Why I Wrote a Cookbook (And Why It’s Not Really About Food)

Lace Flowers on why she wrote Nourished to Lead — a narrative cookbook about food, family and the capacity to keep going. The book started with a tin of baked beans.

It started with a young man staring at a tin of baked beans he didn’t know how to heat.

Not open. Not empty. Unopened. On a university kitchen counter. Staring back at him.

He was bright. Capable. A fully functioning adult who had somehow arrived at eighteen years old without ever being shown how to feed himself. And in that moment, watching him genuinely baffled by a tin of baked beans, something shifted in me. A decision formed before I’d even finished the thought. Whatever happened next, my children would know how to feed themselves. Not just survive in a kitchen. Thrive in one.

That decision became Empire Kitchen. And Empire Kitchen, eventually, became a book.

What the book is

Nourished to Lead: Food, Family and the Capacity to Keep Going is a narrative cookbook. Which means it’s part memoir, part food writing, part business argument. It moves from my grandma’s kitchen in Wembley to a caravan site in Lutterworth to a two-metre-by-one-and-a-half kitchen in Bogotá where I ran workshops on Zoom, cooked live for ten people at a time and raised two children who could both outperform most adults in a kitchen before they hit their teens.

There are recipes in it. But if you come for the recipes alone, you’ll miss the point.

The Arguement

This book makes a single claim: what you eat directly affects your capacity to lead. Your decision-making, your energy, your ability to hold pressure, show up for your team and do the work that actually matters. I have sat across from founders on Zoom who told me their team’s retention and productivity issues were a management problem, a culture problem, a motivation problem. I nodded, because it’s all of those things. Then I asked one question: what are your team eating?

The conversation changed every single time.

Most high-performing people are running on caffeine and convenience food. Not because they’re undisciplined or don’t care about their health. Because nobody gave them a practical system to do anything different.

The wellness industry didn’t help — it repackaged basic nourishment as a luxury product and sold it back at a premium. Supplements, programmes, £10,000 water machines. Meanwhile the actual answer — real food, cooked consistently, without fuss — got buried underneath it all.

Why I was the woman to write it

I I left the UK in early 2022. I’ve since lived and cooked in Mexico, Guatamala, Dominican Republic and Colombia, in kitchens that would make most people reach for their phones and order in. I didn’t. Because the knowledge of how to feed myself and my family isn’t stored in a particular kitchen or a particular country. It’s stored in me. In my hands. In a collective ancestral memory that started with my grandma’s flat in Wembley and a cup of tea and orange scrambled eggs and has never left.

I’m also a DEI and culture speaker and researcher. A founder. A mother. Someone who has lived the connection between nourishment and performance — not read about it, lived it. There was a period in my own life when I was eating takeaways and drinking too much and my forward motion had slowed to almost nothing. When I stopped and started eating well again, I launched my course and left for Central America. It is not a coincidence. It is never a coincidence.

Home cooked meal prepared during a difficult week

This book is for the founder eating their fourth Chinese takeaway this week. The CEO who runs their team on vision and caffeine. The parent who knows they should be cooking and can’t quite get there. The leader who suspects that how they’re eating is connected to how they’re performing — and wants someone to finally say it plainly.

It’s coming. And I’m glad you’re here for it.

Lace Flowers is the founder of Empire Kitchen, Co-Founder of The Flavor Room and co-author of Redefining Equity, Leadership and Influence in Online Business. She works with small business teams to build nourishment into their culture as a business strategy — not an afterthought.

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