bad, that lead to the food on our plates. The first season dove into the protest food economy in Hong Kong, eating disorders, and the cartels taking over Mexico’s avocado industry. The second season looked a little bit closer at potential solutions, placing them within a wider cultural context, from forms of production to the fine dining chefs trying to change how different foods are perceived. In between segments, Roe talked through recipes, making wild mushroom soup, coffee cake, fish balls, duck gumbo, and grilled cheese on ube bread. Her guests included Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, Shaggy, and Eva Longoria. Like Roe, the show achieves the distinctive feat of being glamorous, serious, nerdy, and accessible all at once, driven by a genuine curiosity about the world.

So far, Roe has turned down the possibility of a third season, but one thing’s for sure: What comes next will still revolve around food—she is happy to be open about what it means to her. “Cooking is the one thing that makes me feel like I don't want to die sometimes,” she says. “I know that sounds so fucking extreme, but as someone who's dealt with incredible clinical depression, it's this thing that gives me this sense of purpose that I don't know that I would have otherwise. I have this deeply rich respect and reverence for what food does for me, because I don't know that there's anything else that does what food does for me, you know?”

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