Linda Watson

Linda Watson is a food evangelist who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, a veritable hotbed of sustainable agriculture with an inspiring ethnic mix. She started the Cook for Good project after being inspired by the national Food Stamp Challenge: living on a dollar a meal per person for a week. Her three-week experiment became a lifestyle, the website CookforGood.com, the book Wildly Affordable Organic, and now the Wildly Good Cook videos and teachers' training program.

Her ears perked up when she heard that Fifty Shades of Grey had outsold Harry Potter. Why not write a funny book that combines romance and recipes? One that celebrates sustainability and the fiery potential of women old enough to have hot flashes? The result is her new book Fifty Weeks of Green.

If you and Linda wound up sitting next to each other on plane, you might find out that:

* She really believes in the power of cooking a pot of beans every week

* She wants to help you live your dreams by using the skills you already have

* She's lost 20 pounds since becoming a cookbook writer, just by eating real food cooked from scratch

* She's battling ivy in her garden to establish an edible forest garden

* She's taken improv and stand-up comedy classes at Dirty South Improv Comedy Theater

* She's the inventor of the Rudeness Index, used in the language engine for Douglas Adams' computer game Starship Titanic

* She's an optivore and a flexitegan, not a food Nazi, who knows you don't have to do it all or all the time to make a difference

Linda might be on the way to teach a cooking class or give a talk on organic cooking, thrift, sustainability, or creating an amazing life.

Not on a plane? Find Linda online on her site CookforGood.com, which features free weekly recipes and food news. She also writes for The Huffington Post, the Organic Trade Association, GoodVeg, and DrGreene.com.