2020 Cooking Demos
(2021 speakers coming soon)
Meet our chefs & Food Bloggers
LIsa Le
The Viet Vegan
The Viet Vegan is a personal food blog by Lisa Le, a child of first generation Vietnamese boat refugees, growing up in Southern Ontario. Currently living just outside of Toronto, The Viet Vegan shares veganized comfort food recipes, personal essays, and self-reflections about veganism, nerd culture, feminism, and more.
Lisa Le is the creator behind The Viet Vegan, a vegan and ethical lifestyle food blog and Youtube channel. Lisa always aims to advocate for veganism with an intersectional approach: creating vegan content with an environmentally conscious, LGBTQ+ inclusive, self-critical and feminist lens.
Jack Middleton
The Empowered Vegan
Jack Middleton is a Red Seal Chef and a plant based educator. He attended chef school at George Brown College and has spent most of his career in French dining and Italian cuisine.
At the beginning of 2016 Jack went vegan and found out very quickly how savoury and delicious vegan food can be if you know what you’re doing. In 2017 Jack started The Empowered Vegan to help teach as many people as he can how to make vegan food easy and delicious.
Jack runs group classes, private classes and in-home one-on-one lessons. His classes have an emphasis on food flavour theory, knife skills and using interesting vegan ingredients to produce dishes that match their meat-based counterparts in satiety in flavour.
Download jack's VegFest recipes
Kristen Bethel
Know Thy Food
Know thy Food is a business committed to bringing health and peace to people, animals and the planet. I teach vegan hands-on cooking classes using whole foods, offer vegan mentoring and my signature Vegan Step by Step program. I curate The Vegan Hotline blog, do speaking engagements and consult with restaurants and businesses.
I believe ANYONE can learn to cook and LOVE vegan food. Real Food. That means you won’t notice that you’re eating dairy-free, meat-free, gluten-free, refined sugar-free, allergy-friendly food. You’re just going to learn to make delicious food.