A meal is a collision of stories. Everything we eat owns a history, often full of people, places and processes. Even for those paying attention to where their food comes from, many of the systems at work can feel far away and impersonal. In their Kentucky Educational Television show The Farmer and The Foodie, Maggie Keith and Lindsey McClave deftly trace the lifespan of Kentucky ingredients from source to plating. As the titular roles suggest, the two friends approach each episode from different perspectives, but it’s what they share that makes the program feel close to home.
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Keith, “The Farmer,” has 30 first cousins on her father’s side. During her childhood in Louisville, the family used every birthday, anniversary and graduation as an opportunity to gather at her grandparents’ home in The Highlands. Upon arrival, Keith and her brothers always made their way down into the basement to play with the cousins while her grandmother and aunts prepared dinner. Anticipation mounted in congruence with the delicious aroma coming from the kitchen. The menu varied, but a hallmark was chuck roast prepared with carrots and potatoes.
Keith remembered the visit when she discovered a stash of chuck roasts in her grandmother’s garage freezer. To that point, she had only seen the final product, the alchemic work of her aunts and grandmother, without any thought to where the meal came from. It was a glimpse into her future as the fourth-generation steward of Foxhollow Farm in Crestwood, a role she inherited from her mother’s side of the family.
“Now that I’m in the business of selling freezer beef, pretty much, that memory to me is just so clear that, of course, that’s what you do— you have all your chuck roast in here in case your family comes over,” Keith said.
McClave, “The Foodie,” enjoyed her aha moment during a family vacation in Italy. The 2007 trip was a summit of eating, walking and sensory bliss. Each day, alongside her siblings and parents, McClave strolled the narrow streets of Venice, peering into windows and tasting everything. The Lexington native saw things she’d never seen growing up in Kentucky.
“Every day, we passed this little window that looked into this kitchen, and you could smell all the amazing smells—the garlic and the fish,” McClave remembered. “You could see them back there chopping away and see this squid that they were getting ink out of, and it blew my mind.”
At the end of the week, the family was able to reserve a table at that kitchen’s accompanying restaurant. They ordered the squid-ink pasta, among other items they had watched being made from the window. The dinner was a culmination, the sort of meal that nourished on every existential level, and they had witnessed it come together.
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These full-circle flowcharts are the heart of The Farmer and The Foodie. The program utilizes Keith’s farming acumen and McClave’s cooking talents to tell Kentucky food stories. Each episode typically begins with a site visit to a local food source—whether it be a farm, a fishing lake or an orchard—to learn more about the processes at play in what winds up on our plates. After arming viewers with some agricultural background, the pair takes their bounty to McClave’s kitchen in Louisville. With Keith standing by as a de facto sous chef, McClave moves through unique recipes developed to highlight the local ingredients.
Patrick Brumback
The Farmer & The Foodie | Season 5 | EP 3 | Kitchen | Burgoo & H
The Farmer & The Foodie | Season 5 | EP 3 | Kitchen | Burgoo & Hoe Cakes | June 4, 2024
The pair met through mutual friends in 2009. In the midst of a high-stress career working in the hospitality industry, McClave used cooking as a means of evening decompression. A few miles east in Oldham County, Keith and her mother had recently shifted the operational focus at Foxhollow Farm from the traditional soybeans-corn-wheat troika to biodynamic grass-fed beef.
The connection was natural and easy. The pair bonded over their love of food and curiosity as to how meals are really made. In addition to cooking, McClave also produced a food blog she was writing at the time. She began writing about some of her adventures together with Keith, including the time Keith led her on an expedition for ramps on the Foxhollow property.
“We went out and found these ramps and ate some raw and put some on bread, and we had bottled wine with us. And it was just this lovely afternoon, and I was like, ‘Well, this is fantastic. I feel like I’m in a movie right now,’ ” McClave remembered.
The friends decided to try a podcast together, then a local radio show in Louisville. Then, they made some homemade promotional videos. From there, with encouragement from Keith’s brother, George, they began workshopping a television show.
Bringing the idea to life took fortitude and resourcefulness. McClave and Keith scrounged up funding to shoot a pilot, using a band of freelancers and a 14-hour day of shooting at Foxhollow to put together the show’s first episode. KET agreed to run it, and The Farmer and The Foodie debuted in August 2016. From there, KET agreed to air—but not fund—an entire first season, so the pair struck out in search of funding.
The fiscal agent for the first season was the Berry Center in New Castle (Henry County), which advocates for small farmers, land-conserving communities and healthy regional communities. In The Farmer and The Foodie, Berry Center Executive Director Mary Berry saw a compelling opportunity.
“I think they’re contributing something so important to rural Kentucky, and therefore, rural places everywhere,” Berry said. “Rural places have just been ignored and our raw materials stolen at the lowest possible price, or just outright stolen, for so long now. I think we’re seeing the results of that in the terrible political divide in our country. So, I would go as far as to say that a program like The Farmer and The Foodie really is kind of closing a divide that is, frankly, ruinous.”
Keith and McClave partnered with Kertis Creative in Louisville to put together an entire first season. Among the episodes of the opening season are a trip to Hindman, where McClave’s paternal family is from, and an expedition to Paducah that included carp fishing and a visit with 2025 James Beard Award finalist Sara Bradley, the chef and proprietor of the freight house restaurant.
The season was a success, and KET agreed to fully back the next season … then the next four after that. Two Emmy Award nominations later, the show recently began filming its sixth season. Plans are growing in tandem with the audience, but the mission remains trained on regenerative agriculture, seasonal ingredients, and the connection between people and their food.
“We want to show co-ops, food chains and food systems that are working and make sure that people really understand that there is hope,” Keith said.
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On a hot summer morning in 2023, near the mountain town of Whitesburg, the farmer and the foodie found themselves lost.
On their way to a day of shooting, McClave turned her Volvo onto an uphill, single-lane road. The route scaled the side of a mountain. Everything around them was green and lush. Through the trees, they caught occasional views of the undulating Eastern Kentucky landscape. Birds chirped. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful drive.
It was, they soon discovered, the wrong direction.
To keep moving forward was to push farther away from the day’s filming location, but the road was too narrow to turn around. There was only one way down.
“I got out of the car and was trying to coach her through backing down the super windy road,” Keith said.
The pair still carpools around the state in the Volvo. With McClave behind the wheel and Keith in the passenger seat taking notes on her laptop, they plot, scheme and dream about the Kentucky stories still left to tell. They bat around questions to ask, recipes to try out, and guests to invite, all of it pouring into a Word document as fast as Keith’s fingers can type. The result is a map of sorts, a shared course forward and in the right direction.