We spoke with Julia Sherman, creator of Salad for President, about lessons from art school, how she sees food and art intersect, and salad as a vehicle for change. Julia’s new powdered salad dressings make colorful, nutritious, muse-worthy meals within reach for the everyday.
Julia Sherman is a writer, cookbook author, and photographer living and working between Brooklyn and Los Angeles. She is a self-described expert traveler, art lover, and freak in the garden. Julia Sherman is the author of Salad for President and Arty Parties, books for people who want to live, cook, and host like an artist.
Read on for the interview.
TPS: We have been longtime friends and supporters of everything you have ever done! We have eaten your meals, employed your photo skills for our campaigns, and we sell your books, your hats, and now your salad dressing mixes. Needless to say, we might be your number one fan. It’s an honor for us to feature you in all your incredible do-it-all-ness. Can you tell us a little bit about your method, and why and how you choose such breadth in your work?
JS: It’s such a gift to be able to support one another through our work and business ventures. How lucky am I to know that everything I make has a home with Post Supply?!
“Choose” makes it all seem like I ever had a plan, so I’m not sure I can use that language when it comes to the wacky array of projects I have under my belt at this point in my life. I’m hyperactive, as you know, and I like to tumble from one endeavor to another. Sometimes I operate more on the art side of things, and at other times I feel bold enough to turn my ideas into actual business ventures, like the salad dressing mixes.
I went to art school—a lot of art school—and I learned how not to be a one-trick pony. I can shoot my own content, write my own press release, produce my own events, and art direct my books. I never shy away from a new medium because that’s how I keep it interesting. I think the point of all of it is just to keep creating opportunities to challenge myself and make new things. And to sleep when I’m dead!
TPS: Let’s talk salad. How did you choose salad as your muse, and how do you think salad can change the world? Why powdered salad dressings?
JS: Salad has always been my other passion, until it became my main thing. I’m a passionate gardener, and salad is the best expression of the things that I grow—or that farmers much more skilled than I am grow and sell to me. It’s accessible—everyone has a salad they make that they feel good about—it’s colorful, textural, healthy, and usually best when approached with restraint.
I think salad can change the world if it gets people excited about eating plants and gets them to appreciate what it takes to grow really great produce. It’s a reminder that you shouldn’t have to do much to your food to make it taste wonderful.
The dressings were developed as a shortcut to a better salad for people who find the dressing part of the meal to be the pain point. Most people hate making dressing, and either opt out altogether and purchase gloopy bottled crap, or they stick to oil and vinegar and end up with the same salad every night.
You gals know I have an arsenal of ingredients in my kitchen. I’m a hoarder. I think a lot about dressing so you don’t have to. I love the idea of reimagining Good Seasons—that old-school, chemical-ridden powdered dressing—as something with a clean label and more elevated flavors. If my recipes are sometimes longer or more involved than many people can handle on a weeknight, the dressings are the antidote to that, with comparable quality and flavor.
TPS: What do you hope to see for the future of how art and food overlap? Who and what are your biggest inspirations for what is possible, and what are you working on next?
JS: I have to say, I’m more and more comfortable with art and food coexisting and supporting one another, but I don’t really have so much interest in art in my food, if that makes sense? I tend to feel like it creates a lot of waste and further dissociates us from the food itself. Food isn’t a disposable studio material!
More and more, I find myself looking toward the simplicity of other cultures and cuisines, and the confidence it takes to keep things simple.
