ALUMNA PROFILE

Laura Pauli

Class of 1982

The “Accidental Activist”: How a Marketing Exec Is Using Her Love of Food to Feed the World

Laura Pauli

CLASS OF ’82

Laura’s LinkedIn headline reads: “Chef, Sommelier, Fundraiser, and Humanitarian Aid Activist,” none of which depict her day job as a full-time marketing executive. Given her eclectic professional past, it’s no wonder she describes herself as an “accidental activist.”

“I describe my career as, I was the pinball in the pinball machine, and everybody else was pulling the levers,” says Laura of bouncing around between professions, feeling unmoored. When the opportunity arose in 2003 for her to attend cooking school in New York, “it was a very visceral feeling,” she says, “where for the first time, I felt like I grabbed the levers and was deciding where my pinball was going.”

Officially bitten by the culinary bug, Laura wanted to stay in New York and become a big-time chef. But as a 40-year-old woman, she knew this was improbable unless she had something unique to offer. So she headed to France to figure out what that might be.

She cooked at the Cannes Film Festival, on a lobster boat in Brittany, and at the chateau where they were filming The DaVinci Code. She had an internship at Pierre Hermé, the No. 1-rated patisserie in the world, and at Le Cinq, a three-Michelin-star restaurant at the Four Seasons George V in Paris. “I remember walking out of the Montparnasse train station, and I had this Mary Tyler Moore moment,” Laura says wistfully. “If I’d had a beret, I would have thrown it up in the air and twirled around.” She laughs, making the motions of raising her arm and flicking her wrist. “I felt—for the first time—like, ‘I’m home.’”

Instead of the six months that Laura had intended to stay in France, she ended up spending six years there, giving cooking lessons and doing tech consulting. In 2010, health concerns brought her back to California, where she quickly got caught up in the tech track before earning her sommelier certification and deciding to move to Napa or Sonoma Valley to become a winemaker.

“I describe my career as, I was the pinball in the pinball machine, and everybody else was pulling the levers.”

Heart beets

Comfort Food

The North Bay wildfires in 2017 had different plans for Laura, forcing her to postpone her move north until the following year. But the fires returned, again and again. In 2020, when the LNU Lightning Complex fires set the wine country ablaze, friends of Laura’s lost their homes and vineyards. She knew she needed to do something to help. She immediately headed to the World Central Kitchen (WCK) Vacaville location, which would change the trajectory of her life forever.

She cooked and delivered food to evacuees and first responders as wildfires raged around them. It was COVID, and the sky turned orange. Laura kept cooking.

The experience lit a spark in Laura. She realized how much her love of cooking could comfort others. It was a whole new level of fulfillment, filling people’s bellies and hearts.

After returning home, with the world still on lockdown, she continued to share joy and connection through food, hosting free quarantine cooking classes online. She partnered with local wineries, distilleries, chefs, and musicians she knew were left struggling by the shutdown, featuring different cocktails, food pairings, and entertainment. She hosted a Zoom cooking show with friends—including fellow Menlo grads Mary Texido Folsom ’82 and Lindsay White Rogers ’83—to help busy moms batch-cook meals ahead of another grueling week of homeschooling and remote work. She began studying food as medicine, partnering with two doctors at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation to launch the Power Kitchen, educating subscribers about the myriad benefits of healthy cooking.

It’s the most powerful, profound feeling in the world to hand somebody a plate of food when they’re hungry and despondent, escaping the unimaginable, suddenly bereft of all they had.”

–Laura Pauli ’82

Laura trades her keyboard for a cutting board, enrolling at the French Culinary Institute in New York City in 2003

“It’s the most beautiful country you’ve ever seen. It takes your breath away.”

Laura Pauli ’82, of Ukraine

Each flag represents a fallen soldier in Maidan, Kyiv, Ukraine

Photo Credit: Laura Pauli ’82

Cooking in Crisis

In January 2022, Laura enrolled in a chef-relief training class through WCK, where she learned how to run a small activation kitchen, providing fresh meals on the front lines in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises. A month later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Laura felt compelled to be there but had just started a new job she couldn’t leave. Through a WCK volunteer WhatsApp group, she met Holly, who she now describes as her “angel on the ground.” Holly was staked out on the border of Poland and Ukraine, tirelessly cooking and serving food to people fleeing for their lives, with everything they owned in a garbage bag. Laura joined Holly’s fundraising efforts from afar, providing people with whatever they needed next, whether that was a safe place to sleep, clothes, toothbrushes, or plane tickets.

Laura finally arrived in Poland in early June and spent the next two months on the border of Ukraine, cooking and working at the distribution points before returning to the apartment to dial into her “day job” until 11:00 pm. On the weekends she worked at the train station or refugee center. She did three runs with a humanitarian aid organization, delivering four tons of food in a van with a three-and-a-half-ton payload, bottoming out every time they hit a pothole. They drove for four hours to a convalescent home, past bombed-out buildings, schools, and hospitals, shocked by the scars of warfare. They also drove past endless fields of sunflowers, corn, and wheat, stretching into the vast horizon. “It’s the most beautiful country you’ve ever seen,” says Laura, choking up. “It takes your breath away.”

Laura Pauli hugs a soldier in Zaporizhzhia

”I didn’t want to let go, I was gutted as they drove away, headed for the front lines. Weather reports were for -20°C that night. The only tiny consolation was they had wood-burning stoves to keep them warm.”

Recipe for Success

Laura has now made 11 trips into Ukraine and counting, founding a nonprofit called Feed the World to help fund her relief work. Her humanitarian efforts have expanded well beyond food, to include delivering wood-burning stoves to villages along the front lines and launching a mental health initiative to help orphans cope with the trauma of losing everything they knew to be true.

On every visit, Laura is met with hugs and wonder: Ukrainians can’t believe that someone with no connection to Eastern Europe would travel halfway across the globe to help them. “It’s the most powerful, profound feeling in the world to hand somebody a plate of food when they’re hungry and despondent, escaping the unimaginable, suddenly bereft of all they had,” says Laura. “People need to know that they are cared about, that they haven’t been forgotten.”

Sharing the Feast

It may have taken her decades to find her purpose, but Laura is living proof that it’s never too late. She hopes her story inspires Menlo students and young alumni to start sooner. “Get out and see the world, and help people,” she urges. Whether it’s in our own backyards or across the globe, “there’s so much need in this world; it’s all around us.”

As Laura’s journey continues to wind and wander, her path is now far from aimless, guided by the wise words of WCK founder and chef José Andrés: “If you are lost, share a plate of food with a stranger…you will find who you are.”